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Exactly the point of this theme is to make you think something weird is happening. The Queen herself is an aberration of the original queen she's based on. This song is meant to be both forgettable and never leave your head at the same time. It's completely forgettable, but you never will. This was a raid that was heavily farmed as part of a relic weapon questline for Shadowbringers. I came to almost hate the leitmotif for the entire series of areas that this took place in because it was everywhere, and it's the only time(other than titan's them, I hate that one with it's screaming) I've wanted to turn off the in game music. I spent so much time in these zones hearing that theme in it's 3-4 different arrangements that I really just don't want to hear it anymore, despite still having stuff to work on in those zones. Between this theme and the zone aesthetics which are as my friends says "it's just…. brown" I find it difficult to go back, which is a shame because the fights are almost all a blast, fun mechanics for the most part.
I just ran this for the first time a couple weeks ago. I didn't even register the music then. I was too busy listening to my FC leader shot call. These Bozja fights will kill you very dead if you mess up once. Extremely unforgiving.
4:24 The bells playing here are exactly the same notes playing during Cloud and Sephiroth's final scene in Final Fantasy VII Remake. I don't know if it's a nod or a coincidence, probably the latter, but I noticed it immediately.
This isn't a song I'd listen to by itself, but paired with this fight, it's definitely one of my favorites and it's so cool. One of the few songs in XIV that can instill a bit of dread in you thematically while playing (for me at least)
The fact that this was the opening theme for the 5.4 patch trailer instantly made this a win for me
Getting to actually hear it in-game with the context of the situation was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure
You're alarmingly on the money with "trapped souls" too
Honestly it sounds like something from Legend of Zelda, not FF
Gonna spoiler this for people who are still yet to play this part
She turned a bunch of your friends into robots and mashed them together into her slaves.
That's the explanation for the distorted vocals.
spoiler:
Fun fact, the thing she sits on as well as many of the doll-like enemies are actually the transformed bodies of the blades, the top resistance members that she tempers earlier on, some of which are fused together to create single entities. Knowing this, it makes the music even more twisted.
I think because I heard the leitmotif so much getting to that point, it automatically made me have some sort of attachment to the song, despite it being so weird. Then, because I did that fight so much and liked it, it just kind of grew on me.
Eikon is pronounced the same as icon
As soon as you think youve heard everything Soken and his team are capable of they just put out another masterpiece that completely shatters youre expectations
Sad that I missed the chatting, but you were absolutely on point with the trapped souls thing! Genuinely surprised that you got it! The entire raid has a horrific feeling of "this is wrong, everything is wrong" in that she has essentially enslaved and twisted real people to be her servants, in both the mental and physical sense. They are blindly devoted to her even before this cutscene, praising her as their Queen and coming to her aid throughout the battle. The mechanics of the fight are pretty fun honestly, and I am a fan of horror-ish themes so hearing that distorted, twisted chanting was unnerving and exciting for me! Shadowbringers didn't lay off the body horror honestly, even in optional content XD
The distorted vocal you here is a variation of the Gangos theme. This plays in the welcome area for Bozja and the distorted sound here makes you feel even less welcomed with the angry robot lady trying to bop you.
Parts of this song remind me of Thanatos' theme from the Secret of Mana. I think Jesse's heard it, or a variant of it. The bells and the minor key certainly. Edit: He HAS! Ceremony / The Oracle from Secret of Mana! About 8 months ago.
That piano solo part is exacly the same thing that plays at the end of final fantasy 7 remake when Cloud and Sephirot are in that space rock, exact notes just different tempo.
Every time the crescendo hit, I could see myself in front of the Trumpet playing uni-cycle spider. And there's a charge mechanic, if you time it right, it feels like the boss is charging at you with full crescendo playing !! And the vocals !!! OMG the voice that they managed to achieve, natural or artificial, it is so perfect. Raw. Tribal…… and you can feel the pain in the vocals.
When I got to this boss/song in the raid for the first time, I felt physically ill, because the main bosses you'd been fighting this entire time were your war buddies who were twisted into these robotic spider-ish monstrosities. (Sometimes multiple people inside one robotic body, horrifyingly enough.) The music and distorted vocals definitely added to my "this isn't right, this is an afront to nature" feeling.
Without context the vocals can be a little odd xD but they make complete sense if you have been following the story.
Wait…. we didn't reacted to that song before? 😀 weird, was sure you did. Too many FF XIV songs to remember by 😀
Track is bizzare but it completes the atmosphere and the dark story of the queen and Misija. Fighting with the Queen first time I was overwhelmed by music and felt uncomfortable and anxious, but also fascinated
Weird to see you think it's more forgettable. Probably in my top 3 tracks in the entire soundtrack. The rhythm, the percussion, that melody. The distorted vocals work great in context also (something which you of course don't have) but also without context I think musically too. Having jarring moments in music is great.
That percussion instrument you are hearing is probably done via synth. However, I believe it’s intended to imitate brake drums. These are literal car or other vehicle brake drums typically struck with an acrylic mallet to create the sound of metal and glass meeting. Different diameters, patterns of the holes, and thickness of the metal can create different pitches.
There's one moment in this song and I can't un-hear but it sounds clear as day. It's: 2:35 It sounds EXACTLY like the strings from the Psycho theme (Hitchcock movie) If you look up the theme by Bernard Herrmann it's about 30 seconds in.
Am I crazy or is that a OWA throwback? 10:34
It's like if Nier: Automata met Turok: Evolution
I always loved this track, it's so macabre and bombastic at the same time, the orchestral parts behind totally seal the deal, the association with all the experimental Frankenstein rest is just great
Yes the song is intended to be unsettling and unnerving due to the events leading up to the fight. Without spoiling anything directly just know the reason the female vocals are so distorted is a reference to what happens to some prominent figures of the story of Bozja and their ultimate fates.
Yeah…the Battle with Queen Gunnhildr is quite the spectacle and the events leading to it really push the feelings of 'This is WRONG!'
And here I am trying to prepare to do the much harder Savage version just to get a Cerberus I can ride around.
The thing I love about this song is that it is just a huge wall of sound. Taken all at the same time, it does sound… Wrong… Discordant… Chaotic… That's how the story feels and looks at that moment too. So it fits that feeling. But! You got the nail on the head when you said, "Each time the song loops, I notice something different." That's what's fun about it. It is a huge wall of sound, and it's just a blast picking at it and finding all the little secrets that it hides. It feels like "One-Winged Angel" in that regard. It is a beast of a song, and once you understand the little parts that it consists of, the whole wall of sound turns out to be amazing. It is a song that gets better and better with study.
So, just a bit of clarification first, Eikon is pronounced icon. It's just a ye olde English spelling 14 uses, kinda like gaol for jail. Secondly, y'know how you mentioned in the Bozja theme how usually things build up to the boss and then released? The Queen is the deified ideal of The Queen of Bozja weaponized as a tool of vengeance, which is why you have those distorted almost mechanized vocals mimicking the vocals from Blood on the Wind.
Yesss i have been waiting for this day
Man Bozja was some awesome content, if only there were people that still ran stuff like this lol
when you put it to the context of the story and fight, it's perfectly screwed up.
Just the kind of music I imagine would be in the background when playing a deadly game of forced Chess with the angry reincarnation of an ancient queen that is riding on an abominable machine made up of the twisted remains of her subjects. Yes of course.
YESSSSSS this is one of my top 5 fav tracks in FFXIV. I never remove it from my in house playlist lol. So good man.
The patch that this raid came out in was 5.4 and they overlayed this track over the patch trailer and holy shit I was HYPED. I still get hyped when I listen to it lol
The hell? I don't know this fight.
This is definitely a song that's a bit harder to get the vibe of out of context. In XIV you'd be hearing some of those motifs and the background vocals in background tracks for months and then you hear them again here but twisted and with the weird tribal mood but funky instruments around them. Also the queen there herself is kind of a tragic, vengeful villain who can mind control people.
That said I love the song for the general mood and progression of it but could definitely see your view of it like this too.
Damn, this track always reminds me how much I enjoyed the Bozja Story. I really hope we will return to that place someday, maybe even in the MSQ.
so many hours listening to that song lol
Whoever suggests these pieces to him, have you considered the original song first? This is basically a heavily altered remix of another song. This is great in its own right, but it would help to hear the original as a frame of reference.
This is one of the rare exceptions in FF14 where I think the intensity of the song fits the intensity of fight perfectly. Each individual mechanic puts a debuff on you that will kill you if it goes on twice. As the song ramps up, the boss starts using increasingly dangerous attacks and blasts all 24 people for tons of damage. It definitely sounds odd, but it puts you on edge for what on your first attempts can be a pretty intense fight
I forget about this song all the time even though I love it a lot and listen to it fairly often, so I think I get what Jesse's saying at the end haha
This song reminds me of the Parade song from the anime movie Paprika quite a bit…..
This is kind of a non-standard boss fight, it's in an area that is completely optional to the game that doesn't function like the rest of the game and requires a bit more grinding than usual to get to this part so a lot of people haven't actually heard this. I think the song is meant to be sort of tribal march song, but also sort of off-putting; the whole story of this series of quests has to do with a lot of complicated subjects of past sins and and institutional racism and how lands that are oppressed aren't always shining examples of humanity themselves, and how when you get a chance at a fresh start it's important to decide where the power goes and stuff like that.
So I think that the song is meant to reflect that. Personally I don't think it has much impact, not to say it's a bad song or anything, it's definitely an ear worm, the vocals got in my head for a while. But for me it's not one that really makes you think about it very long, it's kind of shallow. The story of the area around it is a lot more intriguing than the music.
To be fair I think this song was produced pretty late into the Shadowbringers expansion life cycle when the devs were also working on Endwalker in the background, so they probably couldn't put too much effort into this one and threw together something that sounded pretty good.
The fact that you say this song is weird as fuck its 100% correct, this whole raid's plot (think brainwashed, fused slaves, prisoners twisted into mechanical monstrosities, etc.) is really fucked up so it shows how the song manages to convey that feeling even though you have 0 knowledge about the story
[14 bozja spoilers of course]
This theme is basically a horror track. Actually the opposite of filler, it's the climax of a storyline. To get to this boss, you necessarily have spent hours grinding in a zone that plays your previous react song, Blood on the Wind. In all the bozja motifs, the same vocal line is present, essentially as though it is the anthem of the Bozjan people you are fighting alongside to liberate their nation. A proud chant for their history, being shared to keep fighting on.
And then this character comes and distorts the memory of their historical queen and distorts Bozja's present-day heroes into her mindless servants. The anthem/chant under the robotic distortion effect is really chilling and a perfect representation of how viscerally wrong this situation is, that the theme of liberation you've been hearing is now one of total devotion and oppression. Xiv fans probably over-estimate how memorable it is on its own because it is so deeply tied to the context of its story.
Likely why it was confusing for you is that you hadn't found the anthem motif from the previous song memorable enough to immediately recognize it under the robotic distortion. When those vocals hit is essentially the drop of the song, it's just a drop that wants to horrify rather than excite, which is unusual and as you said probably counts as experimental.
I can't find the interview, but I remember Soken talking about how interested he was in the work of Foley artists and using random objects around the office as instruments in his music. The Chocobo racing theme used a trash can as a drum and the Costa theme uses a bottle of pills in place of maracas.
Considering the background of this theme and
who these distorted voice are supposed to resemble,
it's crushing every time. Phenomenal buildup and epicness but always
a requiem in my ears.
I just started EW a couple days ago, and man, I would really like to see you react to Imperial will and Home beyond the horizon together, It's really good