This song is sort of crazy but I love that it does its own thing without any scruples. It just goes for it. Obviously it still holds the architecture of FFXIV music but it’s insanely playful and bouncy – fun for a dungeon imo.
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I hear this music a lot doing daily roulettes on FF14 😂
This is one of my top pieces from XIV. Mainly because it's like, the most experimental jazz ass piece you'll get that's also in a main stream game.
I always got the feeling a couple people found the music room, and was testing out the instruments to see if they can salvage anything and just made an interesting messy song.
It’s so funny that you find the discordance and irregularities in the front of this track uncomfortable (though I understand it), because that actually helps highlight the melody for me.
I’m not sure, but if it were only the simple jazz melody I think I’d find it too boring to be interesting – nice, but unremarkable? Instead, it feels like a haven. 😊
The thing about XIV is that, being a MMO, it has a ton of different motifs to help players get that old gestalt feeling of similarity. Gubal is insane in the fact that it's the ONLY zone (dungeon) in the game with a completely warped motif – it uses the same motif as anything related to Sharlayan (as opposed to Old Sharlayan), same as The Antitower, the very Dravanian Hinterlands map, Saint Mocianne's Arboretum, to name a few – all of those have the same motif. Hell, even Labyrinthos uses something very close to it.
That's mostly because of Gubal's background. It's been enchanted with "space magic", and, later on, sealed away, allowing it to be more spacious than it actually looks, something Sharlayans do well. Everytime a dungeon has that background (being space-warped) the music can get wonky. It's a nice touch – I for one like it a lot!
If I might suggest another XIV theme that I'd actually like to hear your thoughts about, it's Pandaemonium's first general boss theme, Ancient Shackles. That would be really cool!
I imagine it something like someone in the library. You're confused, looking for answers but not quite finding them, nothing fits together. And then, it becomes more coherent, and then the melodic bit is, "Yes, okay, I've found it. I have answers!" Only to start again.
Little bit of pop in there too, which helps tie it together
This sounds a lot like the free jazz that I've heard. Atonal, avant garde stuff. Although this is better.
This is what i often hear whenever i go to the coffee shop and get lost in its sauce.
This dungeon is level 59. Unless you've skipped the story, you've done it. Now, what I find intriguing with Ink Long Dry is what it impresses onto me: a stream of consciousness. It starts off erratic: ideas bouncing around. They tap the butt of the pen on the table. They start their dissertation, the author finds their stride, the ink flows freely. The music slows down, a mental block takes shape. The author looks over, their dip pen is out of ink. The ink gets replaced. The mind grows chaotic; the ideas start reforming: a burst of creative genius shines through and the writing continues.
To me it was a representation of the sharlayans in eorzea. Mammets for instance are a big thing in sharlayan, being caretakes of areas and such….and at one point, the scholars/mammets of tye library worked as a well oiled machine (the ticking clock feel) but slowly… once it was abandoned, one piece goes out of sync, and then another, and then another (like an engine misfiring or something) but even a msifiring engine can hit properly once in a while (hence the smoother chorus) and at this point the "thing" that the library has become is just trying to keep operating based on the way it was designed, even with all the misfires and gears with missing teeth, etc. Pure chaos, but still somehow still going! (Like my life! XD)
My god, how have you not done a video on wmid from Attack on Titan by Hiroyuki Sawano… https://youtu.be/DmW4KFikfcg?si=-UyHpI-ChHQLfYHw
It has 70s Miles Davis Bitches Brew DNA. Fragmented seemingly disjointed sections that seem to fall apart at the seams. Distorted compressed drums. It’s all there. Speaks to the incredible diversity of FFXIVs soundtrack.
YESSIR HES DOING MY ABSOLUTE FAVORITE DUNGEON THEME
I think you perfectly summed up the track with the words "Beautiful cacophony".
This is honestly amongst my favorite dungeon themes in FFXIV, I'd even dare say it's probably my 2nd favorite dungeon theme after Vanaspati. It's creepy and happy and melancholic at the same time and it's so damn fitting for what this place is supposed to be. A bastion of knowledge, previously the pride and joy of the colony in Dravania, now fallen into disrepair and disarray after it was abandoned due to the threat of war.
So the library was left on its own, rotting, infesting with all manners of demons and insects and there you are, finally someone coming back to check up on it, so it starts playing a previously comforting melody… only that due to its state of affairs, the melody is just disordered, incoherent and broken. Its trying its best to rouse a seeker of knowledge but it does it in the only way left to it now, a previously warming song turned into a whimpering whisper. Constantly changing, trying to find the best way to welcome you, as if switching between channels and frequencies or flipping through book pages to find the best way to open its doors to you before finally settling into that slower, cozier music in the middle, only to lose its way again but not giving up.
Both this and Saint Mocianne's Arboretum show the disrepair and rot of time so amazingly through their respective themes, and that's why they're both easily in my Top 5 Dungeon themes. They just say so much through their music about the place and story of each location.
Ff14 "course uncharted" is a theme of the latest alliance raid. A Beautiful and gorgeous melody
The HARD version of this dungeon has another version of Ink Long Dry which is BEAUTIFUL, please listen to it!
I was wondering, hoping, pleading that you'd one day react to my favourite FF14 song and you met, no exceeded my expectations.
I can now return to a state of calm, until the day you inevitably react to Minecraft music and I find a whole 'nother reason to lose my shit.
Yup, day six of being persistent