Wiki
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Release Date
19 February 2003
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Length
10 tracks
The Black Mages is an arranged soundtrack album of video game music from the Final Fantasy series of role-playing video games. The album contains a selection of musical tracks from the games, arranged and performed in a hybrid of hard rock and progressive metal by The Black Mages. All the selected tracks are "battle themes" from the games. The pieces have been described as "hard-rock" with "blazing synthesizers and guitars". It was first released on February 19, 2003, by DigiCube, and subsequently re-released on May 10, 2004, by Square Enix. It spans ten tracks and covers a duration of 51:29.
The album reached No. 43 on the Japan Oricon charts. It was well received by critics like Andy Byus of RPGFan, who termed it "addicting" and "powerful". He criticized the overuse of synthesizer as opposed to live instruments in some tracks, and that some of the arrangements stayed too close to the original tracks, especially "Dancing Mad". Tetra of Square Enix Music Online also enjoyed the album, saying "all of the members are strong musicians, and Sekito and Fukui were equally strong arrangers". His primary complaint with the album was he felt many of the songs followed the same general pattern in their arrangements.
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