Clem Fandango

I wonder if you could almost call this album the Xenogears of OCR albums. It's weird and not really like anything else and sometimes that weirdness is like, "Ehh, this isn't really for me." Like, why the hell was Chu Chu on the cross, you know? But it had something it wanted to say and I remember it being mostly fun playing it. When I do a "listen to every OCR album for games I've played, in order the album was released" like I'm doing right now, I never skip over it. I wouldn't want to miss out on some favorite tracks mixed in with the weirder ones.

Listening to this album compared to most others on OCR gives me a different feeling because I've got no emotional attachment to this game. It was always that distant thing that I knew from the Internet was Chrono-adjacent but there was not really an easy way to play it back then. As a piece of OCR history it's interesting to hear what some folks who are still cranking out great tunes were doing back then - there are a bunch of names who put out bangers in either Chronopolis or the Chrono Trigger jazz album, and that's if I'm only talking Chrono stuff. My absolute favorite bit in here, and one of my favorite stretches of music I've ever listened to on OCR, is starting about 1:53 on 08 - The Scar Sealing Girl, when all the other sounds peel away except for the piano, then at 2:20 it gives off a strong aura of the opening bars of "Let It Be," lingers on that just long enough to give a fuzzy feeling, and then the track moves on. Puts a smile on my face every time.

I've listened to this album so many times that not too long ago when I took advantage of there being a Switch port of FF7, I found myself expecting to hear the OCR album versions of songs instead of the actual tracks from the game. There's a lot of variety in the game's soundtrack itself and I love how that's represented in this album, setting a standard that I think that all of the future JRPG album projects on this site were going to have to meet - and have met; I enjoy all of them too. Some diverge wildly from the style of the source track, like 2-02 Valse Aeris, while others like 4-04 Airships Make Me Happy hew closer to what might have been found in the game, and I dig these and everything in between. I've still got the torch burning for this album in 2020.

I've carried this album (and other OCR faves) with me on a little USB drive across at least three computers now and have had to settle for a crappy laptop that has no space for my OCR music right now. I was pretty sad about it until I came back to the site and saw it's all available to stream on Soundcloud. Thank you to whoever made this happen (for this album and the rest). It's great. There may have been better quality symphonic single tracks on some subsequent albums as people were able to use more instruments in live performances, but for tackling the whole game story in this way I think Chrono Symphonic is still unique and wonderful among everything that's been done around here in the 14 years since. If anyone who ever helped make this happen checks in the future, you're still putting smiles on faces in 2020.

This album still brings me delight more than 15 years later and I just wanted to say thank you and well done to all of the fine people who were a part of it. It makes me feel nostalgia not only for the days when my cousin and I would stuff a towel underneath the door so that his parents wouldn't see we were up late playing Donkey Kong Country (or other SNES games of the era) in the dark, but also for when this and other early OCR albums were my "get stuff done" music.