Final Fantasy VI "Dearly Departing" 4:23

ZackParrish returns with this mostly-acoustic arrangement of "Phantom Forest," where he writes that he was trying "to dig myself out of a rut by forcing myself to do a DoD entry entirely on my own. I was not expecting to place very high with this entry but managed to nab silver for it anyway. Not much thought went into this track other than trying to smoothly chain different ideas together."

I know a lot of musicians that would love for something this piece to be what happens when they get stuck – Zack is underselling himself a touch here, and we're fortunate to have him as a fixture of our community, with over sixty contributions to the site running the gamut from larger mega collaborations to solo contributions like this. For someone who collaborates so often, it's an interesting note that his solo ReMix before this one was also Final Fantasy VI, a game personal to a very large number of folks in our larger community of musicians.

A couple of the judges point out that the string samples (synthesized) aren't quite as crisp as the live guitars, but given how strings tend to sound so significantly compressed on the Super Nintendo itself, the backing strings here somehow feel slightly more authentic to the source material to my ears than they would if they shared the same high fidelity as Zack's excellent guitar playing – and as prophetik music comments, the usage of them is smartly integrated into the arrangement, especially when "the backing elements really start to come up to play – I love the strings in there at 2:46," which leads to "the electric guitar we were all expecting at 2:55 – that's a great payoff."

There's a lot of heart in this one, with a number of small touches that elevate it, including the chaotic introduction that makes settling into Zack's amazing guitar tone feel even more comfortable.