Welcome to Critical Hit, where I (or someone else on the PC Gamer team) celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle.
I often think of the times the mainstream dips its toe into our colourful corner of pop culture and tries to fit in—Beyoncé tapping away at a Nintendog, the multitude of weird Hollywooded videogame movies, real-life athletes turning up in the videogame version of their respective sport, WEED3.
But it is so rare to see the reverse. When the 2021 Tokyo Olympics paid homage to the industry with a fantastic videogame music-filled opening ceremony, it was newsworthy. It is still incredibly funny every time I think about the fact the Vatican was made privy to the existence of Undertale’s Megalovania. Small pockets of nerd culture bleeding out to the masses.
I couldn’t help but keep these sporadic moments in the back of my mind as I ventured into the large blue-and-red gazebo that sprawled across the Dogtooth Stage at Download Festival—the largest rock and metal festival in the UK—offering a pleasant respite from the sun beating down over Donington Park. It’s a space I’m familiar with, grass I’ve trodden before. Dirt and dust I’ve washed out of my hair after too many days of the dreaded wet-wipe-shower.
But this time I wasn’t here to live out my perpetual emo teen dreams of drinking in a field waiting for bands like Linkin Park or Limp Bizkit. I was here to see The Primals—Final Fantasy 14’s official in-house band. One which has never done a live performance outside of a Fan Festival or Asia tour. A wonderful marriage of my two biggest interests coming together under one very sweaty tent.
With a surprisingly tasty timeslot of 5:50pm, The Primals’ biggest competition being Electric Callboy at the nearby main stage, I was curious exactly what the crowd would look like, and how it would respond to something relatively niche. Festivals are always the perfect place to discover a band you’ve never heard of before, but a very specific videogame band? That can make popping over to a stage on a whim a harder sell.
I turned up approximately 20 minutes before the set was due to start and was met with a small but tightly packed crowd, a dense throng of bodies clustered close to the barriers. I took a spacious spot towards the back, feeling myself become increasingly closed in over the next 15 minutes. I took a quick look over my shoulder shortly before the timeslot and was pleasantly surprised to see how many more people had packed in.
The Primals weren’t exactly drawing the crowds showing up for the more mainstream bands populating the larger stages. But as I scanned the area, spotting several folks wearing Final Fantasy 14 t-shirts chatting away about the game, the nerves I’d felt on behalf of the band began to settle.
They abated even further when the first few notes of Shadowbringers began to blare through the speakers, and composer-slash-guitarist-slash-vocalist Masayoshi Soken took to the stage, followed by Gunn Lee, Eikichi Iwai, Tetsuya Tachibana, and fellow Square Enix employee Michael-Christopher Koji Fox. The group riffed straight into the fantastic song Fiend—Sephirot’s theme from Heavensward—and another brief scan showed an enthusiastic crowd peppered with eager lip-syncers and those who seemed to not be quite as clued into Final Fantasy 14’s whole thing but having a great time nevertheless.
Primal instinct
As the band wrapped their first song, Fox took the mic to ask if the crowd has heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14. Knowing whoops and cheers erupted from those around me. “You might’ve heard its soundtrack… fucking ROCKS HARD,” he declared to even louder, more agreeable whoops and cheers. I couldn’t help but join in with the deep enthusiasm for what is, in reality, this group of middle-aged Dad rockers living their best lives as Fox continued: “This ain’t no Super Mario… be afraid,” using it as a segue to dive into the group’s next song Not Afraid.
As The Primals welcomed longtime collaborator Jason Charles Miller to belt out the final three songs in the set—Absolute Tyranny, eScape, and Under the Weight—being squarely in this slice of nerdom was giving me a weird sense of… seclusion? Despite being surrounded by half a dozen other bands and tens of thousands of attendees.
The set may have been criminally short at just half an hour, but its curation of classic and new tracks was excellent. Those of us in the Final Fantasy tees heard our favorites, while others were more likely to catch the ears of passersby or future Warriors of Light. And such an enthusiastic crowd made one thing clear: this kind of thing can work! These weird and wonderful niche corners of music can intersect, transcend, and take up space outside the confines of videogame geekery.
It’s a thing I would sincerely like to see more of in the future. Let Crush 40 play a Sonic set at Coachella! I dunno, get Lyn doing a full Persona 5 setlist at, like, Glastonbury or something. Finding these little ways to weave the two worlds together more would be lovely—peel off the “videogame music” label and The Primals playing at Download simply felt correct. A rock band, doing rock things at a rock festival.
If I hadn’t known their origins (and, y’know, hadn’t connected them to the Final Fantasy 14 branding slapped on advertising billboards across the whole festival site) I’d have taken them as a rather good and semi-zany Dad rock band from Japan. Finding more opportunities where these marriages of communities feel downright normal? That’s a win for all of us.