I apologize to the RPGamers and to Kain for being rather erratic in posting these past few days. Internal Medicine is proving to be quite a doozy. I'm having trouble finding time for anything else other than duties, sleep, and the occasional studying. It's like a girlfriend from hell turned into a medical rotation. Being the rant machine that I am, I most probably should've launched into a lengthy dissertation right about now. Fortunately, I'm in an exceptionally good mood. You see, during one particularly dreary post-duty day, while I was grumbling over my cold and late brunch (It was nearly four in the afternoon at the time.), a close friend informed me that I had managed to attain a general weighted average (GWA) that would allow me to graduate with honors.

"Preposterous," I immediately thought. I had previously calculated my GWA and had come up with the conclusion that I had missed the cum laude standing by two-thousandths of a point. Being a former mathematics contestant whose name incited fear in the hearts of opponents during interscholastic competitions, I had accepted the result without question. The possibility that my close friend was just playing a prank on me haunted me for days until the class president herself confirmed it as she congratulated me a few days later. That was perhaps the most delightful miscalculation I have ever committed.

Moving on to the music, we have here the fourth and final track of Kain Vinosec's Final Fantasy IV Tribute EP. The Big Whale is perhaps one of the most majestic of Uematsu's "airship themes" with its brasswind-driven melody and rapid string sections that seem to invoke in the listener a sense of flight. Kain shows us just how good it could sound given a few touches of metal here and there. The rapid strings in the first part of the original have vanished and are replaced by an insistent drumbeat that is occasionally pierced by snares. The rhythm guitars take the role of the relatively slower, contrapuntal string section in the latter half the piece, forming a quasi-neo-Baroque fusion that is simply mesmerizing. As Kain said so himself, I dare you to listen just once...

Now that the entire album is complete, Sound Test shall resume with its regular update schedule. Stay tuned, everybody, and have a great week ahead!

Fermat's Last Theorem

Sound Test Curator