A Distant Promise - Xenogears (solo piano arrangement)

wow sorry don't know what happened with the previous upload attempt so let's try this again lol--Mitsuda month continues in our composer series, and this one’s from an all-timer—XENOGEARS!!!!! 😍😍😍 You guys, considering how weepy and feral I get at the mere mention of Xenogears, it’s absolutely criminal how long it’s taken me to loop back around to doing covers of it again. I LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS GAME 😭😭😭😭 in fact the one trait all of us Xenogears fans have in common is that we are very not normal about our love for Xenogears, and I love that for us lol. The PS1 era saw Mitsuda fully lean into his love for Celtic folk music, as evidenced by the Xenogears and Chrono Cross OSTs—fast triplets, 6/8 time, flutes, fiddles, hornpipes, pentatonic scales, strummy guitars, the whole nine yards. Additionally, this is the time where we also see him fully flex his songwriting chops—nascent traces of his ability to write gorgeous yearning pop ballads were present in Chrono Trigger, utilizing Dorian mode and his beloved 4-3 suspensions and variations of clave rhythms for subtle syncopated feels in Corridors of Time and To Far Away Times, but in the 2000s he is FULL ON with Unstolen Jewel and Small Two of Pieces—breathy female vocals, electric guitars, drums, sad piano, the works!! Granted, CC’s Unstolen Jewel is restrained lonely acoustic singer-songwriter vibes, but Xenogears’ Small Two of Pieces is as juicy of an 80s power ballad as you could hope for, as I have belted out BROKEN MIRRORRRR A MILLION SHADES OF LIIIIIGHT at the top of my lungs when I’m by myself in my car and in the shower many, many, MANY times over the years, and I know I’m not the only one. LOL! So this theme is one of the many thematic variations of Small Two of Pieces sprinkled throughout the game, called Distant Promise, or Faraway Promise depending on what decade of the internet you were conscious for in your formative years. It’s a stripped down tinkly music box version reminiscent of Marle’s Theme in CT, and is of great narrative significance in the game—you hear it early on when you first arrive at Citan’s house and he shows you a mysterious music box he excavated from some ancient ruins topped by statues of two angels with one wing each. As the music plays Fei remarks it’s somehow familiar to him, to which Citan enigmatically replies he probably has heard it, long ago. It’s such heavy foreshadowing that hits you like a truck 70+ hours later as the ending cutscene is playing with Small Two of Pieces in all its glory, and you realize just how far Fei has come from his humble remote backwater village to whatever ascended astral plane they’re on at the end with their godlike mechs, the scale of that game is just so, SO EPIC omg and I so love how Distant Promise plays such a key role in highlighting that!!! 😭😭😍😍 For this arrangement I played the original as is, because of these huge story implications, but for the second half I always liked the live solo piano version that was performed for the Xenogears 20th Anniversary concert in 2018 so I transcribed it and tacked it on. Dunno if you can hear how much the Small Two of Pieces is threatening to bust out of there but I kept it under wraps as best I could lmao, as it 100% deserves its own arrangement which I SWEAR I will get to one day, as I’ve been meaning to FOREVER but for now I’ve always wanted to do this one and finally happy I had an excuse to get around to it!! Thanks so much as always for listening and following along my little series—more Mitsuda coming up in the next upload!!!