My Home, Sweet Home

Well, I have falled in love with this track.

Let's Listen: Final Fantasy V (GBA) - Bartz Theme, Lix Village (Extended) - YouTube

Let me take you on my journey to discover this track. You randomly explore the world map with your newly acquired airship and you stumble upon the town of Lix. Then this theme starts playing...

Everyone in town recognizes Bartz and welcomes him back. You can tell Bartz had a long childhood here and it's been very long since he's last been here. A bard now occupies Bartz's former house. Yet there is no interaction - Bartz does not speak a word while you're in Lix. I must say, I had expected dialogues between NPCs and Bartz, but no... you just explore the town and Bartz remains silent.

Until you go to the inn and stay the night. The music stops. During the night, Bartz goes to the grave of his mother, Stella, and Faris finds him. For the first time since entering the village, Bartz speaks and tells of his past. He engraves his father's name onto his mother's gravestone and says to Faris that his father had always wanted to be buried beside her. Faris wonders what it's like to have a father... then they go back to bed.

And then the music resumes. You can view a flashback of Bartz's mother's death if you explore their former house, but other than that, the music plays nonstop, and Bartz remains silent once more. Until you leave.

THIS is how you make a town memorable. The concept was great and the execution downright amazing. With the dozens of identical-looking towns in the SNES/GBA Final Fantasy games which I've always had trouble locating on the map, Lix was the one that stood above them. The music really captures the feeling the town conveys and matches Bartz's staticness perfectly. It provides a solemn atmosphere that really sticks with you.

This is one of the lesser-talked-about moments in Final Fantasy that really captivated me in the moment. Do you have any of those as well?

I always liked the feeling of this track, but I think to fully appreciate its beauty, you have to listen to the piano version. It's quite stunning.

It certainly has a lot of emotional weight, which stands in direct contrast to town themes up to that point in RPGs. They generally went for pretty blatant "happy," "sad," "destroyed" feels, depending on the town and situation.

This one has emotional depth.

I absolutely couldn't agree more. It's such a fantastic little song. I wrote an article for the frontsite about it last year and it always invokes nostalgia in me to hear it again.