Final Symphony II

Final Symphony II is a symphonic concert tour first held at the Beethovenhalle in Bonn, Germany on August 29, 2015.

For 2024, concerts are planned featuring the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham, United Kingdom and the Royal Northern Sinfonia at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music in Newcastle, United Kingdom.

A video of the Stockholm performance of the Final Fantasy VIII section was released on September 23, 2016.

A studio album recorded in summer 2023 and performed by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra was released on August 4, 2023.

Critics have claimed the concerts to be one of the highest quality video game music orchestral performances produced, along with the original Final Symphony, with the second tour considered to have simpler arrangement styles than the first but in turn be more approachable to audiences.

[3] He encouraged Böcker to take more liberties with the source material if the opportunity arose, and hoped that another concert could be created in the future.

Böcker proposed Final Symphony later that year to Uematsu, and got approval from Square Enix while coordinating a Tokyo concert of Symphonic Fantasies.

[2] Jonne Valtonen, Roger Wanamo, and Masashi Hamauzu created the arrangements for the concert.

[7] An album for the concert, recorded from a studio session by the London Symphony Orchestra, was released in 2015.

Hamauzu, feeling that "there were no orchestral versions of Final Fantasy XIII tracks that [he] was really satisfied with", wanted to create a "ground-breaking" arrangement of the main themes of the game.

"[12] The Final Fantasy IX section, "For the People of Gaia" is in the form of a piano concerto, with an orchestral introduction.

The concerto is based on the characters' motifs from the game, beginning with music related to Vivi's theme, which inspired the idea for Wanamo.

It continues through music related to Zidane, then Garnet, before ending with the battle against Kuja, interspersed with themes from the protagonist characters.

[11] The name is intended to capture a theme from the game of the conflict between childhood and adulthood, as well as the destruction of the present in favor of an uncertain future.

[15] The performances were the first time that a non-Japanese orchestra played a video game music concert in Japan.

[27][28] On 20 August, it was awarded the "Album of the Week" on the classical music radio station NPO Klassiek.

[29] Benjamin Schmädig of Eurogamer Germany remarked in his article that on the album "every moment lends a majestic elegance to the familiar melodies".

[10] Joe Hammond of Video Game Music Online, in a review of the London performance, said that Final Symphony II "wasn't reinventing the wheel or revolutionising what the team have already done, it was triumphantly expanding on previous success".

He felt that the concert series was "lighter and more accessible" than the original due to its use of fewer and less complicated types of orchestral arrangements, and that Merregnon Studios did not "try to push the boundaries" but instead tried to "expand on the success of the Final Symphony 1 programme with other games in the series", in his opinion successfully.

Producer Thomas Böcker in 2010
Arranger Jonne Valtonen in 2010
Composer and arranger Masashi Hamauzu in 2012
Excerpt from Stockholm performance of "Mono no aware"