TheFinal Fantasy 14community is still raving over therecent introduction of the Arcadion Raid series, even if producer and directorNaoki Yoshida has since revealed he’s not overly keen on fan-favourite Honey B Lovely. The fourth tier, AAC Light-heavyweight M4, has players facing off against Wicked Thunder to the bopping tune of Give it All.
I recently spoke with the singer of the track, Chrissy Costanza, best known for being the vocalist of Against The Current and particularly well known in the gaming sphere for her love of video games and previous work with Riot Games in 2017 for the League of Legends Worlds Anthem.
“I’ve been a gamer my whole life, so I’ve been well aware of—and it’s an omnipresent force—the Final Fantasy series overall for my entire life,” Costanza tells me when recalling the joy of working alongside composer Masayoshi Soken and the game’s official band, The Primals. “Getting to collaborate in video games at all with music is a dream come true, and then also just on top of that, then you add in someone so legendary in the space. It’s pretty surreal. It was genuinely a massive honour to even be considered, let alone to be part of the project.”
Costanza was “pumped” when she first heard the track, going on to say, “It’s really epic. It’s [got] that little bit of an underdog, comeback kid feeling to it. I also like that it was through the perspective of the villain, [who] doesn’t know they’re the villain, right?”
Square Enix explained the background of the raid and the character of Wicked Thunder in the first call with Costanza before she worked on the song so that she could understand the character’s motivation, but revealed to me that she didn’t immediately realise she was the villain in this fight. “Lyrically, when you dive into the song, it almost makes you a little bit empathetic towards her, even though you’re trying to beat her at the time. It humanizes her a bit.”
Costanza tells me it was fun getting to learn about Wicked Thunder’s story as she’s never done a song for such a specific character in a game before, so it was interesting to focus in on her motivation and perspective, as well as what she would be thinking during the battle.
In terms of adding her own personal flair, Costanza says she was lucky that the song was right up her alley in terms of genre and performance, so she was easily able to have fun and be herself. She explains sometimes when you receive demos of songs, the companies want you as the vocalist to sound just like the demo, but for this, it was different.
“We want it to sound like you. We love your voice, and that’s why we want to collaborate with you. We want your touch on it.”
Give it All is a longer track than Chrissy is used to working on. “I don’t think I’ve ever recorded like a five or six-minute track before,” she tells me, explaining the song isn’t very “copy-paste”. Whereas most songs have the same chorus that comes in four times, for Give it All she found “everything had a different nuance to it. It was probably also the most I’ve recorded vocal file-wise. My session was huge by the time I finished it because there are just so many little things throughout.”
Last month saw Costanza launched her first solo album, 7 Minutes In Hell. She tells me it’s very different to go from working in a band she spent half her life with to suddenly creating music solo. Over the years she had a lot of ideas that didn’t fit with Against the Current, or that would not have felt authentic to the band.
“That’s the thing with a band, all three of us participate,” she says. “You want everything to be more or less representative of all of us. I knew I always wanted to do something that was really fantasy heavy, not just in the music, but the visuals and the aesthetic,” Costanza tells me, laughing as she adds, “I didn’t want to ask Dan [Gow] and Will [Ferri] to put on a full suit of armour. It’s just not a world that they’re in, I’m not going to force that on Against the Current.”
Costanza acknowledges that Against the Current has such a strong identity, and so some of the ideas she had didn’t have a place in that world, but with her solo album, she can now embrace something a bit different. “It was cool getting to have a place to put these extra or different ideas that are things I love so deeply.”
Most of the video game music Costanza listens to are official soundtracks. Her favourite is Skyrim, which she listens to daily. ‘The Streets of Whiterun’ is her favourite track, with her telling me “I cry when I hear that song every time. I’ve probably listened to it a thousand times. That’s the song I want to walk down the aisle to when I get married.”
“I want to say it’s a dream come true, but I couldn’t have dreamed it,” she tells me when I ask how it feels to be able to combine her two passions of music and gaming. She tells me that when she was starting out with Against the Current, it was a dream just to think they’d have fans of their own, play shows, and make a career out of it, never mind being able to collaborate across various gaming projects. “It’s actually, to me, a very deep part now of the culture of Against the Current. A lot of our fans are gamers, and I think part of that is because of those collaborations. It’s really changed the landscape of our career.”
Costanza hasn’t played Final Fantasy 14 yet, but she dabbled in the series years ago and has watched a lot on YouTube and Twitch. She plans to do a live stream to check out FF14 for herself when she has a couple of months off from touring, and she tells me she’ll leave her choice of race and job up to a chat vote. And so starts the debate of which race and job to recommend to her. While we wait for Costanza to inevitably become obsessed with FF14 as she rightfully should, you can catch her beautiful vocals in the Arcadion.
