If there’s one thing I’ll happily own up to, it’s being a colossal nerd. I quite happily spent most of my childhood ensconced either in book after book or quite possibly the geekiest video games of all – JRPGS. For those not in the know, a JRPG is a Japanese Role-Playing Game, which essentially means a long tale of heroics and derring-do while your good guys carefully line up on one side of the screen to thwack the baddies on the opposite side of the screen until you win. Trust me, they’re great.

A New World: Intimate Music from Final Fantasy. Photo supplied

One of the pinnacles of JRPGs has always been Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy series, which has been running since the mid-80s across various systems. Although each instalment generally has almost nothing to do with the others, except for a few running gags, a series mainstay has been the extraordinarily good music. From Final Fantasy I all the way through to Final Fantasy X, the music was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, and later by several different composers for each new entry. I’m definitely fondest of the Uematsu era (and the music of IX,...