This mod brings an all-new musical score with a high stakes theme to Chapter 12: Fight For Survival. I composed the score to heighten and maximize the urgency and tension in the story. Chapter 12 is dense with cinematic moments and well-animated cutscenes, but the standard original score didn't seem to get as much attention to detail, featuring some mis-matched and re-used score tracks. I also didn't get the sense of tension from the standard score that this moment in the story demands in my opinion, so I decided to produce and mod in a score of my own. I used themes and motifs from the original FF7 for my arrangements, mostly those used at the part of the game that corresponds with chapter 12 in remake. The composition style is inspired by the scores of Tenet, Dunkirk, and other Nolan films, as well as Perfect Dark and the Ace Combat series. 



This re-score features 12 suites, which are broken up into 19 replaced BGM layers in-game, and 22 tracks on the companion soundtrack, bringing 49 minutes of additional music to the game. The soundtrack is is available as a separate download of mp3 files. Because of the way the middleware messes with the volume of modded music, the in-game score is mastered to around -4 LUFS (yes seriously). The soundtrack versions are mastered to a more reasonable -10 LUFS. 

• Hurry! - High Stakes
• Whispers' Theme - High Stakes
• Anxiety - High Stakes
• Let The Battles Begin! - High Stakes
• A Trap is Sprung - High Stakes
• On That Day, Five Years Ago - High Stakes
• Attention, Avalanche! - High Stakes
• Gut Feeling - High Stakes
• Shinra's Theme - High Stakes
• Saving Marlene - High Stakes
• Who Are You? - High Stakes
• Tseng - High Stakes
• I Never Miss - High Stakes
• Jessie's Theme - High Stakes
• You Can Hear The Cry - High Stakes
• Hurry! (Reprise) - High Stake
• Turks' Theme - High Stakes
• Dark Suits - High Stakes
• Awaiting Confirmation - High Stakes
• Plate Is Collapsing - High Stakes
• Follow Your Heart - High Stakes (Bonus track)
• Flowers Blooming - High Stakes (Bonus track)
• Trailer Music - High Stakes (Bonus track)
  

Compared to the standard score, the mod is expanded because I composed a unique cue for each file, where there used to be some duplicates. Some cues are perfectly locked to picture with the mod which weren't before, but in some cases this means that skipping a cutscene or loading a save mid-way through the chapter will desynchronize the music from the scene. 

I started this project with the plan to only replace the first track of the chapter, but when I dug deeper and found that all the different scenes that use that track have separate files, I decided to replace all of them with unique tracks. Eventually it led to re-scoring the whole chapter so I could give it all a consistent style and theme. I have more to say about each one of these tracks for anyone interested in the nerdy music composition side, I'll be posting it in the discussion tab soon.