The Opera House — "Maria and Draco" · Final Fantasy VI · SNES · 1994
Final Fantasy VI stops its own plot to perform an opera, hands the player a soprano aria rendered on an SNES sound chip, and then drops a giant octopus through the ceiling.
By the mid-1990s the Final Fantasy series had built a reputation for ambition, but the Opera House sequence is the moment it visibly reached past what its hardware was supposed to allow. The setup is pure caper: Celes, a defected Imperial general, happens to resemble the famed diva Maria, and the party substitutes her into a performance of "Maria and Draco" in order to reach the gambler Setzer, who plans to abduct the real singer from the stage. What follows is a four-part composition by Nobuo Uematsu — "Overture", "Aria di Mezzo Carattere", "Wedding Waltz – Duel" and "Grand Finale" — with a libretto written by Yoshinori Kitase, staged in-engine with scripted blocking, timed lyric cues the player must follow correctly, and a rendering of a soprano voice built entirely out of synthesised SNES instrumentation. The scene refuses to become solemn: the octopus Ultros crashes the performance from the rafters, and the operatic register collapses into a boss fight and a chase through the catwalks above the stage.
The SNES had eight audio channels and a small pool of sound memory. It had no capacity for a sung human voice, and Uematsu did not attempt one. Instead "Aria di Mezzo Carattere" hands the vocal line to a synthesised instrument and lets the player's own ear finish the job — the melody phrases like singing, breathes like singing, and is accompanied like singing, so the listener supplies a soprano the hardware never produced.
Simultaneously the game puts the lyrics on screen and requires the player to choose the correct lines in sequence. This is the mechanism that turns the scene from a cutscene into an experience: you are not watching Celes perform, you are performing as her, and a wrong lyric is a genuine failure in front of a genuine audience. It is one of the earliest examples in a mainstream game of interactivity being used to create stage fright.
The scene's most under-appreciated decision is that it will not let itself be taken entirely seriously. Having spent several minutes constructing something genuinely beautiful, Final Fantasy VI drops Ultros — a purple cartoon octopus with a taste for insults — through the ceiling, and the aria becomes a boss fight and then a chase across the catwalks with a countdown running.
That deflation is what keeps the sequence from ageing badly. A 16-bit JRPG staging a sincere opera could easily have become embarrassing; a 16-bit JRPG staging a sincere opera and then knowingly wrecking it is a work with a sense of humour about its own ambition. The Opera House is remembered as Final Fantasy's most audacious set piece precisely because it dares to be grand and then refuses to be pompous about it.