A purely piano JRPG score with a Ghibli-like innocence and sadness.
Editor's review by Adam Corn (2017-03-03)
If Studio Ghibli were to release a new film, and that film were to have a piano collection album, that album might very well sound like I Am Setsuna. Tomoki Miyoshi's score for Square Enix's SNES era'esque JRPG has exactly the mix of heartfelt innocence and lingering sadness so often found in Ghibli films and their soundtracks. The score is almost entirely performed by piano (at least in this partially arranged US edition), and it eschews dramatic arrangements and virtuoso performances to simply let a plethora of pretty melodies take the forefront. To compare it to the same publisher's Final Fantasy piano collections, it's more simplistic than most of the modern piano collections from FFVIII to FFXIV, and instead more comparable to the ones for FFIV and FFV. Given said simplicity and a general lack of drama it's not an album I listen to often, but as accompaniment to say a quiet evening relaxing it would fit the bill very nicely.