Valse di Fantastica (FF15)

This is perhaps the most purely romantic piece in Shimomura's FFXV suite — a waltz in the classical European tradition, but filtered through a lens of wistful, slightly melancholic fantasy. A solo piano introduces the main theme, three-quarter time giving the melody that characteristic swaying quality, gentle and unhurried as a slow dance in a room no one else has entered. Strings join gradually, the orchestration filling in like warm light through windows, never overwhelming the intimacy of the piano's lead. The tempo is deliberately nostalgic, the kind of musical pace that suggests memory rather than immediacy — this is how a moment feels when you're looking back at it rather than living inside it. Shimomura shapes the emotional arc so that joy and longing become indistinguishable: major-key brightness shot through with something aching at the harmonic edges. The title's double meaning — a waltz of fantasy, a fantasy waltz — is fully realized in the composition, existing simultaneously as dance music and reverie. It evokes road trips, the particular freedom of chosen companions, and the bittersweet knowledge that certain times in life only reveal their perfection in retrospect. This is music for late evenings in moving vehicles watching landscapes dissolve in the dark, or for revisiting something you once had that you can no longer fully return to.