My first encounter with this song, like a lot of other people, wasn’t from Final Fantasy IV. It was in Super Mario RPG. Final Fantasy IV Boss is also the battle music for the Culex fight in SMRPG. When I first heard it, I thought ‘hey, this sounds like a Final Fantasy song’ because of the bass intro that matches most of the old FF battle themes. After the Culex fight, the FF Prelude music starts playing, which led me to believe this was a cameo from some kind of Final Fantasy boss. Common misconception, but Culex actually isn’t in any Final Fantasy game, he’s just heavily based on a boss that would appear in one.
Now that I’ve given you a biography on Culex, let’s talk about this song. This is one of my personal favorites from the 2010 era. The main thing I wanted to make sure had prescence was the bass line, which is probably the most memorable part of the original. Considering I was using a cheap Ibanez Gio bass with a P-bass pickup configuration, it come out pretty much as good as I had wanted it to.
I tried to give the solo a bit of a Black Mages feel, although in my case, it’s more like the Lack Mages.
As I said earlier, this is one of my favs from the 2010 era, and it’s arguably the most solid.