About

Dancing Mad (Japanese: 妖星乱舞, Yousei Ranbu) is one of the popular soundtracks of the J-RPG series Final Fantay.

Similar to Clash on the Big Bridge, The Decisive Battle, Those Who Fight Further and J-E-N-O-V-A, this song is a popular subject of covers by numerous audio and instrumental remixes. The song had also been one of the standard music resources of MAD videos on the Japanese video sharing service Nico Nico Douga (NND).

Origin

"Dancing Mad" is the theme for the battle with Kefka the final boss in Final Fantasy VI which was first released in Japan in 1994.^[1] As same as other Final Fantasy series songs, it was written by the Japanese video game composer Nobuo Uematsu.^[2] Its full song is 19 minutes long and consists of 4 movements, which is abnormally complex for video game music.

Since it gains a large popularity among fans, its arranged version have been included to several subsequent spin-off titles in the series : Dissidia Final Fantasy^[3] and Theatrhythm Final Fantasy.^[4].

Spread

Reflecting the popularity, many fan works are created and have been posted to the video sharing services since the middle of 2000s. In particular, the complex melody and irregular meter in the 4th movement is a popular subject of playing covers among pianists, keyboardists, and sometimes ensembles. Besides, it had been sometimes reused in parody videos in the early days of the MAD phenomena on NND. One of the earliest MADs in this series was a derivative of Ronald McDonald's Ran Ran Ru, which was posted on March 26th, 2008.^[5]

There are hundreds videos related to this song on both NND^[6] and YouTube.^[7]

Notable Examples

Playing Covers / Remixes

MAD Videos

Search Interest

External References

Editor’s Note: Registration is needed to browse the original videos listed in this section.