Musical Plagiarism? 1UP’s musical comparison of Final Fantasy IV versus Link to the P

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I noticed that a few months ago. If you are subscribed to 1up, please link this post, since it contains some analysis of the themes.

Sikora and I also noticed that the main menu music of the Russian MMO Allods Online is similar to that of the Ballad of the Goddess in SS (the harp part in both cases).

Update: Here are the relevant parts of the scores (the first four measures of both themes) to highlight the similarities between the FF4 Prologue and the ALttP Ending Theme:


Follow the dotted blue lines (I used both Finale 2008 (the music composition software) and Adobe Photoshop CS6 beta to create the image) (note that the FF4 Prologue was originally in B♭ Major, but I transposed it to C Major (the original key of the ALttP Ending Theme) for the sake of comparison)

♭ = flat

Originally Posted by Nen desharu

I noticed that a few months ago. If you are subscribed to 1up, please link this post, since it contains some analysis of the themes.

Sikora and I also noticed that the main menu music of the Russian MMO Allods Online is similar to that of the Ballad of the Goddess in SS (the harp part in both cases).

Update: Here are the relevant parts of the scores (the first four measures of both themes) to highlight the similarities between the FF4 Prologue and the ALttP Ending Theme:


Follow the dotted blue lines (I used both Finale 2008 (the music composition software) and Adobe Photoshop CS6 beta to create the image) (note that the FF4 Prologue was originally in B♭ Major, but I transposed it to C Major (the original key of the ALttP Ending Theme) for the sake of comparison)

♭ = flat

So what do you think? I personally think it's a completely fair thing to do, and I really hope (although the music is old) that no legal trouble comes of this. Like I said in my article, composers arrange other composer's work all the time, and both the key difference and the changes made to the rhythm do not make the piece plagiarism.

What really weakens the arugument is that fact that you compare notes that on are strong beats in FFIV but weak beats in Zelda. Also that many of these notes are stable notes that or very commonly used. In fact the only unstable notes used are b, e d, and a; a only occurs in zelda also. You compare two notes in measure two. E and D to E and D in Zelda. In FFIV they are quarter notes which give a good sense of harmony to the tune. On the other hand in Zelda the E and D are passing tones on the upbeat of 2 (on of the weakest beats in the measure) they have no influence over the harmony.

What this you see is a coincidence due to both composers using good melody writing. I think the FF one is a bit more simple but still effective.