Perhaps Uematsu's slow decline in popularity inspired him to produce a full remix album; perhaps he just grew interested in the rock genre as a result of composing Otherworld for Final Fantasy X's Original Soundtrack, or maybe Tsuyoshi Sekito and Kenichiro Fukui just asked to arrange certain tracks. In any case, the Black Mages is in essence just that: a fairly tight arrangement of battle themes from Uematsu's previous work on music in the Final Fantasy series. It seems that tracks were picked indiscriminately - even Final Fantasy I makes it into the arrangement - and the remixes are very true to their original counterparts, barely introducing much new content to the songs other than a resampling with more advanced synthesized instruments. To some it may be a disappointment - certainly, hearing Dancing Mad with a live choir and organ rather than slight improvements compared to the SNES sampling would have been impressive - but the overall feeling emitted by this album seems to be more like respect for Uematsu's original creations, rather than complete reinterpretations of them. Much seems lacking, but there is also more than enough here for the true Final Fantasy fan to be at ease with.