I know I’m super late to the party for anybody that’s known about this since it came out, but it was just recently that a friend of mine mentioned this album to me. For people that haven’t heard of Random before, I first became aware of this guy when he put out an album called Mega Ran, a tribute to Mega Man’s music. Random took tracks from the Mega Man soundtracks and wrote raps to go along with some of the beats. While you see groups like The Black Mages, Minibosses, and The Advantage taking video game tracks and performing their own (often awesome) takes on them, Random’s Mega Ran was the first time that I’d seen someone write lyrics for game tracks that actually went well and sounded good. While I appreciated the quality, I was never a huge Mega Man player when I was younger, so I just sort of moved on from the tracks and got on with my life. Now, four years later, I’m rediscovering Random again. Only this time, he’s teamed up with Lost Perception to give the same treatment to Final Fantasy VII’s soundtrack, my personal favorite game soundtrack of all time, and they’re calling it Black Materia. Like Mega Ran, Black Materia is an album full of raps set to the beats of the game’s soundtrack, all being completely related to the background tracks they’re set against (e.g. the rap set to Tifa’s theme is all about Tifa.) The album includes some of my personal favorite like the Cosmo Canyon and Cid themes, as well as the one everyone would expect, One Winged Angel, and many more. All told, there are 16 main tracks to the album, as well as three of what Random calls “Bonus Beats,” which are remixed versions of tracks from the soundtrack that, as he puts it, “weren’t used…yet” that are still great to listen to. So if you like raps or you like Final Fantasy VII’s soundtrack, maybe you should at least check out a few tracks. If you like both of those things, this should be a no-brainer. Head over to this page if you’d like to purchase the album. It’s $7.77 for a digital copy, and there are 3 different sets of hard-copy CDs if you’d like to go that route (one of which even comes with a cool poster.) I’ll definitely be making sure to keep Random on my radar in the future, to see if he keeps up his awesome work.