It’s been a year of video game concerts, hasn’t it? Nintendo’s been going hard on live concerts featuring some of its most popular characters — Kirby got his own live concert earlier this year. Now, it seems Elden Ring publisher Bandai Namco wants to get in on this action and it doesn’t give a toot.
The company will host a live jazz concert during December that will be streamed online. It’s called Elden Ring: A Night in the Lands Between, and is a jazz collab between BN and award-winning jazz musicians Kenny Garrett and Takuya Kuroda. The show will comprise “recognisable melodies from the game’s soundtrack” that will be played “live in a Jazz format — with improvisation”. The band for the evening will be led by Kuroda on trumpet and Garret on the alto saxophone.
As Bandai Namco correctly identifies in its press release, game soundtracks and live concerts tend to err on the side of symphonic music or modulated to something closer to rock and roll. “Our ‘A Night in the Lands Between” Jazz event is exploring a wonderfully different treatment of the Elden Ring soundtrack.”
There will be two shows, both performed at the Bourbon Room in Hollywood, California on December 4th. The first show will be at 1 pm AEDT and the second at 5 pm AEDT. Both performances will be livestreamed. There are, of course, a couple of catches.
The first catch is that Bandai Namco has apparently restricted access to the livestreams and post-show video-on-demand to US residents only. So, that’s a real pain in the arse to start with. In the year of our lord 2022, are we not past this kind of ridiculous geoblocking? Must we still be forced into using VPNs to watch content that should be readily available by default?
The second catch is that they’re charging how much to watch a livestream??
The Furled Finger tier will run you $US25 (or roughly $AU40) and gets you access to the livestream of a concert you are not physically attending. If you wanted some extra goodies to go with that livestream of a concert you will be physically present for you, you can opt for the Host of Fingers package at $US50 (about $AU80) which gets you livestream access, a commemorative ticket and a digital soundtrack.
If you’re happy to miss the live experience and catch the VOD afterwards, that’ll set you back $US15 (roughly $AU24).
A reminder that Nintendo hasn’t charged anyone anything to watch its livestreamed video game concerts.
This all seems like a really strange way to run an online concert for video game music and suggests that the jazz musicians they’ve booked to play at the event may not have come cheap. Anyway, hopefully Bandai Namco can see their way clear to making the Elden Ring jazz concert available to everyone at some point in the future.
In the meantime, I’m going to play the Elden Ring theme in Trombone Champ and pretend I’m at the show.
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