First off, Final Fantasy X is my favourite game ever made and I'm fairly certain at this point that nothing will top it (I used to play at least once a year since it came out - though I held off once the HD release was announced in 2011). It also includes some of my favourite music ever written (I say "some of" but actually "Besaid" is my favourite song of all time).
As such, I was very tentative of how this Remaster would turn out. I bloody love it. While I do still adore the original music (in most cases, more than the new ones) I still really like the updated music. There's so much depth built into it now that clearly they couldn't allow the original PS2 to play. It's fantastic.
Last year I went to the Final Symphony (Final Fantasy Music) event here in London which had Masashi Hamauzu and Nobuo Uematsu present at the event along with the London Syphonic Orchestra to play music from FFVI, VII and X. In the brochure thing (the thing that welcomes you and mentiones the order of the music that will play) there was a message explaining why Hamauzu had decided to rewrite his own piece for the FFX section (rather than letting the main people behind the event/London Symphonic Orchestra write them). He said how he had always felt like the music in X was unfinished, that he had so much more to say about the world (he specified Spira - saying he believed the music properly reflected the characters) in the music than he ever got across.
That seems like the reason that X's music was altered and X-2's wasn't: because Hamauzu had more to say and was using the HD remaster as the opportunity to properly get it across.
I think it shows. And I think it makes the entire game better for it (despite how I'd probably prefer to listen to my album of the original).
Maybe it's because I've always been the kind of person to be intrigued by remixed music (usually enjoying the originals more due to the emphasis that a good remix can tell on the original) but I genuinely think the updated music is a better and more striking than the visual changes. Heck, I've just played the Bikanel Island-Home section and the key moment in that place actually hit me hard (brought out a fire inside me that I haven't felt from that scene since the first time I played it). And I'm fairly certain it was due to the music depth building on the scene.
If anyone is shying away from getting this because they're unsure about if they want to play it with altered music, it's your loss.
Also, the menus look vastly superior now to the originals (too bad they're just as slow as they were before - maybe next time).
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