Ashes of Dreams / Aratanaru-JP Version (NieR: Replicant Official Score Book)

Piece: Ashes of Dreams / Aratanaru (from NieR: Replicant OST)
"Our journey may have been meaningless.
Our past may have been a mistake.
But we’re not going back.
Even if this world comes to an end.
Because this…
This is the world with the people we cherish"
“Ashes of Dreams” is the song that plays during credits after each ending of NieR: Replicant, and developers actually made five versions of it, one for each ending (A, B, C, D and E). This version, with sub-heading “Aratanaru”, which means “New” in Japanese, plays during the credits of the last ending, ending E, which didn't exist in the original Nier in 2010.
I’d very much prefer to learn the arrangement of the English version (it plays after ending A), the most popular one, but for some reason MONACA decided to include the Japanese version in their scorebook. I’ve tried to find piano arrangements for the English version of the song, but they either sounded too simplistic or were too difficult to learn. Official piano scorebook that I have has a nicely balanced arrangement, possible for me to learn. Not exactly what I wanted, but in the absence of other options I’ve decided to pick this one.
You might think that I sound too picky here, but if you are planning to work on a piece for half a year, you better like it, or you’ll set yourself up for a LONG torture working on a music you don’t exactly prefer! Over time, I warmed up to it, though. I still think the English version has a better beginning part, and this particular arrangement has a terrible ending section that is unnecessarily complicated and sounds out of place, but more on that later.
Not gonna lie, this took an effort for me to learn! Although this piece shares some chords with the Music Box version I’ve learned earlier, there are still just too many notes to remember, as my teacher has said.
First part is basically a music box version remade to sound better on piano, so this one I’ve learned easily. Things got more interesting as I progressed through the piece, and once I got to the chorus part with a series of chords in right hand my progress slowed to learning one line in two weeks, but once I grasped this section, things got a bit easier down the road. But then the sheer volume of the piece became a problem, because I needed not only to learn new sections, but also not forget the previous ones, so I had to spend some time on segments that I already learned.
But all that was manageable until I reached the very end of the piece, and there I basically hit a roadblock. I’ve very quickly realized that I don’t have technique good enough to play tougher parts of the ending section, but tried to learn them nonetheless, turning difficult parts in various exercises to help to alleviate the problem, but after two months of work I gave up and admitted that I just can’t play that part smoothly enough. So my teacher suggested simplifying it, removing some unnecessary complications while keeping the essentials. Simplified version of the ending sounds a bit poorer, of course, but at least I could learn it!
Looking back, I think I should’ve asked her to just make me sheets with notes from the original ending, it would sound less dramatic, but much easier to learn and better fit for the overall mood of the piece. You can check out the original song here: • Ashes of Dreams / Arat...
All in all, I’m very glad I’ve picked this up and learned it. In hindsight it looks like this is the most difficult piece from both NieR scorebooks, and other pieces should be a lot easier!
Hope you enjoyed it!
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Setup and settings:
Yamaha Clavinova CLP-645 digital piano, default settings with the following changes:
- Binaural mode is turned off;
- Voice - Yamaha CFX Grand Piano;
- Reverb - Recital;
- Reverb depth - 20.
Recorded internally on the piano via USB

[@To04G]

Is there any chance of us getting your music sheets?