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I've been wanting to post this one for about as long as this blog's been around, but I haven't really known what to say.  Game related or otherwise, this is one of my favorite pieces of music, period.  

You might think, then, that I would have innumerable glowing superlatives to shower lavishly in its praise.  Quite the contrary: I can't imagine what I could tell you about this piece that it isn't fully capable of communicating itself.

I guess that means I can go off on a bit of a tangent.

As far as I'm concerned, game music in general has just kept getting better in the 3 decades and change that it's existed.  It's changed drastically over the years, and while in many cases new developments often come at the cost of elements that helped make the classics great, the sheer breadth of content available today is so vast you're sure to find what you're looking for somewhere.

Really, that's a long-winded way of saying I don't think one could say there is a "golden age" of video game music.  If one were to try, however, one could do far worse than to name the RPGs circa the Playstation era as its standard bearers.  Maybe it's nostalgia talking, but there was something magical about the game music of that time; even the most well-produced material was not over-produced, and entire soundtracks were often not only composed but also created by a single auteur.

Even if it is just nostalgia, I'm hardly the only one to reach the same conclusion.  To bring this back to topic, even among all that greatness, I think the Chrono Cross soundtrack as a whole clearly stands out as the greatest soundtrack of that age.  Every tune fits its use in the game perfectly, yet is also a joy to listen to on its own.  As much as I feel the same way about the soundtrack for Xenogears, I think Chrono Cross unarguably does it even better.

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You may not be aware, but I am incredibly fond of '80s glam-rock. Far moreso than it deserves, I'd reckon.

In fact, I don't get it when I hear people ragging on '80s music, because I have a selective memory with a tendency to gloss over the terrible death throes of disco, the often incredulous byproducts of hip-hop's rise to popularity, and the sappy...well, I'm not really sure what the technical term is, but I call them "talent show songs." See, for me the entire decade was a non-stop cavalcade of bands like Def Leppard, Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, and the Scorpions, and nobody is going to tell me any different. 

Imagine my surprise (and delight!) when I stumbled across a German band called Zero Division doing the Lord's work of resurrecting this style of music right here in the 21st century. Sure, the song may be little under-produced for glam rock, and I'm not really digging the atmospheric intro (and breakdown), but man, once you hit that chorus (and guitar solo) it's pure joy.

Oh yeah, and I guess this particular song is also based on a song from an old Commodore 64/Amiga puzzle game that I never played.

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Today, we're keeping it short and sweet.  I never played Star Ocean: The Second Story, and I'm no fan of the franchise.  I only discovered the soundtrack because I'm a Motoi Sakuraba fan.  It's a pretty great album, and this little tune is pretty much my favorite part.  I've got no context for it, all I know is it's super-catchy and incredibly high-energy.

Really, that's all I need to know.

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If there are such things as alternate universes, I'd like to think that there's one in which Final Fantasy VIII was about rapscallion secondary protagonist Laguna instead of that emo twit Squall.  Instead of being a ridiculous and largely incomprehensible story about a bunch of orphaned high-schoolers who have been groomed to save the world from...you kwow what?  I don't really know what the big problem was in Final Fantasy VIII; there weren't any killer clowns, city-eating whales, demon princes, or giant meteors threatening to destroy all of humanity. Even the evil sorceress was actually a good guy all along.  The party just sort of...went places and did stuff.

But you know who went places and did stuff a whole lot better?  Laguna, a man who understands that once you have a gun, it's pretty silly to attach a sword to it.  This was a guy who pines after a lounge singer, finds himself caught up in a war as first a solder then a war correspondent, kills a (different) evil sorceress almost by accident, and finds himself suddenly elected the president of a city-state when he never even ran for office.  

Laguna is an eminently interesting and likable fellow who finds himself moving from one unpredictable and untenable situation to another through copious amounts of tenacity, optimism, and luck.  All the while, he manages to keep a smile on both his and the player's faces.  In short, he is the exact opposite of the whiny douchebag the player gets stuck with for the other 85% of the game.  

Even his battle music is leaps and bounds better than Squall's.  Please enjoy this rock version, courtesy of Nobuo Uematsu's pet rock band The Black Mages.  I know I do.

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I may be in the minority, but of the venerable Heroes of Might and Magic series, I find HOMM 4 to be the most enjoyable.  Don't get me wrong, I spent a great deal of time with popular favorite 3, but after I got used to the mechanical changes in 4, I found they struck a chord with me.

Not only that, but I consider the artwork to be the pinnacle of the series.  In the grand scheme of things, this may seem a relatively minor thing to sway a "best in series" nod, but here Heroes differs from most series in two important respects.  First, with the arrival of each new entry1, the previous game's artwork had an uncanny knack of immediately looking goofy and slapdash.  I don't know why this is, but it's more pronounced in this series than any I can think of.

Secondly, and more importantly, Heroes' lush fantasy landscapes were one of the games' major draws for me.  I tend to be an explorer when I play games, interested mostly in seeing what the developers have whipped up for me.  As such, I had no qualms about keeping the difficulty on normal and "super-stacking" each and every map, as long as I got to lose myself in the incredibly detailed forests with their glowing faerie circles and spinning water wheels, or the snowy and stony mountain tops, or any number of other locales filled to the brim with accents, decorations, and scattered treasure.

Heroes 4's soundtrack does an incredible job of complementing this fantasy world with its flowing, folksy music filled with flutes and fiddles.  While its town themes aren't as awe-inspiring as the operatic scores in Heroes 3, its exploration music is second to none2.

This particular track plays when your heroes are travelling by ship, and is not only one of my favorites, it does a great job of showcasing many of the elements scattered throughout the soundtrack all in one place.  It's got the the airy flutes and light violin work I love in the grasslands and forest themes, along with a healthy dose of plucking and some sea shanty thrown in for good measure.

For my money, exploration music doesn't get much better than this.

At least, before (unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned) the series went 3D in 5. It's difficult to carry this claim into the 3D realm, because 3D artwork in general tends to hold up very poorly when compared to the latest model.

Actually, the jury may be out on this one. I've only had the chance to put a couple of hours into the demo of Heroes 6, but from what I've heard so far, its soundtrack is a serious contender.

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Game Over is a Swedish Metal Nintendo cover band, that I introduce mainly because I wanted to type that out.  Now that I have, I'm really unsure what order to put those words in or whether I should drop some commas in there.

It's no matter, I don't want to talk too much about the band, because from what I've heard they're pretty hit-or-miss.  Little Mac's Confession (incidentally, their first release) is very much a hit.

I appreciate the way they've strung together different tracks from the game to form a narrative that mirrors the lost fight described in the lyrics.  Not only does it follow an order similar to the background music in the original game, it forms a good song structure that keeps the cover moving.  If this were a straight metal cover of the repetitive (though quite catchy) background music from Punch Out, it would have had difficulty staying engaging for four and a half minutes.

As it stands, this is a pretty rocking cover of some classic Nintendo themes, and some of the (if not the) best treatment of the material I've heard.

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Katamari Damacy is a game that revels in its strangeness.  Unlike its pseudo-successor Nobi Nobi Boy, however, all of that strangeness is heaped upon the foundation of a really good game.

Its soundtrack is rather similar.  It combines a mish-mash of wildly different styles of music, the tracks' only shared quality being their determination to stray from the beaten path.  I'm familiar with few soundtracks of any sort that are so committed to this sort of uniqueness, steeped in so much silliness, while still taking themselves very seriously.  I'm familiar of none outside the Katamari series that do so and still put forth some honestly good music.

Katamari's soundtrack provides more than simple novelty, and isn't just quirky for quirkiness's sake.  Many of its tracks, taken wholly on their own, are still eminently listenable.  Put in the context of the rest of the soundtrack (much of which, I must admit, does work only in context), they become a hodgepodge of toe-tappers that serve as a perfect accompaniment to the ball-rolling, junk gathering, world destroying zaniness of Katamari Damacy.

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I absolutely love the soundtrack for Xenogears.  It remains one of my favorite soundtracks, and judging by the amount of attention it gets from fan remixers, I'm in good company.

This particular remix, though, really stands out among the crowd.  Its medieval folk style is not only an unusual choice, it manages to perfectly blend said style with the original song.  This is actually a talent of the artist, as she has a catalog of several game remixes done in similar style.

Of all of her game remixes, though, I think this is the greatest.  Now, part of that is my bias towards Xenogears, though I am also a fan of the well-represented Final Fantasy 9 OST (best in series there, as far as I'm concerned).  Mostly, though, I think it's just a gorgeous song, and perfect fit for the source material.  

For me, it's one of those cases where after listening to the arrangement it supplants the original in your mind. When I think of this song now, or hear any version of it, I find myself now considering this to be the definitive version.  This is the case even though it doesn't necessarily match the tone of the original piece in the context of the game.

Because if I'm honest, I'll probably never have the time to play through Xenogears again.  On the other hand, I'll not be done listening to Xenogears music anytime soon; and as far as I'm concerned, this mix is "Xenogears music."

[gametraqs]

Anyone who hasn't played Shadow of the Colossus is missing out on one of gaming's treasures.  Everything in the game works in service to its theme and style, and not one bit is out of place.

Take, for example, this song from the soundtrack.  Most battles with the colossi are relatively low-key affairs, until you begin to press your attack.  The music reflects this, by getting out of the way, either by being meandering, film-score-like tracks, or by simply not being present.

However, once the player makes his way to the colossus's weak point, and begins inflicting actual damage on the great beasts, the music switches to triumphant, thematic tracks like this one.  It's often a relatively subtle shift, that you don't notice until several seconds after it has happened, but it feels completely appropriate.  

The music seems to say you as the player, and as the character, are actively accomplishing your goal; you are gaining the upper hand over a creature orders of magnitude larger than yourself.  If only all contextual music were done this well.

[gametraqs]

At the time, Shenmue was an incredible game.  At the time, open-world gaming was a fairly new concept, and I'd be hard pressed to name any contemporaries with such a well-realized world to romp around in.  This was novelty in and of itself, and made it easier to forgive some of the game's bigger flaws, like its awkward fighting system or how the game ended just as its was starting to really get good.

Even though the game doesn't hold up today, it did a few groundbreaking things, most of which were pretty amazing.  Its unfortunate that the game's legacy has been largely reduced to the invention of the quick-time event.

Its greatest achievement, at least in my mind, was its ability to immerse the player in its world.  How many games make you show up to a part-time job everyday hauling around cargo, yet still somehow engage the player and make the experience enjoyable?  And let's be clear on this; we're not talking about a block puzzle or minigame here.  The protagonist literally has to move crates from point A to point B on a forklift, because he is a high-schooler with a crappy job.

The game had immersion down pat, and its soundtrack only helped out.  For the bulk of the game, the music is entirely diegetic.  However, during the dramatic scenes, the player is treated to beautiful pieces like this.  This is an orchestra arrangement of the main theme, though aside from the vocals and full instrumentation, it's pretty much the same song.

It really is a shame what happened to the Shenmue series, but that's partially why I like to listen to this arranged album instead of the original soundtrack.  Much like the game itself, I prefer to remember the music without the rough edges--just a bit better than it actually was.

[gametraqs]

Don't get me wrong, Diablo was (and largely remains) a great game.  But looking at it more than a decade older and wiser, much of its stylings are a bit...adolescent.  It is fully a product of the late '90s "darker is better" mentality, and let's be honest, it's no Planescape: Torment when it comes to weaving that particular yarn into compelling narrative.

The art direction seems to have taken a lot of cues from the doodles in the notebooks of high school metalheads, and my goodness--that font.  But when you get down to brass tacks, this is a game about clicking on things.  When you click on those things enough, they usually turn into other things for you to click on.  Everything else is window dressing.

There are really only two things I remember clearly about the game itself: clicking on a sword or potion and having it do a quick flip 5 feet in the air and land back in the exact same spot because it was time to play Inventory Tetris, and the music in Tristram.

I'd say this song is responsible for a good 80% of all of Diablo's atmosphere.  All the grim graphics, dark caves, "Os" with crosses in them, and despairing townfolk may be trying to tell you a story, but Tristram's lonely strings are what sell you that story.

Has anyone reading this not played Diablo?  I bet you can listen to this song and still have an excellent picture form in your head of some unfortunate place where Halloween is not a holiday, it is a way of life.  Stay a while and listen: imagine yourself sitting next to a campfire, as a wizened old man recounts harrowing tales of the hard times that have befallen this place, of the horrors lurking behind the shadows of its pale, moonlit evenings.

If you've a good imagination, you've likely just built for yourself a more fascinating world than the one Diablo puts forward.  Now, keep this world in mind, find your favorite roguelike, and do some delving.  Dream up stories for that room you just entered with the skeletons hanging around the dark altar, or that dusty old bookshelf where you found some arcane secrets.  Work those back into that world you imagined earlier, and you've got something pretty special; a unique experience you may remember fondly for years to come.

As it happens, Diablo is an excellent game to do this with.  In fact, that's how I wound up playing it all those years ago, and that's why I don't actually remember much about the game itself, but I sure have fond memories of playing it.  Pretty neat trick for a song, eh?

[gametraqs]

As much as I love the subgenre of action/adventure games known as "Metroidvanias," Super Metroid was the only entry in the eponymous series that I actually finished.  

The original Metroid was prototypical, and never hooked me.  The Prime series was first-person, and one of the very few things I dislike more than first-person shooting on a controller is first-person platforming (on anything).  Other M was a complete abomination, and we'll not speak of it further.  I guess I have no excuse for the GBA entries, except to say I played a good deal of Fusion and it just didn't "feel" like a Metroid game1.

This is an important distinction, though; what does a Metroid game feel like?  If we ignore mechanics, it's clear that atmosphere plays a huge part in it.  I have to admit, as distasteful as I found the Prime trilogy's shift to 3D2, the time I spent with those games defined what I now consider to be the important Metroid themes.

See, I had heard the Metroid games were about loneliness, isolation, and the tense uncertainty of exploration.  That's really a tall order to fill in the SNES era, when technical limitations meant most games featured a lone hero against an endless array of antagonists in a setting devoid of other signs of life.  The best parts of the Prime series, in part due to contemporary context, really brought home the idea of a lone warrior finding her way through desolate and forgotten regions of deep space. 

That's the reason I particularly enjoy this remix.  While I don't share the game music remix community's love of the Metroid soundtracks, and I couldn't tell you anything about the original track this song is based upon, I think the mixers here absolutely nailed the atmosphere of the Metroid games.  

Though it doesn't necessarily feel like an appropriate accompaniment to any particular point in media res, if a Metroid game ever felt the need for a montage segment, I can't think of a more perfect tune.

Which, I suppose, is to say it didn't feel like Super Metroid.

To be perfectly fair to Retro Studios, they did an incredible job of making a 3D Metroid game--it's just not my kind of game.

[gametraqs]

Nier was not a great game, but man did it come close.  It had a lot of trouble deciding what it was, but that only served to make it even more unique.  Aside from a few maddening difficulty spikes, my only real complaint is that the game spent too much time with cruft and setup, and not enough actually letting you play the underlying ridiculous action-RPG/bullet-hell shooter/platformer/text adventure/trading game/farming simulator.

As unique as the game itself was its soundtrack.  Fortunately, the music was a more consistently enjoyable experience than the rest of the package. The composers built an aesthetic for this game, and they just ran with it.  Most of the background music in this game is peppered with ethereal vocals similar to those in the track above, and they really help to further define Nier’s strange and desolate setting.

As I may have mentioned before, I wish more game music would branch out into vocal territory like this.  And I mean lyrics in the standard background tracks, not just a few songs for dramatic emphasis like Sonic Adventure.  There are certainly some that do, but in contrast with other vocal-heavy soundtracks like The World Ends With You, the vocals here are used more like another instrument in the arrangement than as the central focus of the piece.  The singer here isn’t being backed up by the band, she’s the part of it that’s carrying the melody.  Not only does this keep the lyrics from being a distraction, but it is a perfect fit with the somber tone of the rest of the game.

I would like to reiterate my earlier statement, because this is important: almost all of the music in Nier is like this.  It may not always succeed, but Nier tries some amazing things.  I would really like to see other developers build on some of this experimentation and try to work out the kinks.  I think it would be a great step towards ensuring Keiji Inafune's reports of the Japanese gaming industry's demise remain greatly exaggerated.  Until then, much like the game itself, there remains nothing quite like Nier's soundtrack.

[gametraqs]

It's time to dip back into the Grandia well and pull up some smooth jazz.  Well, kind of smooth; it's also kind of funky.

Grandia was one of those games for which I just didn't see the point in releasing an arranged album.  All of its good tracks were already beautifully orchestrated right there in the game.  Why bother revisiting this material when there were other games with excellent synthesized tunes that could use some love?  Two reasons:

First, I would later discover that as long as those other games were RPGs, they probably did have arrange albums.  More importantly, just because the originals were great, doesn't mean you can't make more great songs by reinterpreting them.

Case in point: "The Beautiful Woman of Alent"--the source track from the OST--is this kind of ambient, ethereal tune, with wafting vocals and not a lot of presence.  This arrangement however, is positively bursting with character.  I defy anyone to make it through this song without tapping their digit of choice.

They're not all winners, though.  The version of "Duel with Gadwin" flirts with greatness without quite achieving it, while the arrangement of "Farewell to Sue" completely lacks any of the emotion of the original.  There's also a distressing lack of representation of my personal favorite track from the OST, "Mullen."

Round that out with several goofy "happy town/inn" tracks that I didn't care much for to begin with and a couple of arrangements that are so close to the originals they force a reconsideration of the "what's the point?" question, and Vent as a whole is pretty difficult to recommend.  Even so, there certainly are two or three tracks on the album that make the game music world a bit brighter for their existence.

[gametraqs]

Bastion is one of those games that's in some ways familiar enough to be comfortable, but is still so new and different that it's a breath of fresh air.  Mechanically, it's often compared to Secret of Mana, but given the plotline, I think the more clever comparison would be Terranigma.  It's not really the major points of gameplay mechanics or story beats that make it so unique, however--it's primarily the trappings that set Bastion apart.

The lonely post-apocalyptic setting may be familiar territory for video games, but very rarely is it portrayed using such colorful and lush imagery.  The hand-drawn 2D art style on its own is remarkable these days.  More importantly, the constant exposition from the game's narrator is a device used to amazing effect.  Not only does it make what could be a standard throwback action title ten times as engaging as it might otherwise be, his gruff voice and matter-of-fact style go a long way in setting the overall tone for the entire game.

Because of this, the game feels a bit like a Western, even though nothing outside of the narrator's storytelling and the protagonist's grim determination have much at all in common with the genre.  Well, that and the music.

Bastion's music is one of it's defining characteristics. Quite literally in fact: the music was sampled early in the design process, and was used as sort of a style guide when designing the world. As such, the music in many cases1 conveys as much or more information about the world than the narrator's often sparse sentences.

This song, for example2, paints a picture of a journey, of unexplored frontiers, and of a lonesome wayfarer. It's a pretty neat summation of Bastion's central themes, really. Much like the game itself, Bastion's soundtrack feels at once kind of familiar3, but still completely new.

Especially in the cases of the songs with lyrics.

I believe this is the song from the title menu, but it may also be used elsewhere in the game.

Well, maybe not familiar to gamers in general, but certainly to those who've seen a few westerns...or Firefly.

[gametraqs]

I never played a minute of Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, primarily because nobody I knew seemed to like it much--at least, not until I no longer had the time to revisit old-school JRPGs.  Even so, I think it's pretty safe to say it's not one of the essentials.

I've also never heard the soundtrack, so I can't even speak to its music.  Descendants of Erdrick, on the other hand, I quite enjoy, and this smashing cover does an excellent job of closing out their Down, Right, Heavy album.  It also does an excellent job of demonstrating the things I enjoy most about the band's music.

Unlike that of many (if not most) heavy metal video game cover bands, DoE is able to make some noise without feeling oppressively, well, heavy.  The energy is there, and the sound is full, but it still feels...nimble.  The band exhibits a good deal of skill and precision, so they're able to create a wall of sound without hamfisting the strings and building that wall right on top of you.  

Plus they have a flutist.  Not only does her presence alone air out their sound substantially, the strong flute accompaniment (and sometimes lead) works surprisingly well for covering classic video game music.  It's an excellent compliment to the electric guitars that really mirrors the complimentary waveforms so often found in the chiptune originals.

In fact, the band spends a lot of effort making sure their covers stay very faithful to the source material.  It's actually a trait I respect more than I enjoy, but in a world where "heavy metal video game cover band" is a reasonably well-represented subgenre, it makes the Descendants all the more unique.

[gametraqs]

I really enjoyed the first Kingdom Hearts.  It was a charming and entertaining Action RPG with an ambitious but ultimately not-very-fun shooter sandwiched in the middle.  Kingdom Hearts 2 on the other hand...well, flip that assessment.

One of the other things that made Kingdom Hearts so great (and in contrast, fell flat in the sequel) was that each of its worlds had a different feel to them.  Each one had a pretty impressive sense of place, considering how many of them were packed into a PS2 game, and most of them seemed like they'd be a great place to visit.

A good portion of this is due to each world's music.  They're mostly pieces inspired by the soundtracks to their respective movies, given a healthy dose of Yoko Shimomura styling.  The original worlds, however, steal the show.

Traverse Town's theme is, in a word, delightful.  It's the perfect accompaniment to its serene, lamplit eternal evening.  Most RPGs have some sort of "peaceful town" theme, and many (if not most) of them sound a little trite.  This one, however, is the cream of the crop.