Excellent music (that isn't mine this time)

[davidn]

You know, I don't tend to pay attention to a lot of game music now, because I felt that a lot of it sort of faded into the background compared to the (forced) more catchily melodic efforts that hardware musicians had to come up with around the 8 and 16-bit eras. But recently I've been listening to two pieces that were made up as replacements for music that came earlier in a series, and - shockingly for someone on the Internet - I've come to think that they're just as good or even better than the classics that they replaced.

The first is Baba Yetu by Christopher Tin, and it is wondrous. I remember the first time I saw it, I sort of laughed at the Civilization IV title screen for its sudden Lion King stylings, but when you let it play through and think about how... epic the idea of trying to capture the whole of world history is, it's incredible. Something that I've only just realized is that its structure fits perfectly with the progression of the game itself, starting off as very plain but becoming gradually more complex as it adds in the orchestra piece by piece later on.

This parody of it isn't half bad either, and sums up the game perfectly in a very different way. "Win with science, culture or napalm - Watch out, Gandhi might drop an A-bomb."

The second one is the (slightly unfortunately titled, given the subject of the game) Metal Gear Saga by Harry Gregson-Williams, which hastily replaced the iconic Metal Gear Solid theme music after it was found out that it had been slightly stolen from a composition by Georgy Sviridov. It keeps the synth-choir and busy percussion mood of the previous theme while making the whole thing sound more film-like, and as demonstrated halfway through, works beautifully in as many different modes as the first game's theme did.

While listening to it during work yesterday, it certainly produced the most exciting-sounding login page I've ever written.

Comments

[kjorteo]

Since I tend to gravitate toward retro throwback titles (Retro Game Challenge, Etrian Odyssey, etc.) I tend to notice really good music because it is, as you mentioned, more of a focal point. Etrian Odyssey in particular gives us... oh, God, it's a fool's errand to narrow the music down, the entire score of every game I've played to date has been amazing, but... Petal Bridge from Heroes of Lagaard is commonly cited as basically everyone else's favorite song from the series and I can certainly see why--I certainly will not deny that the composer outdid himself with that one. Of course, I personally also like the first game's Destruction Begets Decay, The Withered Forest, and the song from the fifth stratum which is unfortunately a major spoiler (even the title of the song is, so everyone reading this comment would be advised to NOT CLICK THAT if they ever intend on playing EO1 and haven't had the major twist from it spoiled yet) but is just... so hauntingly beautiful and epic, and fits in perfectly with the... setting.

Of course, having recently beaten Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, there's another series with a fantastic score throughout that's really hard to narrow down... though I do like the main Professor Layton theme itself, The Veil of Night, and... oh God, everything in Diabolical Box, I can't decide, though I will give special mention to Lost Forest just because it's almost criminally underplayed, being in only a tiny fraction of the rooms compared to the main Folsense theme even though it's just as beautiful.

And every game in the Trauma series has fantastic music, too, you just usually don't notice until around the endboss, which is usually the first track that's so epic that it actually registers in your mind above all the OH GOD GEL SCALPEL SYRINGE I'M GOING TO DIE HELP, then you go back and listen to the OST or something and find that everything else is really good too. Trauma Team's theme for the First Response vs. the Trauma Team doom disease is incredible, but I don't want to link it because I really want to think you'll play it someday and, once again, the song title is a spoiler.

[davidn]

What I really love about the Professor Layton soundtrack is that - despite sounding suspiciously French for something that's meant to be set in England - it has such an iconic sound to it in its instrument choice. It's one of the very few times that I've been able to instantly recognize that a game has music written by the same person as another game that I've played - Dark Chronicle, in this case, and the composer is called Tomohito Nishiura. The violin synth that he uses in particular is a giveaway.

The fifth stratum song, to me, is reminiscent of Ecco the Dolphin - the PC88 stylings help even though they're not at the level of crudeness of the Megadrive, but I can really picture floating around under a lonely sea to it (completely lost and bumping into crystals). Until you let it go on for about a minute - then there's a stronger section that fits in with the mood you describe.

I'm certain that I will play Trauma Team! Though when is anybody's guess. Quite opposite from what I said about Professor Layton above, the interesting thing about the Under the Knife games is the huge difference between the quality of music in them (not 'quality' in terms of how good it is, but... what era it appears to be from), best exemplified by the boss musics - Judgement Day contains a sort of recognizable electronic attempt at a chant, like what would happen if I did it in my own Modplug music. In contrast, Severing the Chains of Fate is a full orchestra with choir! Which I'm still not sure how they managed to fit on the cartridge.

[kjorteo]

And here I was thinking that the biggest giveaway that makes the Layton soundtrack so iconic (and the first two of those Dark Chronicle songs in that link, as well) was the unnaturally heavy use of accordion in almost everything. The violin synth is clearly his second-favorite instrument, though....

The Etrian Odyssey series is good for making, even through the PC88 stylings, music that's frequently very fitting for where it plays. If you want something with Ecco-like gloomy isolation, Heroes of Lagaard's third stratum is the Obligatory Ice Level and is... well, the music lends itself very well to wandering around a frozen wasteland. (Fun aside: go through some of the other suggestions in that LiveJournal thread. Someone brought up King's Quest V!)

For Trauma Center, you can always go with the compromise between the two and go with Second Opinion's UTK2-esque modern and completely over the top version of UTK1's endboss song. And, of course, New Blood couldn't decide whether it wanted a sinister gothic ambience or suitably intense now-you're-fighting-an-endboss crunchy rock, so it gave its endboss two stages and used both.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I was really impressed by the opening to Civilization IV. I also like that song a lot. This is all I have to say on that matter.