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silveradeptElectric Challenge #6 asks us to talk about our favorite soundtrack, and this is the one where I go "but there are so many good ones, can I possibly choose one?" I tend to cue into music as one of the things that helps determine whether or not the game is good, so I have a large collection of possibilities for good soundtracks. Good soundtracks have loops that don't become grating, battle music that remains exciting even if it's battle one thousand, boss and optional battle musics that are a step up from the regular ones.
One thing I tend not to like immediately in an OST are pop-song like tracks included in there. They're usually the credits music, whether with the opening cinematic or over the end credits for the game, and I'm not sure what it is about them that I dislike. They're usually well-produced, and many of them I can get to know better disconnected from their place in the order of the OST. I think it might be that I think of them as disconnected from the OST, as "Oh, here's the pop song", so I'm judging them with prejudice.
Square-Enix games from about the Final Fantasy VIII era onward tend to include one or two of these pop-type songs in their repertoire. (Had the technology been available during the console era, we might have had a recording to play during the opera scene in Final Fantasy VI. As it is, we have to substitute in later performances and imagine those in the spot of what exists.)
As someone who tends to lean into the grind, rather than trying to avoid it, a lot of my evaluations for soundtracks will be on their battle themes or the battle variations for those themes. Especially for stat-RPGs, the "random dungeon" theme can be make or break for any given game.
There have been some really interesting battle themes I've come across. "Don't Be Afraid", for example, from Final Fantasy VIII, is written in 5/4, which is one of the few examples I've seen written in a nonstandard time signature (the chocobo theme from the previous game, "Cinco de Chocobo," is also written in 5/4). Many action-RPGs use transitions from field themes to battle themes, a concept I first encountered in the .hack series (which is a simulated MMORPG game series), and whose soundtrack reflects this, as the tracks themselves start with the field or dungeon theme, shift to the battle theme, then back to the post-battle field or dungeon theme. Kingdom Hearts, on the other hand, shifts to completely different themes altogether, although each battle theme is scored to be thematically appropriate to the place that it is in.
And I do really like a lot of the themes of Kingdom Hearts, which allows for some themes to be revisited when those locations are returned to on other games, so sometimes you have to say that you love, for example, the original Hollow Bastion theme, (or The ReMix 1.5 orchestration) and the Radiant Garden version in Birth By Sleep, but you definitely don't like the Kingdom Hearts II version (or the 2.5 ReMix orchestration). And that's before we add into the mix the variation just released with the Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind DLC, which brings the different official orchestrations up to five, not counting any time it shows up in an orchestral concert medley of place themes. And that is before you get into the remixers and the fan projects.
(Also, Atlantica may be considered a swear word among Kingdom Hearts players, so tread carefully among those themes and sections of gameplay.)
But if I have to say which soundtrack is the best one that I've encountered so far, with the highest rate of good tracks, at least for my ears, is have to go with the Chrono Cross soundtrack. Chrono Trigger's is also very, very, excellent, and would be on a lot of people's top lists, and if I had the best fusion forever of the two, that would be good, but Chrono Chross gets the edge because it has a lot of more musically interesting pieces as well as aurally, aesthetically pleasing pieces. While Chrono Trigger is considered to be the better game by a lot of people and reviews I've seen, it has the limitation of having been developed for the Super Nintendo, and therefore while the sound bank was absolutely programmable, we are still in the era where instrument patches haven't fully caught up to the sound of the actual instruments. With CD space, instead of cartridge space, Chrono Cross gets more space to play with the instruments and make them better. Once you put the compositions to actual instruments, they're both equally excellent soundtracks to listen to. (Even though it will always be a selection of all the possible tracks.)
Chrono Cross's "Chrono Cross ~ Scar of Time" sets the tone for the game, in that it will have moments of high action, drama, slow and emotionally charged moments, and other situations throughout. Also, did we mention that it changes time signature and tempo changes? Because that's basically the hallmark of the soundtrack for Chrono Cross - many of its pieces engage with time, tempo, or rhythm changes as part of their regular work. "Scar of Time" alternates between a beat pattern based on straight time (usually sixteenths in the strings) and one based on syncopation, before layering them on top of each other for the end, while "Hurricane" (or "Gale", according to the Other Wiki, or possibly "Whirlwind"), the main battle theme, is primarily in 9/8, a highly irregular time signature. (In the linked orchestration, the piece I'm talking about is in the first half of the medley. The second half, "The Brink of Death", is in a fairly normal 4/4, even though the syncopation in the rhythm section will throw off anyone looking for regular beats, as that particular song lives on the pattern of a 1 / and of 2 pattern.) "Drowned Valley" is a lovely reel in 5/8, which makes it a little less easyto dance to, sure, but not impossible.
When not shifting time signatures or tempos, there are lots of really musically neat pieces on the soundtrack. "Forest of Illusion," for example, builds a piece entirely out of looping one-bar fragments (in 3/4 time, no less) layered on top of each other, with each fragment occurring exactly at its appointed time in the loop, and the piece itself created by whether any given fragment is present or absent in the loop. It took me a very long time listening and re-listening to the track before my musician ears engaged and pointed out the construction of the piece. (It helped that I had also been exposed to Vienna Teng doing something similar to create a loop in which both "Ain't No Sunshine" and "Lose Yourself" could be played on top of what was looping underneath.) And, as befits a game where the protagonist is warping back and forth between different dimensions, the themes of the same place in each dimension are related to each other, and the second theme often contains fragments of the first theme when you encounter it.
Being the second Chrono game in the series (Radical Dreamers was an interquel of sorts), there are also musical call-backs to the first game, such as in "Chronomantique" and in "Fields of Time - Home World", which are actually clues to the plot of the game, once you understand the whole of it. (As are the victory themes for the battles, and the "Fragment of a Dream" piece, and, and…)
There are two tracks and one concept that sell this soundtrack for me over Chrono Trigger. The tracks are "Frozen Flame" and "Dragon God" (first, oboe and/or strings over harp, languid melody over quickly-plucked counterpoint, then final boss theme, time and tempo switches regularly, several sections scored to sound like multiple time and tempo playing together, melodic line swaps back and forth between quick rhythmic and longer notes over very busy accompaniment). Appropriate that those should be the highlight pieces for the work.
The concept is a rather large spoiler for Chrono Chross, but also, it's been out since the first Playstation, so you probably know the twist by now. Specifically, it turns out that after running all over two different dimensions, if Serge has been doing all the optional quests and figures out that some tiny island is actually a place he can go, even though there's no indication from the interface that there's anything there at all, Serge can collect the titular Chrono Cross and someone in the party can equip it. If the player character has put together all of the hints dropped this far, including an otherwise strange room in Terra Tower that has no background music, and instead repeats a pattern of six notes (and colors), they can discern the correct way to win the game is to unify the timelines that the Time Devourer has spread themselves across by freeing Schala Zeal from her fusion the Time Devourer (which is a manifestation of the fusion between Schala and the Mammon Machine, itself an aspect of Lavos, the world-destroying entity that the events of the first game devoted themselves to defeating). The Chrono Chross is the essential tool for this work, but it has to be primed appropriately. Each of the colored elements that the characters and enemies use to cast magic and do skills has to be fed into the Chrono Cross, and naturally, only one combination will actually work. Which is the combination that whomever built that room in Terra Tower with the giant floating lights-and-sounds crystals figured out and then left on repeat for someone to find. Potentially messing with this situation is the Time Devourer themselves, whose skills and magic are also elemental, and can mess up your feed if they insert the wrong color into the sequence and force you to start over again.
So, essentially, to get the true ending to Chrono Cross, you have to use the elements of the universe to play the correct tune, and by doing so, you save the universe. It is, essentially, a game where music is the thing that saves us all. (And, if you go back and listen to the soundtrack after finding this, the motif created by those notes in sequence shows up in aaaaalllll sorts of places.)
And it also has great music along the way. (If you want all the characters, you'll have to play it at least 2.5 times through, because there's one decision at the beginning of the game that can resolve three different ways, each of which nets you a character and locks the others out, so you'd better enjoy the music all the way through each playthrough.)
One thing I tend not to like immediately in an OST are pop-song like tracks included in there. They're usually the credits music, whether with the opening cinematic or over the end credits for the game, and I'm not sure what it is about them that I dislike. They're usually well-produced, and many of them I can get to know better disconnected from their place in the order of the OST. I think it might be that I think of them as disconnected from the OST, as "Oh, here's the pop song", so I'm judging them with prejudice.
Square-Enix games from about the Final Fantasy VIII era onward tend to include one or two of these pop-type songs in their repertoire. (Had the technology been available during the console era, we might have had a recording to play during the opera scene in Final Fantasy VI. As it is, we have to substitute in later performances and imagine those in the spot of what exists.)
As someone who tends to lean into the grind, rather than trying to avoid it, a lot of my evaluations for soundtracks will be on their battle themes or the battle variations for those themes. Especially for stat-RPGs, the "random dungeon" theme can be make or break for any given game.
There have been some really interesting battle themes I've come across. "Don't Be Afraid", for example, from Final Fantasy VIII, is written in 5/4, which is one of the few examples I've seen written in a nonstandard time signature (the chocobo theme from the previous game, "Cinco de Chocobo," is also written in 5/4). Many action-RPGs use transitions from field themes to battle themes, a concept I first encountered in the .hack series (which is a simulated MMORPG game series), and whose soundtrack reflects this, as the tracks themselves start with the field or dungeon theme, shift to the battle theme, then back to the post-battle field or dungeon theme. Kingdom Hearts, on the other hand, shifts to completely different themes altogether, although each battle theme is scored to be thematically appropriate to the place that it is in.
And I do really like a lot of the themes of Kingdom Hearts, which allows for some themes to be revisited when those locations are returned to on other games, so sometimes you have to say that you love, for example, the original Hollow Bastion theme, (or The ReMix 1.5 orchestration) and the Radiant Garden version in Birth By Sleep, but you definitely don't like the Kingdom Hearts II version (or the 2.5 ReMix orchestration). And that's before we add into the mix the variation just released with the Kingdom Hearts III Re:Mind DLC, which brings the different official orchestrations up to five, not counting any time it shows up in an orchestral concert medley of place themes. And that is before you get into the remixers and the fan projects.
(Also, Atlantica may be considered a swear word among Kingdom Hearts players, so tread carefully among those themes and sections of gameplay.)
But if I have to say which soundtrack is the best one that I've encountered so far, with the highest rate of good tracks, at least for my ears, is have to go with the Chrono Cross soundtrack. Chrono Trigger's is also very, very, excellent, and would be on a lot of people's top lists, and if I had the best fusion forever of the two, that would be good, but Chrono Chross gets the edge because it has a lot of more musically interesting pieces as well as aurally, aesthetically pleasing pieces. While Chrono Trigger is considered to be the better game by a lot of people and reviews I've seen, it has the limitation of having been developed for the Super Nintendo, and therefore while the sound bank was absolutely programmable, we are still in the era where instrument patches haven't fully caught up to the sound of the actual instruments. With CD space, instead of cartridge space, Chrono Cross gets more space to play with the instruments and make them better. Once you put the compositions to actual instruments, they're both equally excellent soundtracks to listen to. (Even though it will always be a selection of all the possible tracks.)
Chrono Cross's "Chrono Cross ~ Scar of Time" sets the tone for the game, in that it will have moments of high action, drama, slow and emotionally charged moments, and other situations throughout. Also, did we mention that it changes time signature and tempo changes? Because that's basically the hallmark of the soundtrack for Chrono Cross - many of its pieces engage with time, tempo, or rhythm changes as part of their regular work. "Scar of Time" alternates between a beat pattern based on straight time (usually sixteenths in the strings) and one based on syncopation, before layering them on top of each other for the end, while "Hurricane" (or "Gale", according to the Other Wiki, or possibly "Whirlwind"), the main battle theme, is primarily in 9/8, a highly irregular time signature. (In the linked orchestration, the piece I'm talking about is in the first half of the medley. The second half, "The Brink of Death", is in a fairly normal 4/4, even though the syncopation in the rhythm section will throw off anyone looking for regular beats, as that particular song lives on the pattern of a 1 / and of 2 pattern.) "Drowned Valley" is a lovely reel in 5/8, which makes it a little less easyto dance to, sure, but not impossible.
When not shifting time signatures or tempos, there are lots of really musically neat pieces on the soundtrack. "Forest of Illusion," for example, builds a piece entirely out of looping one-bar fragments (in 3/4 time, no less) layered on top of each other, with each fragment occurring exactly at its appointed time in the loop, and the piece itself created by whether any given fragment is present or absent in the loop. It took me a very long time listening and re-listening to the track before my musician ears engaged and pointed out the construction of the piece. (It helped that I had also been exposed to Vienna Teng doing something similar to create a loop in which both "Ain't No Sunshine" and "Lose Yourself" could be played on top of what was looping underneath.) And, as befits a game where the protagonist is warping back and forth between different dimensions, the themes of the same place in each dimension are related to each other, and the second theme often contains fragments of the first theme when you encounter it.
Being the second Chrono game in the series (Radical Dreamers was an interquel of sorts), there are also musical call-backs to the first game, such as in "Chronomantique" and in "Fields of Time - Home World", which are actually clues to the plot of the game, once you understand the whole of it. (As are the victory themes for the battles, and the "Fragment of a Dream" piece, and, and…)
There are two tracks and one concept that sell this soundtrack for me over Chrono Trigger. The tracks are "Frozen Flame" and "Dragon God" (first, oboe and/or strings over harp, languid melody over quickly-plucked counterpoint, then final boss theme, time and tempo switches regularly, several sections scored to sound like multiple time and tempo playing together, melodic line swaps back and forth between quick rhythmic and longer notes over very busy accompaniment). Appropriate that those should be the highlight pieces for the work.
The concept is a rather large spoiler for Chrono Chross, but also, it's been out since the first Playstation, so you probably know the twist by now. Specifically, it turns out that after running all over two different dimensions, if Serge has been doing all the optional quests and figures out that some tiny island is actually a place he can go, even though there's no indication from the interface that there's anything there at all, Serge can collect the titular Chrono Cross and someone in the party can equip it. If the player character has put together all of the hints dropped this far, including an otherwise strange room in Terra Tower that has no background music, and instead repeats a pattern of six notes (and colors), they can discern the correct way to win the game is to unify the timelines that the Time Devourer has spread themselves across by freeing Schala Zeal from her fusion the Time Devourer (which is a manifestation of the fusion between Schala and the Mammon Machine, itself an aspect of Lavos, the world-destroying entity that the events of the first game devoted themselves to defeating). The Chrono Chross is the essential tool for this work, but it has to be primed appropriately. Each of the colored elements that the characters and enemies use to cast magic and do skills has to be fed into the Chrono Cross, and naturally, only one combination will actually work. Which is the combination that whomever built that room in Terra Tower with the giant floating lights-and-sounds crystals figured out and then left on repeat for someone to find. Potentially messing with this situation is the Time Devourer themselves, whose skills and magic are also elemental, and can mess up your feed if they insert the wrong color into the sequence and force you to start over again.
So, essentially, to get the true ending to Chrono Cross, you have to use the elements of the universe to play the correct tune, and by doing so, you save the universe. It is, essentially, a game where music is the thing that saves us all. (And, if you go back and listen to the soundtrack after finding this, the motif created by those notes in sequence shows up in aaaaalllll sorts of places.)
And it also has great music along the way. (If you want all the characters, you'll have to play it at least 2.5 times through, because there's one decision at the beginning of the game that can resolve three different ways, each of which nets you a character and locks the others out, so you'd better enjoy the music all the way through each playthrough.)
