Ravenfreak wrote:I have many favorites and here they are in no particular order:
Legend of Legaia- PSX
Mega Man X4- PSX
Mega Man X5- PSX
Mega Man X1- SNES
Mega Man X3- SNES/PSX
Sonic 3 & Knuckles
Sonic 2
Sonic 4 (yes I actually love the soundtrack, I know many people have complained about it but I think it's good. xP)
Mega Man 8 both PSX and Saturn (I personally like the Saturn version a bit more, but Grenade Man's stage sounds better on the PSX version.)
Mega Man Legends
Mega Man X8
Mega Man X7
Mega Man Battle & Chase
Tomb Raider
Rayman Advance (I personally like this version better than the PSX. But I love that version too.)
These are the main ones that stand out, I have tons more but I think my post is long enough. xP
I can agree with quite a number of these, mostly the Sonic and Megaman games. Mega Man Legends 2 is also underrated. (
Yosyonke Village's song tends to pop into my head when I think of snow, along with SaGa Frontier II's "
Naturvolk".)
Nice to see another Legend of Legaia fan. Underrated soundtrack. "
Sol Tower" and lots of the battle themes being my favorites. Legaia 2's soundtrack was good, too, with some good enhanced reworks of songs from the original, including the aforementioned Sol Tower, but also some new tracks like "
Inaccessible Road" and "
Lost Forest."
...Mmm, I should really try to beat it one of these days. Started it, got stuck, never finished it. Have to dig up my copy.
To add a few more soundtracks to my
already long list... which, of course, doesn't count the one
extra soundtrack I've already added...- Borderlands (PC) - Great soundtrack through and through. One of my favorite songs is "
Trash the Bandits Some More" which is Track 18 on the game's official OST, or if you've played the game, the song that plays while you fight Crimson Lance in Old Haven. Other good songs include the main song that plays through most of DLC1,
Jakobs Cove, as well as a set of five songs in DLC2, Mad Moxxie's Underdome Riot:
Some deliciously raw, dirty synth in those. I love it. Especially prevalent on the Boss Wave.
- Shadow Hearts I & II (PS2) - Goddammit, does Yoshitaka Hirota really need to get more work. Were I a producer in charge of some project that needed it, I would absolutely call on him. "
NDE - Near Death Experience" is an epic battle theme for the Europe sections of the game, as was the mid-boss desperation theme - the interestingly-named "
Sicking Fucking." The sequel follows this up with an even more awesome one called "
Vicious ~ Europe 1915." The Japan section battle theme is different but good in its own way - "
Deep in Coma." Battle themes should be required by law to be this good. Finally, there's also some lighter, nicer songs in the soundtrack - in Shadow Hearts I you get "
Coffee with Bullet" (which is actually a song by co-composer Yasunori Mitsuda - yes,
THAT Yasunori Mitsuda) and in Shadow Hearts II, later on you get "
Anastasia -Going Her Way- ~ The Imperial Princess's Adventure" which has SaGa series scribe Kenji Ito doing some guest duties. If you like the Persona games' settings, definitely consider giving the first two a look, but you may want to skip the third - not by the same composer, and they drastically lightened the tone of the games.
- Odin Sphere (PS2) - Hitoshi Sakimoto has always been a favorite composer of mine. In addition to doing the Legaia 2 tracks above (a game he co-composed along with Yasunori Mitsuda and Legaia 1 composer Michiru Oshima), Odin Sphere is just a pure work of brilliance. Nintendo-hard game, but the sprites are some of the finest I've ever seen, as one would expect from George Kamitani and Vanillaware. As for the songs? The game's main theme, "
Odin Sphere Theme", almost never fails to not get me to water up in the eyes, though that may have to do with me understanding the lyrics. A translation:
Imagine the angels singing,
the voice of the wind passes, passes
the silver horizon.
Imagine the wind humming,
think and then dream, dream.
and then remember.
Let yourself be rocked
by the vastness.
Fall asleep in the dreams,
fly towards the sky,
fall asleep in the dreams, dreams,
look at the butterflies flying to the moon
In Arabesque whirls.
Let yourself be rocked
by the vastness.
Fall asleep in the dreams,
and remember that one loves life, life, life...
If this doesn't move you, you're less of a softie than I am, that's for sure.
- Fate/stay night and Fate/hollow ataraxia (PC, also a censored PS2 port) - I've been a fan of Type-Moon for awhile now, but I've only recently begun playing this. The soundtracks are credited to "Number 201", which is the duo of James Harris and Keita Haga. They're not names most people will recognize, but they do some damn good soundtracks. In Fate/stay night there's tunes like "
Mayonaka no Hazama" (During the Dead of Night) being the perfect thing to be slinking around at night to, "
Kogane no Ou" (King of Gold) being a great theme for a certain antagonist, and "
Arashi no Yokan" (Premonition of a Storm) being a good tune for "Shit's about to go down!" Then there's sadder songs that move me in a similar way to Odin Sphere's Theme above, like "
Kie nai Omoi" (Ever-Present Feeling) for its unbridled bell-inducing sadness. Finally, there's the "Time to kick your ass" bits like "
EMIYA" and its arranged version in Fate/hollow ataraxia, "
EMIYA #2." Soundtracks like these are why I like the Visual Novel format a hell of a lot - moving your audience with words is a good thing, but being able to do it with visual, sound, and all... that makes it so much better, so much more memorable, than just mere, plain text. If I had an artist, I'd probably be writing one, in fact.
Anyway, while the number of soundtracks I gave in this post are few, I gave a lot of song examples via Youtube links, and in the case of the Borderlands DLC oggs, ripping them directly from my copy of the game itself. I'll stop here because this post is nearly as long as my original, and because I can't really find good ways to edit my thoughts into a nice, less-block-of-text manner.
...Well, actually, I can, it's just that I'm too lazy right now. Some other time, perhaps.