Heroes of Mana is a good follow up soundtrack to Legend of Mana imo. She also contributed to the Super Mario RPG soundtrack, which was also excellent. She has a distinctive style, but I’m a little worried about how it will carry over into an FF game. Its not the same style of RPG.
What else has Mitsuda done other than Xenosaga in recent years? He kinda fell off the edge. I don’t get why Mitsuda is such a polarizing figure. Sakuraba, I understand, but Mitsuda no.
Also
And also
He was apparently the sound engineer for a lot of fucking good games. His actual composing doesn’t look too impressive outside the Chrono series though.
He just doesn’t do a lot of high profile games. I expect World Destruction to be a big deal, though. I just hope it gets released here.
Didn’t he work on Blue Dragon?
Anyway… yeah, Shimomura is a bit hit-and-miss IMO. I think she did the Kingdom Hearts games, and while the second one had a lot of great battle tracks, the first one was pretty disappointing except for one or two bits.
By far my favorite games in terms of music are Wild ARMs. Seriously, Wild ARMs 3 had four discs and other than the different versions of the same song, I think 70% of them were really listenable, which is pretty astounding. Other than Mitsuda’s three biggies (CC, CT, XG) and FF6 they’re the only soundtracks to which I listen to the majority of it rather than selected tracks.
I hold Shimomura and Michiko naruke as two of the greatest composers in the field. Legend of mana, and Wild ARMs 3/Alter Code: F are probably the ones I listen to the most. Mitsueda, I admit, I mostly know from Chrono Trigger and Cross, since I never got into the XenoSeries that much.
You have to be careful in that list you showed because Mitsuda wasn’t the composer in Luminous Arc 1+2 , for example.
Uematsu did Blue Dragon.
On another note, I agree Michiro Naruke is pretty good and I agree that she has made good and unique music for the WA series.
One thing that’s really fun to do is listen to the music from Wild ARMs 1, and then the same tracks from Alter Code: F. To listen to how they evolved with both the technical capabilities of the consoles, and with her own growth over the years… it’s really quite amazing. I sometimes wonder what composers would do if they went back to their earliest stuff and had a chance to redo it the way they really want to.
One of my biggest issues with WA4 was the lack of Naruke presence. The music was just so… bland, msot of the time. The WA5 soundtrack was an improvement, though.
As usual my stance of WA4 and 5 is the reversed.
I recently downloaded the soundtrack of WA4, despite the fact that I’ve never played it, to see how the soundtrack stacks up. Will give it a listen soon. WA5 was nowhere near as good as WA3, but still had a whole bunch of very strong tracks (The Day The Shovel Was Named is one of the most infectious, perky tracks I’ve ever heard scored for traditional instruments rather than relying on silly electronica.)
I liked WACF, but I didn’t like how they overused some of the tracks. For example, in the original, Boomerang’s theme only played when you fought Boomerang Flash; it added a huge amount of suspense and thrill. In the remake it plays every time you fight him. Similarly, what was previously the Photosphere theme is now used in several generic dungeons. Also, some of the tracks seem to be trying too hard in terms of “being remixed”… e.g. the overworld theme sounded much better with flutes instead of "ahhahhahh"s.