I wouldn’t mind if I only had a Wii. I tried to get my brother to sell me his, but he is a pretty greedy guy 
Disregard.
Shoji Meguro is a fucking awesome composer.
Check out this track.
Word. HOMM2’s music was great, especially at the time, and it contrasted nicely with the game. Which rocked.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I REALLY enjoyed Soul Nomad’s soundtrack. “Speed Queen” get’s me pumped every time.
Requiem of Gemini give me that “kill things in slow motion” vibe that I really like…
I want to say I’m surprized no one has mentioned Koichi Sugiyama at any point so far, love him or hate him. Yes, a lot of his works sound the same from game to game, but dammit I love it so damn much.
REALLY like this one from DQV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvsIh7wEwmE
This is just too fucking cool…: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnByZFypR4&feature=related
I had found clips of the Dragon Quest ballet some months ago, I need to dig them up again and finish it…
Speed Queen is SO cool… and the 4th one you posted reminds me of the music from NGE. Or Star Wars. It’s those psycho violins.
I actually enjoy Sugiyama’s music a lot. I’m not sure why I never think of Sugiyama when I think of video game music, because I have tons of his music on my computer and I listen to it often enough. I guess it’s just that his music is so much more like music I study in school, particularly composers from the first half of the 20th century.
Sugiyama has things he does very well like overworlds and town music and sad music. There are things he does NOT do well , like battle music.
I think he’s got some good ones. I really love the combat music from DW3 and DW4. I think DW7’s boss music is really good.
I didn’t like DQ7 as a game, but the music was good, especially the Symphonic Suite.
The symphonic suites are always pretty good.
Re: battle music: throw enough shit at the wall and something will stick. Sure , occasionally the music is decent, but that’s more the exception and if I were to compare his decent battle tracks to other composers, he does not rank high.
I think that might be more of staying within the determined style than him actually being bad at writing intense themes.
What?
I think SG is saying that sometimes themes suck as standalone songs because they have to fit within the tone of the game. Listen to the fight themes from Radiata Stories. Most of them would be awful in any other place, but they make sense in context. Sometimes, even if a composer is really really good (Noriyuki Iwadare), a really great standalone song just can’t be written for a particular game (RS).
Not even just context, but Dragon Warrior establishes a very specific musical STYLE, too. Like (not that anyone doesn’t know this), but not all Orchestral music is the same. There’s baroque, classical, romantic, impressionism, avant-garde, neo-classicism, minimalism, and a whole bunch of other shit. Sugiyama remains within very specific genres of orchestral music, and with orchestral music genres, there are a lot more restrictions on what’s appropriate when writing music…like, VERY specific rules.
That’s a very interesting point and I obviously do not have the musical theory knowledge you have to challenge anything you might have to say about it. Taking that into account, I can see how doing certain things like this can be very difficult. But does that make listenable? I don’t think so.
No argument there. Sometimes, music just sucks to listen to unless you’re listening to it in a purely analytical perspective. That’s not only valid, but very important for a composer of music to remember.
SG, have you heard <a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdLoTPUNtD0”>this song</a> before? I tell people I like classical music because of songs like this, but at the same time I’m just not a big fan of most classical composers. What subgenre would this be under? I wouldn’t mind finding more songs like it. It reminds me of WC2. Does it still even count as classical? The composer is not THAT old.
Hmm, that’s a weird song, but not necessarily in a bad way. It’s…romantic, but it isn’t. It has a lot of stylistic similarities to Romantic music (which it should - 1875 is the late romantic era), but it’s also very static, which is unusual for a romantic era piece. If you want to check out composers of that era you might like, I would suggest pianists like maybe Frederic Chopin or Franz Liszt. It still has a similar enough musical sound, in my opinion, but it’s more dynamic in emotion.
This Franz Liszt guy has chops.