Yeah, I’m with Hades there.
Yeah, if you assume that every single game he writes music for sounds like Radiata Stories. I remember the first time I heard the battle theme for that game I was like “W_H_A_T__T_H_E__F_U_C_K_?!?!!?_?!”
Here, try this on for size. I know I’ve shown you this one before Hades, and I remember you enjoying this one:
Yeah I was only half serious. I saw Grandia in the list when I looked him up, and knew how good he is 
Man those Spanish guitars kick my ass every time. There’s just something about them that’s epic in the hardest core way
I figured you might be pulling my leg, but for other people, I think it would be a crime to let them forever know Iwadare as just “The guy that did Radiata Stories.” How tragic, right?
Iwadare did the music to Lunar? Wow, he’s up there then for me too. I know he did NOT do Skies of Arcadia, and I enjoy that a lot. Mitsuda is one of my favorites if only for Xenogears.
I love Uematsu’s “Old Stuff” that is, FF 1-8. He hasn’t done anything worth while since. However, I thought the Blue Dragon OST was phenominal. His Black Mage influence was really showing there. And goddammit, Eternity was a treat to listen to everytime.
Of course, this isnt about any of them, this is about Kajiura.
My favorite soundtracks by her are .hack//sign, Cossette, and Madlax. She’s got some good stuff with See-saw, and vocal track with Fiction Junction impress.
She always gets compared to Yoko Kanno, which I never understood. The only similarities is that they’re women, and they’re japanese.
Iwadare did NOT do Skies of Arcadia.
She always gets compared to Yoko Kanno, which I never understood. The only similarities is that they’re women, and they’re japanese.
Wrong. They also share the same initials >_>
Ouch. Corrected.
Yuki Kajiura is definitely up there in terms of potential. The first full soundtrack I heard her do was XS3 and as much as I hated the game, the music was excellent and brought fresh style. Godsibb is the end boss battle track if I remember right. Its pretty fucking good. She has a flair for the dramatic.
I disagree with SG that Iwadare has the best battle tracks. I agree they are excellent, but I believe Kenji Ito’s are better, but he is way way old school and hasn’t done much good in years (and neither has Iwadare for that matter). Both are old school classics though and deserving of praise.
I agree that Yoko Shimomura’s opus is LoM, as Xenogears is Mitsuda’s. While those soundtracks are excellent, a lot of their other good works (Heroes of Mana for Shimomura and CC for Mitsuda for example) strongly resemble their other work. So I see them kind of as 1 trick ponies. Don’t get me wrong, I still like their work, but as artists, they don’t quite experiment and diversify their style. What they do well however, they do very well. Mitsuda doesn’t really do much in terms of soundtracks anymore, but Shimomura is still around and kicking, with FFXIII coming up.
I’ve been a fan of the Sakimoto / Iwata combination since Ogre Battle when I was a teenager. It definitely broke the mold at the time. Sakimoto’s had some ups and down since. FFT is definitely his best work and it is excellent. Vagrant Story was ambient but had some good stuff in there. FFXII was a bit of an in between. At first I felt that it wasn’t that great but it grew on me and I agree that it makes for good background filler music in the end.
Michiro Naruke’s interesting. I agree the WA games also brought something fresh to the medium. They’re not my favorite, but I like the fast pacing of the dungeon tracks and the slower paced town tracks. Kind of a classic hallmark of the series and I find they’ve been pretty consistently good over the series despite how different the soundtracks have been. As much as I hated WA5 as a game, I do admit there were a few good tracks in there, but probably not as many as Cid was pointing out. I think the soundtracks are pretty representative of the games themselves: they have moments where they shine and moments where they don’t, which is why the games are always 2nd tier. That doesn’t mean they’re bad though, because they really carved out their own little niche.
Uematsu’s interesting in the way he evolved over time and experimented. You can see a real shift as you listen to the music from the different FF’s. FF7 was obviously a big transition from old to new, but there was definitely some evolution from 1-6 and probably the most was between 4-6, as 1-4 are very old school. FF8 was further experimentation, some of which worked in fantastic ways, some of which really didn’t. He tried to return to his older style in FF9 and I personally liked 9’s soundtrack honestly. Note that FFX was a collaborative work with other composers. What’s particularly interesting about Uematsu is his versatility, something you don’t see quite as much with other composers. I find he’s more consistent, even if he doesn’t usually hit as hard (with key exceptions like OWA and Eternity). His most recent works in Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are a testament to that. If you listen to BD, you really hear his other works, I find. I despise the Black Mages though. I can’t stand high pitched techno noise. There are much MUCH better groups and tracks out there.
Like Cid, I was also surprised at how much I liked TWEWY’s soundtrack. On a similar note, I was also surprised by how much I like Madworld’s. These things really aren’t what I usually like but they grew on me very fast.
I enjoy them both in different ways. Ito’s battle themes are, without a doubt, more musically interesting. However, Iwadare’s battle themes are the ones that make me go “fuck yeah!” which I think is more important in a battle theme. Also, yeah, neither of them have done much lately. Ito’s last work I think was Culdcept SaGa and that was about a year ago. Iwadare is doing the music for the new Ace Attorney spinoff game, and so far, what music I’ve heard from it is good. It’s definitely not typical Iwadare RPG fare, though (not a bad thing).
I agree that Yoko Shimomura’s opus is LoM, as Xenogears is Mitsuda’s. While those soundtracks are excellent, a lot of their other good works (Heroes of Mana for Shimomura and CC for Mitsuda for example) strongly resemble their other work. So I see them kind of as 1 trick ponies. Don’t get me wrong, I still like their work, but as artists, they don’t quite experiment and diversify their style. What they do well however, they do very well. Mitsuda doesn’t really do much in terms of soundtracks anymore, but Shimomura is still around and kicking, with FFXIII coming up.
The strange thing about Shimomura is, when the console generations switched from the SNES/Genesis era to the N64/PSX/Saturn era, her style, like, completely changed. Most composers in my opinion just expanded their musical scope with the advent of better MIDI capabilities, but it’s almost like Shimomura morphed into a completely different composer.
I’ve been a fan of the Sakimoto / Iwata combination since Ogre Battle when I was a teenager. It definitely broke the mold at the time. Sakimoto’s had some ups and down since. FFT is definitely his best work and it is excellent. Vagrant Story was ambient but had some good stuff in there. FFXII was a bit of an in between. At first I felt that it wasn’t that great but it grew on me and I agree that it makes for good background filler music in the end.
I have a hard time thinking of what Sakimoto’s best work is, too. I think his best solo work is definitely Dragon Quarter, and I’m not just saying that because I have a hard-on for the game - that soundtrack is just plain good.
Uematsu’s interesting in the way he evolved over time and experimented. You can see a real shift as you listen to the music from the different FF’s. FF7 was obviously a big transition from old to new, but there was definitely some evolution from 1-6 and probably the most was between 4-6, as 1-4 are very old school. FF8 was further experimentation, some of which worked in fantastic ways, some of which really didn’t. He tried to return to his older style in FF9 and I personally liked 9’s soundtrack honestly. Note that FFX was a collaborative work with other composers. What’s particularly interesting about Uematsu is his versatility, something you don’t see quite as much with other composers. I find he’s more consistent, even if he doesn’t usually hit as hard (with key exceptions like OWA and Eternity). His most recent works in Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey are a testament to that. If you listen to BD, you really hear his other works, I find. I despise the Black Mages though. I can’t stand high pitched techno noise. There are much MUCH better groups and tracks out there
.
Uematsu is not my favorite VGM composer, but I’ll be damned if he’s not one of the most talented ones, if not the most talented one. “What’s that? You want me to write a heavy metal song to a fantasy sports game that’s similar to underwater quidditch? Check THIS shit out”
I agree with SG, battle themes aren’t supposed to be really interesting, they’re just supposed to make you feel like fighting. OWA was both. So was Fighting of the Spirits.
Gale was neither.
I like the more ambient themes too, like when you fight Yojimbo. Or any of the songs in FFXII, since fights just used the BGM. Well… if you can call them fights. I think it was a cool effect anyway.
The Black Mages are weak. It seems like, in all the covers I’ve heard by them, they’re really good at reproducing the notes in a song… but they completely shun the actual spirit of the song. And they obviously cut a lot of corners. They seem to use synth whenever something’s too fast for them to play on guitar, even though it should be, especially since, compared to acoustics, electrics almost play themselves. I have no patience for lazy bands.
Actually, I think Gale was musically interesting, and I don’t mean that in a haha funny way. I will admit, though, the song was kind of dumb.
WA5’s battle theme is possibly the most awesome of any game I’ve played. I just re-listened to the soundtrack and damn but I can’t get it out of my head. What’s really cool is that the soundtrack has one version of the battle theme (which does play during the game) where there’s no melody track, just the harmonies, and that just by itself is more awesome than most regular battle themes. There are so many instruments and they play off each other so well. It’s also really long, which is a necessity and more games should do that.
The only battle themes I think come close are the regular boss themes from FF6 and FF7; those are really solid tracks.
When the heart ignites is pretty good, I agree. A lot of work was put into it. Its ironic that you’d pick an extremely short song as an alternative favorite (the FF6 track). My fav non-remixed battle tracks are: Knight of Fire from XG, Darkness Nova from LoM. The Seiken Densetsu Sound Collection is an amazing remix of the Seiken Densetsu 1 soundtrack by Kenji Ito and its pretty much why I think he wins over Iwadare. The battle remixes that were done really doesn’t compete with anyone. No other soundtrack was remixed the way SDSC was, nor with the same level of quality. I greatly look forward to hearing updated versions of Saga II; hopefully we’ll be treated to remixes since the DS sound chip is garbage. The Saga II battle tracks in particular are classics.
Some music that hasn’t gotten much love here is the music from the Heroes of Might and Magic (2-4 in particular). That music was groundbreaking at the time the games were made. HoMM 2 brought the opera style. at a time when it was new to play games on CDs. It took years for the rest of the industry to catch up. It was spectacular. 3 lost the opera and singing but was excellent nonetheless. 4 brought it back. 4’s music was remixed a lot but it was still very very good. It also had a unique type of combat music that SG might like. Like Iwadare, the artist relied on percussion to set the beat to the tracks. Different kind of music though.
I’m also surprised no one mentioned Tenpei Sato. I’ve played a couple games to which he made the music and he is definitely unique and has made some excellent tracks. He’s responsible for Disgaea, La Pucelle, etc.
Michiru Yamane’s CV SotN to this day has not been surpassed by another CV.
I think you’ve shown me one or two things from Heroes of Might and Magic, and I remember enjoying them.
If it’s about “feeling like fighting”, I’m gonna go and seem like a total uneducated brat and say my favorite theme is Shoji Meguro’s Mass Destruction. It’s silly hip-hop with nonsensical lyrics, but it does what it needs to do: It pumps me up and, unlike what ends up happening to the usual entirely instrumental themes, doesn’t just fade into background noise for me after listening to it for hours.
Never played or heard most of the things mentioned in the last few posts… except for Disgaea, and I can’t remember any tracks I liked in there (mostly I remember the regular castle theme, which is really annoying).
Except CVSOTN, that one had some great tracks. I think if a game uses real instruments (or something that sounds very similar) they have a much better chance of coming out with memorable, high-quality tracks. Hence my love for CC, CVSOTN, and WA5. CC in particular was amazing in terms of technology: it used the PSX’s sound functionality (unlike CVSOTN, which was recorded live) but made it sound so real… you could even hear the little guitar squeaks.
SDSC 
Man, if you guys want battle music that makes you want to fight, Madworld will make you very happy people.
I dunno, the very idea of that game makes me very uncomfortable.