Back To Special Features
By Contributing Writer Rob Pecknold Contrary to popular belief and the utter disregard of retro gamers everywhere, video game music has advanced leaps and bounds past the bleeps and bloops of yesteryear. More and more game music is being composed by top quality composers, with many of them being Japanese. This article's job is to tell you who the top composers are and what games to find them in. Before starting on this, I want to talk of the quality of game music, which in some cases goes far beyond the quality of the game itself. Game music is something that is always there to enforce the mood and strengthen the gameplay in an interactive title. It angers you, calms you, and can make you weep with sorrow or cry in joy. Game music is one of my favorite things in all of gaming, and I spend a lot of time at my local music store searching for the next great import CD (the only drawback to this is that I have to sift through all the Japanese porn CDs...I don’t buy them, I swear!). But it's the sound quality that can take games above and beyond. I don’t mean the music, I mean the quality of the sound processor in the console. Because of this, the PlayStation, with its CD-quality sound, can easily get ahead of the pack in terms of sound quality as long as it's utilized correctly. But even the worst sound processors can create notable soundtracks. I’m currently humming a tune from Pokemon (Pallet Town if you must know) and can always be caught tapping a foot to the Zelda: Link's Awakening Town Theme. All these catchy tunes and soaring melodies must be made by someone, so here are the best in the biz. Nobuo Uematsu This man took crappy video game sountracks and beat them flat on their butts. He is singlehandedly responsible for making the music in the Final Fantasy series, which I hear is very popular these days. He is the master of creating themes conveying a certain mood and feeling. I believe he was the one who suggested to Square that in the battle following Aeris’ death, the Death Song should continue playing, keeping the mood in the game intact to a level of perfection. Also, the inspiring melodies and roaring themes of the Weapons' attack on Junon in FF7 and the Magitek trek through the snow in the beginning of FF6 really made my proverbial gaming day. Although some criticized his work in FF7 (he had to write 100 themes in a very short amount of time), he is still one of the greats and always can be counted on to stir some emotions. Yosunori Mitsuda While Uematsu took bad soundtracks and threw them out the window, Mitsuda started with soundtracks that were already good and improved them until they were almost perfect. You legal types out there (or the folks who watch Ally McBeal) might be thinking "That’s Plagarism!" but it meant that while others were utilizing new sountrack technology to make ho-hum tracks, Mitsuda used older engines to create musical perfection. His work on Chrono Trigger was one of the reasons I think it's the greatest game of all time (read my article on that here), and was one of the reasons I became a gamer in the first place. I'll admit that I started gaming late, but I made up for lost time with five-day SNES-Fests with my brother. Ahhh....how I miss those days... Anyway, the Chrono Trigger soundtrack was, in my opinion, the best soundtrack of all time (of any kind) until recently, and who could top Yosunori Mitsuda than, well, Yosunori Mitsuda? Mitsuda followed up his Chrono Trigger work with the amazing, stirring, epic sountrack to the best RPG of 1998, Xenogears. This work was upbeat, new, and hip (I may sound like a marketing director, but it's the truth). The Xenogears soundtrack also put away any worries that Mitsuda was a one hit wonder. "Our Village is #1" (the Lahan Village theme) and "Valley of the Winds" are some of the greatest songs of any kind. Yosunori Mitsuda is the king of game music. TAPPY This mysterious character, referred to only as "TAPPY" by the folks at Konami, has composed only compose one game soundtrack (to my knowledge), but what a soundtrack it was. Metal Gear Solid had the suspense of a mystery, the action of an...action movie, and the drama of a romance novel, and all this matters because TAPPY made it happen with his stirring soundtrack, which I believe was the second best of 1998 behind only Xenogears. When the DARPA chief has a heart attack, or when you are caught by guards, or when you are entering the dock, the music is so varied that you can’t help to be compelled by TAPPY’s reasoning behind the compositions. Also, the in-game music that plays when you're just walking around is tense enough to ensure that you are always on guard. In spite of this fact, I would always find myself running into search lights and then quickly equipping stealth just so I could run around and hear the music that play! TAPPY seems like a newcomer, but has the potential to be as great as the aforementioned masters at Square. So those are the three composers that pop into my head as the best. Also, with the chance that wthe Grammy's may include a "Best Video Game Soundtrack" category next year, the world of game music is looking as bright as ever. You may now go back to your normal life, and I think I’ll go back to my room to listen to Xenogears again... You can e-mail Rob at rob@mastergamer.com
© 2001 ivan@mastergamer.com