Phantasy Star: Fringes of Algo

I didn't find a thread like this (may have missed it) for just posting/discussing your favorite pieces of game music in general. So talk about it here - current gen, retro, whatever you like!

And here's one that's captured me lately. It's the piece that plays over the main menu and loading screen of The Last of Us. A hugely emotional, melancholy piece. And I'm surprised it's not on the official soundtrack.



The loading screen is long, as the game does all its loading right at the beginning. So it takes a while to load, but there's basically no loading once you're playing. Since it is so long, it has a simple but contemplative cinematic to go with it. From the left side of the screen, you see a cloud of Cordyceps spores suddenly shoot off and you watch them just float and disperse as this plays.

My faves are probably...







Temple of Fiends Revisited from Final Fantasy, Bubble Man from Mega Man 2, and Bloody Tears from Castlevania II. Hard to nail down my absolute favorites, but they're definitely up there. Within the Giant, Clad in Dark, and The Dreadful Battle from FF IV are definitely top ten or so, and Terra's Theme, Shadow's Theme, The Decisive Battle, and Another World of Beasts from FF VI are definitely awesome.

The Metroid Prime games have incredible soundtracks, more ambient stuff, I love Donkey Kong Country, Gangplank Galleon, Forest Frenzy, Fear Factory, and Xenoblade has been the most amazing soundtrack I've heard in recent times, Satorl Marsh (night version), One Who Gets in Our Way, Mechonis Field, pretty much the whole soundtrack is incredible. I love anything with a good sense of melody, or interesting rhythms, but I also gravitate to weirder, more ambient stuff, like the Beyond Oasis soundtrack, which I just played and really liked for the strange music.

Ah Very interesting topic !
The first piece of game music that comes to my mind is this one !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FEyvZCt_pY
What a masterpiece .. everytime I'm listening to it, it sends shivers upon my spine : so this is a good mark !
Motoi Sakuraba is definitely a Genius.

Time to shmup it up in here, so here's one of my favorites from a pure trickery perspective.

You see, in Hellsinker, there are two paths of going through stage 5, the SOL path and the LUNA path, and this actually makes a difference all the way through, because the boss, Perpetual Calendar, actually behaves differently depending on which path you took. To reflect this, the different versions each have their own boss music.

SOL side-



LUNA side-



They're pretty neat on their own, but this is where the trickery comes in. Some enterprising fan with an ear for this sort of thing decided to fusion dance the two tracks together, and got this as the result-

Combined-



The SOL and LUNA side versions are actually each one half of a complete track. I swear, this is some real Hats Off to Eight Nineteen stuff here.

That Star Ocean 3 song was beautiful, myau. Reminds me that I really tend to like RPG music, it's often sadder and more melancholy and just plain pretty. Of course, they have some pretty crazy battle themes, too, ha ha.

So... yeah. Time to go mention a lot of the video game music I really enjoy, because I can!

Yoko Shimomura- Parasite Eve- U.B.

The final boss song for Parasite Eve. In one corner, a very attractive NYPD detective who somehow managed to fit her service revolver, tonfa, and flak jacket under a very sexy dress at the start of the game. In the other corner, a giant mutated baby... thing that was birthed by an opera singer mutated by mitochondria because of...

.....Look, I don't think I can accurately describe just what the actual hell the Ultimate Being is, but this is the music you get when you fight it on the deck of an aircraft carrier. It is very much equal parts "fighting for humanity," "you are this screwed," and "go make it dead." Shimomura has that nice ability to make RPG combat sound epic (not surprisingly-- she's done the soundtracks for Live a Live, Super Mario RPG, Mario & Luigi, the Kingdom Hearts series, and Street Fighter II.)

Yoko Shimomura - Super Mario RPG - Fight With Monsters

If you don't like Super Mario RPG, you have no soul. At all. It's really one of the best Super NES RPGs ever, even if Luigi only makes an appearance in the very end. The whole soundtrack's charming, with some remixes of Koji Kondo's classic Super Mario Bros. tunes, and combined with the bright-colored world full of hilarious characters, you get one hell of a trip.

Harry Gregson-Williams - Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - Snake Eater

This song actually crops up twice in the MGS series- the first time, obviously, during the opening credits of Snake Eater, which helps ease you the player into the "James Bond parody gone horribly horribly wrong" atmosphere. Its second appearance is equally fitting, as it's the final boss song from Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, playing during the extremely brutal fistfight between Solid Snake and Liquid Ocelot. (I'm not linking the fight, you can see it on YouTube easily enough.) At first fighting as two mortal enemies, when "Snake Eater" starts playing, it calls back to the previous game, symbolizing Snake and Ocelot as the successors of the previous game's protagonist, Big Boss.

....and then you beat on Ocelot enough and the health meters fade away, and you both start moving slower, and a new song plays, showing the fight for what it really is: Two old men beating the hell out of each other over a war that's long ended.

Wow, lots of music here. Bragatyr, I definitely like the Mega Man track. I've found Mega Man has some of the best 8-bit music out there, and I know the developer made a point to have really good music in all of those games.

R-90-2, what they did in Hellsinker…it sounds really cool. I can't think of any other game offhand that has done something similar.

myau56 - I've never played Star Ocean. Now I might have to at least consider it based on that track alone.

Snorb, I think that MGS track is in SSBB. Can't recall for sure, but I swear I recognized it instantly from that.

I think my personal award for best overall soundtrack, though, goes to Okami. So many good tracks in that game, I could probably fill a few posts just with Okami music. I love this music so much I've made ringtones out of it.

This one is probably my favorite boss fight theme in any game, not just Okami. Plus the boss battle itself is awfully cool, and he makes one of the best entrances I've ever seen in a game.


I don't even know how to describe this one, but it plays a lot during the last third of Okami, I believe the first time is when you run into Shiranui.


And then there's this, which is only played once at the very end of the final battle. Talk about an emotional way to end the final boss battle.

I love the Super Mario RPG soundtrack, the battle theme is definitely great. My favorite is Beware the Forest's Mushrooms, the forest maze theme, I also love the big boss fight music. Also, I really need to finish Okami some day, I started it a few years back and didn't really get anywhere, I think I was Zelda'd out.

Oooh, good topic. I'll leave out the tracks from the original four PS games, as I'm sure my feelings on those are known by now.

I'll mention my favorite track from Phantasy Star Online, though. The mines boss is my favorite in the game, and the music from the second stage definitely enhances it for me, as it's my favorite music in the game:


Going waaaay back to 1997, "Catherine's Freedom" is my favorite track from the Myst soundtrack. Most of the music in those games is just supposed to be ambient, atmosphere-enhancing simple strains, but this one's got a bit more power behind it.


There are two tracks I love from Mass Effect 3, and I actually stumbled across the (free!) sheet music for them a while back. Now I can play them on my own piano whenever I want!
(Obviously these videos are not me playing. BUT I COULD! )

I Was Lost Without You (the love theme, swooon)


An End Once and For All (no spoilers, just the music)

augmentedfourth, your favorites are much more ambient than I would have expected. Nice and somber, for the most part, I still really need to play the Myst games, gah.

I now need to post some actual videos of my faves.



It doesn't get much more beautiful than Within the Giant. I love the plaintive strains in this one, and DAT BASS.





This one is just incredible. Whoever composed Gemini Man deserves a medal.



This is the mini-boss's theme from the last level in Dragon Spirit, for the NES.