Syzygy It’s amusing in retrospect that Nintendo ended up getting the weird non-mainline parallel FF games with the Crystal Chronicles series. We never really got an exhaustive and critical retrospective of that whole bizarre endeavor, have we? There are over 2200 characters from 450 games with over 1100 music tracks in Smash, including Final Fantasy stuff, yet nothing related to Crystal Chronicles! It’s like the series vanished. Most of the games do have a slamming soundtrack, too.
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Speaking of Final Fantasy, I would not qualify the following as a slamming soundtrack but I think it’s a case worth sharing in the context of this discussion. 🇯🇵Gundam True Odyssey (🇺🇸MS Saga: A New Dawn) was a perfectly serviceable, quickly forgettable RPG developed on the once upon a time almighty Renderware engine for the PS2 in the later stage of the console’s career (2005). The game ticks all the boxes of a standard JRPG, except you are piloting Gundam robots during the turn base combats. It’s aggressively okay. Akiman is taking care of the character design, but not trying his hardest either. The game was a flop, but it’s not considered terrible or anything. It’s just that nobody really found a reason to give a shit.
I mention it here because I find the soundtrack downright distracting with how hard it tries to be a Final Fantasy soundtrack. It’s physically impossible for me to get invested in the game as I am always under the impression I am stuck in a secret pop quiz trying to guess which Final Fantasy episode was ripped off for each track.
This is a strange case where I believe a good – if unoriginal – soundtrack is paradoxically doing disservice to an alright game. The composer, Makino Tadayoshi, ended up fulfilling his destiny by collaborating on the FF7 Remake soundtrack.