The way I view the OST for FFVIIR, specifically as among the GOATs, is that it is practically like a parallel Remaking of the soundtrack on the scale of the game, which can be related to Tim’s ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS BOTTOM LINE for, not FFVIIR, but The Last of Us–it’s great by default. It’s titanic, it balances new stuff and old stuff in a new form, some of it is weird and some of it is overblown, but it’s all executed with exceptional love and hypercompetence. Some of it is really banging, from a subjective point of view.
I think it’s also impressive to what degree it scores so much of the experience of playing the game and how well it often does that; what will cause me to wish a game’s soundtrack would give it a rest is when it is just omnipresent, =like the developers thought silence would for some reason be uncomfortable even when silence and ambient sounds would probably set a better mood than the music (or at least the same music over and over with little or no breaks in between loops (looking at you, Elden Ring)). Whether or not every scrap of FFVIIR’s OST is good or not, I think it really effectively scores the action onscreen, weaving in and out of battles, setting the tension of the events on screen, exploding in sync with the action heightening on screen… it’s a huge part of the cinematic feeling of the game, if you ask me.
Because of that, perhaps whether it lands with someone or not could also depend on how they feel about the game itself. I absolutely can’t separate how I feel about the version of Those Who Fight Further from how I felt when I played that section. As in, hype as fuck.