3 words: Secret of Mana.
@fugazi57 AMEN!
The more I hear of the Dragon Seeds soundtrack the more I‘m fooling myself into thinking it must’ve been something more than mediocre.
There was a perfectly middle of the road 2D Korean MMO I played in high school and while I can't say the gameplay stuck with me very much the soundtrack always has. A few standout tunes:
The Summer remix of the main theme, which is the song I remember most:
The Obligatory Ice Zone (with a surprise "We Wish You A Merry Chirstmas" in the bridge, for some reason)
This chill harmonica version of the main theme:
The whole soundtrack is a pretty chill time and I'd recommend giving it a listen some time. As an MMO, it's also about a billion tracks long. Good for an entire workday. Here's a link to a playlist:
There's also song inexplicably titled "Baker Street" on this OST (not quite good enough for me to link in this thread). Lots to chew on here.
ah wow, this perfectly places me in 2005 korean game world. I will listen to it during my work day.
@kory I felt so turned off by that game‘s cover art when it came out, it’s gotta be Nomura at his most unhinged.
But those sure are cozy little tracks! I love Masashi Hamauzu.
finished listening to the latale soundtrack finally. it was up and down but I quite liked a lot of it, and this one struck me toward the end. doing yasunori mitsuda without being yasunori mitsuda.
Not so much mediocre as “game experiences of their time” but here are three cool tracks from largely forgotten Famicom adventure games.
① First comes a good opportunity for me to share my very first custom ringtone, the Shinjuku Central Park theme from Toki no Sugiyuku Mama Ni•••, the fourth game in the Tantei Jingūji Saburō series (sometimes localized as Jake Hunter for the US market). Here is the full playlist and a full playthrough for reference.
② Time Twist is probably one of Nintendo’s most obscure games, released at the tail end of the Famicom Disk System’s relevance (1991), not really pushing any technical envelope (unlike HAL’s Metal Slader Glory) to carve a fanbase in Japan or benefiting from a rallying outcry of deprived Western Nintendo fans intrigued by a Smash Bros cameo (unlike Famicom Tantei Club or Nazo no Murasame-jō). Time Twist is just an OK 8-Bit adventure game well past the genre’s prime in Japan – only notable for the weird quirk of featuring Jeanne d’Arc, Hitler and Jesus in its story. However, Time Twist also welcomes a killer soundtrack by newcomer Hirasawa Hajime, who would later gain fame for his work on Star Fox (1993). Here is a full BGM recording and a playthrough of the first disk but the real gem is September 25th, 1995 a.k.a. the introduction’s theme.
③ Erika to Satoru no Yumebōken, a 1988 Namco(t) joint developed by fledgling developer Atlus, found new fame in recent years for bizarre reasons but it also had a pretty chill BGM by Takayama Hirohiko making full use of the Namco 163 MMC chip and its eight additional sound channels. Complete soundtrack here. Playthrough there.
legacy of kain: soul reaver is technologically inventive, but as a game it‘s pretty boring imho. i love the soundtrack, though, which itself technologically inventive, being somehow dynamically sequenced. it’s also really got a really sludgy, ancient future vibe. i'll refrain from posting ozar midrashim.
and another thing, while i dearly love the original rayman, i get the feeling that most people would rank it as mediocre. this here is my favorite track:
i've been a fool not looking at this thread sooner. so much great music here. sometimes i think i like videogame music more than videogames.
This resonates so hard for me. You could also replace "music" with "visual artistry" and the sentiment would hold equally true.
Ever since this thread started I knew I was forgetting a really good one and I just remembered it was Tales of Legendia! Just really nice chill anime vibes, going on an adventure with some buddies
i‘ve been listening to that alpha playlist and i’m struck by how good the music in fishing games tends to be.
edit: i took the next logical step and searched youtube for fishing game music. good result:
I got another hot one off that alpha channel:
@MegaSigil Notably this is one of the few tales games with a soundtrack not by Motoi Sakuraba! The Legendia OST was written by Go Shiina, who would later go on to make music for Tekken (and a bunch of other Tales Of stuff)
@TheFragranceOfDarkCoffee …and before that, he got his big break on the Mr. Driller series, which is packed with fantastic off-kilter music.
(It took the recent remaster for me to finally realise why the credits tune for Drill Land is a faux-Disney ballad about a couple preparing for a wedding: the game's themed after Disney Land, duh.)
okay I don‘t know for sure that fin fin on teo is mediocre, it actually sounds pretty interesting with its seaman-like qualities, but it looks kinda off somehow… but regardless, there’s no way it lives up to (the first three songs in) this soundtrack:
@exodus Wow, I had seen the LGR video but I had no idea the soundtrack was that good. The first song reminds me a bit of the album Vortex Symphony by Midori.
I know many people on IC follow Alpha’s Youtube channel so you probably have caught on **Otsugē Uranai Nandesu**’s matryomin-fueled soundtrack but I am sorry to report the game is pretty mediocre.
@exodus You might already know this but the guy that did the SNES Waterworld music did some great music for several other forgettable SNES titles such as Green Lantern and Jurassic Park 2, and for some unreleased Amiga CD ROM game apparently.
@TheBeigeKnight yeah, I've been going through his channel!
Epic was very much released, it is one of Amiga’s last big games.
Epic had a Cyberpunk 2077-style cycle of hype: massive coverage, last minute delays, misleading advertising and troublesome review process, and eventually backlash from consumers due to poor debugging and running poorly on the A500 generation (it fared much better on A1200). It was successful enough to get a DOS sequel in 1994.
I assume the "unreleased” part pertains to the track itself. It probably was meant for a cancelled Amiga CD32 conversion.