Music and Games

It's true that I am a few years ahead of us, but I'm pretty sure most of you have played SNES games in emulators. In fact, even though I own a SNES, most of the games I played were with emulators as well, I am just keeping mine to sell to a museum in 50 years. Anyway, the games spawned during the SNES era had a very interesting approach to music compared to the systems before. The SNES itself was, at the time, a great technological advancement, in terms of cartridge space, sound channels and layers. It was a boon for gaming in general, because the tech boundaries were being overcome, and now they didn't need to be so restricted in the creativity realm because they would still bump into a byte wall, but not as often. So, along with graphics improvements, the music also took a big step further.

How many of you can think of a tune, or bgm, or sfx of any sort from those games. I'm sure we all remember mounting Yoshi and his squeeze, or whatever noise that was, that they decided to turn into "yosheeeeeee" later on. Or some of the tunes in Chrono Trigger, like the Millenium Fair and Chrono's Theme; Secret of Mana's Fear of the Angels / Where Angels Fear to Tread; Final Fantasy's Prelude and Overture, and the list goes on. It was during the SNES that music started to become not only important in the game, but a character itself.

One of the best things in Final Fantasy, or what made FF what it is today (even if it isn't that good anymore), was the contribution Nobuo gave to the series. I have no doubt in my mind that if he had not been part of the first 10 games, it wouldn't have gotten that far. And proof of that are the cutscenes we got from 7 and onwards, where we never had any dialogue or voice acting, only the event and a bgm with it. If you never played FF9, youtube the cutscenes, mainly the events involving Bahamut's raid into Alexandria. The tune when Eiko descends from the airship and meets with Garnet will always be imprinted in my mind. The scene was shorter than 20 seconds, but had so much power.

Japan has a lot of good musicians that are usually in charge on certain brands. We will always be seeing Motoi Sakuraba working in the Star Ocean universe, Yoko Shimomura in KH and Mana series (she is in charge of FFXIII Versus as well), Kenji Ito and Masashi Hamauzu in the Saga series, among others. Music (and the musician's way to protrait) is so powerful, that you can endura bad games with good music, but the opposite is a lot harder to happen. Think of Unlimited Saga (ps2) to illustrate the first. And good music will always enchance gaming experience, just look at how good the Super Mario Galaxy OSTs are, and how enjoyable the game becomes with it.

Most of us are looking forward forward to GuildWars 2. Jeremy Soule did a very good in the first installment, and I hope 2 will be just as good if not even better than the first one. GW2 does have a more "epic" feeling about everything, so the music will probably follow that road.

Also, for you guys in NA, if there is ever a video game concert in your area, DON'T MISS IT. It is the most amazing experience, even more amazing than playing the game.