So I played Undertale last year, and huge part of what made that game great was its soundtrack, which I felt was an effective medium for connecting the player to the drama, atmosphere, or epic-ness of what was happening on the screen. I had some of the songs on repeat for about a month before I started thinking more about how the "best" music in video games manages to do this. In my humble opinion, the truly great songs can capture the essence of the entire experience of a game, and listening to these songs is like taking a brass-knuckled fist of emotion to the face. A shining example of a track that does this for me: the title theme from Ocarina of Time.
To put it bluntly, I WANT MORE OF THIS. I would appreciate it if anyone could share any tracks that have evoked this sort of response in them!
p.s. Obviously, since this is a thread about music, everything is subjective AF, so feel free to respectfully disagree!
Edit: I just added my latest post to the top of the thread:
Phewwwwwww! Finally caught up to most of the music on this thread. Thanks everyone for posting! And keep posting, these are all great!
OKAY SO HERE ARE THE PLAYLISTS.
As I mentioned previously, I divided all of the music I heard into 3 rough categories. They are:
1. Get AMPED
In short, this is all music that motivated me to get off my ass and do something, while making me feel epic (or like a badass) for doing it. Some of these, like E1M1 and Megalovania are no-brainers for this category because of their fast tempos and raging solos. Other songs, which have a more orchestral sound like OoT's Last Battle and Frog's Theme, were also selected for this category because they have an epic, "going off to war" kind of feeling to them, or a chord progression that clearly culminates in an epic manner. The main musical theme that ties everything in this playlist together is the heavy percussive element in each track.
These are all songs that had the exact opposite emotional impact compared to those songs from the first playlist. While the Get Amped playlist made me want to go make an impact on my surroundings, this playlist makes me want to just sit down by myself and look inwards. In general, all of these songs have slower pacing, with broad, sweeping chord progressions and softer instruments like the piano, harp, and acoustic guitar, as well as operatic or choral vocals. Drums are optional.
3. The Escape
The third and final category consists of tracks that managed to do what neither of the other playlists could do. These tracks didn't evoke a response out of me; rather, they transported me to one of the levels in a game or injected the atmosphere of a game into me. For example, it was impossible for me to think of the Super Mario Bros. Underground Theme in terms of how it made me feel. As soon as I heard it, I could only picture the levels themselves and Mario jumping around in them. Other cases for which this happened to me were Gerudo Valley from OoT and Dire Dire Docks from Mario 64. At the same time, songs like the Starcraft Terran theme, the Shadowrun theme, and the GTA 4 theme were great at instilling their respective atmospheres in my mind. Because the essences of these games are vastly different from each other, it was really hard to find a musical through-line for all of these songs compared to the previous playlists.
Final Notes:
I'm pretty sure I managed to include most of the music suggestions from each post on this thread. If I somehow missed you, let me know! I've been going through a lottttt of music over the last couple of days so it's entirely probable that I just forgot to add your song.
Again, music is subjective, so I don't expect anyone to completely agree with how I've categorized these tracks. That being said, I WOULD LOVE FEEDBACK. How badly did I screw up organizing the songs? Did I totally miss the mark with a track, and should it instead have gone into another category? Was three categories too few in this context? Any other musical similarities between tracks that I neglected to mention?
And as I said before, keep posting! I will continue to grow these playlists as more tracks are posted!
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