What games were ruined for you by the music?

What games have been ruined for you by soundtracks you hate? I’ve played some Trials Rising (my first Trials Game) and while I’ve loved the gameplay every time I think about playing it I’m reluctant to because I think the music in it is godawful. At this point I don’t even know if I’ll continue with it. Another game in recent memory that almost met this criteria was Dragon Quest XI, until I found out there was a mod to replace the music with orchestral versions. If not for that mod I definitely would not have continued with that game.

When super meat boy got new music for ps4 release that really killed it for me. I listened the original soundtrack so many times.

Most of the time though I'll just play podcasts or spotify if I don't care for the music.

@the_hiro_abides: "Most of the time though I'll just play podcasts or spotify if I don't care for the music."

This. You don't need to let any music ruin a game for you if you play your own.

I can think of times music elevated games, but usually, even if I don’t like the music, I find that it fits.

The closest examples I have are...

I play the current WWE games with my kid. I just turn the music off, or make it play ridiculous music like the Sexy Boy song for giggles.

Same for sports games. I’m not into the overwhelming majority of hip-hop, so I just turn it off.

I think Final Fantasy tactics Advance and Pokemon Ruby both had this problem for me. It's not even that their music is bad - It's just that I played those games for hundreds of hours, and after a while the music felt like it was drilling into my eardrums. I really can't go back. I suppose the GBA's sound chip or whatever didn't help.

I guess the closest this ever gets is when games don't mix the audio properly?

Japanese games in particular seem terrible about mixing their audio. Even if the music is good oftentimes it absolutely overpowered everything else and there's not always a way to adjust the levels.

Beyond that I don't know that bad music could really ruin a game for me, if it's just something I hate then Ill turn it off and find my own.

Let's just put the obvious one in: Resident Evil: Director's Cut. Composed by a man pretending to be blind and deaf.

Dragon Quest XI. The tinny thin midi tracks were so bad I just started googling it to find out why, then I learned that all the reasons for it were very stupid and completely preventable. UGH. What a shame.

I've played a lot of sports games in my life, and thus I am generally attuned to the hodgepodge/committee approach to music licensing and don't let it bother me. Many songs I would otherwise hate or just dismiss become obnoxiously delicious earworms for me over time like some kind of stockholm syndrome. That said, while I get that Watch_Dogs' whole thing was crafting a playlist for yourself on your iPod or whatever the gimmick was, I was so apathetic to that game and the main character that I just kept every song I collected active and their curation really was the worst. It had great songs by bad artists, bad songs by good artists, mediocre songs from complete unknowns and random inclusions of certain genres just so they could go "y'know, Chicago!" It had no sense of character or setting, it was just a bunch of music. Sure, a lot of real life iPods look/looked like that, including mine, but this was a curated and licensed piece of an artistic work, not some random citizen's Pirate Bay collection.

They really needed to attach that music to Aiden's character in some way for the playlist idea to work; I mostly drove around with the radio off in that game, something I will absolutely clown people for doing in real life.

Persona 5. Most of the tracks are fine to listen to, but I cannot stand to listen to that main battle theme over and over again.

I can't really think of any examples of games that were flat out ruined by the music, but the reverse is true - there have been several games without music, or with only situational vignettes rather than a continuous soundtrack, that couldn't hold my interest largely because of it, The Signal from Tölva, Plunkbat and Black the Fall certainly come to mind there.

There are of course the examples given above where you have a previous reference point and something changes for the worse - like when Binding of Isaac and Super Meat Boy got their soundtracks replaced, or that Dark Souls' soundtrack was just incredibly generic compared to Demon's Souls.

There are far more examples of games where a great soundtrack has helped me look past other issues, like bugs/design issues or poor writing/acting.

To me the soundtrack may be the most important part of a game, so listening to a podcast instead is akin to skipping the cutscenes in a Metal Gear game or playing something like Journey on a mobile/Vita screen.

Was never much of a Majora's Mask fan and its super annoying take on the classic overworld theme is part of that.

@nodima I had C.R.E.A.M. on loop for most of my playthrough of Watch Dogs 1.

I’m going to sound crass, but Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon both had musical-esque moments that flat-out killed the momentum of those games for me. Remember, RPG makers, kids in RPGs are just the worst.

"How can we bring the Battlefield theme into a modern/near future soundscape?"
"Don't worry i just picked up this $5 synthesizer from Toys R Us".
Way to suck any energy and creativity out of the franchise, i bet the composers at DICE hated having to work on BF3 and 4, BF2 had such fun and creative energy.

Final Fantasy X-2. I tried to replay it at one point, but the music was like nails on a chalkboard. I just absolutely could not put up with it for more than a couple hours. I have no idea how I was able to get through that game the first time.

Xenoblade Chronicles X is one of my favorite games ever and had some great music, but the mixing was TERRIBLE in some cutscenes, like to the point where I needed the subtitles to understand what the hell they were saying. The other thing was that while the day and night songs for the only city of NLA weren't BAD, they got pretty old considering the amount of time you had to spend in the city throughout the game. Still love the game, but those were some big drawbacks for me.

It's hard to think of a game where the music really hurt the experience - if I don't like the music I'll usually just put on my own instead.

Didn't ruin the games for me, but the music in the New Super Mario Bros. series is very bland.

I’ve suffered through games with bad to mediocre gameplay because I thought things around it were good so I don’t think I could be turn away purely by bad music.

You are so right this is exactly what I thought too

Spelunky. That music drives me insane. I couldn't even watch the end of last week's UPF because I saw Brad boot it up.

I know it's no AAA game, but I always found the music in Gish distracting. I didn't think it fit at all.

To everyone saying they play their own music or podcasts. Doesn’t that kind of get in the way of sound effects and dialog? I can understand if you’re doing something grindy like in an MMO but for anything narrative driven or with important sound effects it seems like a no go to me. To take my examples, I can see playing your own music for Trials but Dragon Quest XI I can’t see not listening to the game audio.

If there’s a game that prominently features 4 non-Blondes and Papa Roach, that’s the game that’s ruined by its music.

It does; I don't play a lot of narrative-heavy games, though. Most video game stories bore me to tears. Generally if I'm going to pay attention to dialogue it's in the sort of game where it comes in punctuated bursts, at which point I pause the podcast and resume it when I'm back to action.

There was something just downright uncanny about the music in Yoshi's Island DS. It's so... vacant. And when you compare it to the original Yoshi's Island soundtrack it seems like a travesty.

Playing it got on my nerves!

I really despised most of the soundtrack in the original Need For Speed: Most Wanted. I went so far as to go into the music menu and manually turn off the tracks I extra hated, but in those dark pre-podcast days, I still had to hear a lot of those middling EA Trax many, many times. I don’t play very many sports/racing games, so I’m not used to being subjected to this melange of vaguely macho licensed music from [current year].

Both games have great soundtracks throughout but both Hellblade and Wolfenstein II end with licensed songs that can be charitably described as baffling. Both games are great but both also had me pulling a bit of confused face going into the credits.

not by any means a good game but listen to this cacophonous journey of pure auditory anxiety

Dragon Quest XI. Even the proper versions of those songs are grating and irritating, but the game just isn't right without some sort of music playing.

@justin258: Gotta disagree on the proper versions. I’ve come to really like it. It can get repetitive, however, since there’s not enough of it.

I mean, I love the game otherwise, but Streets of Rage 3's tracks on the whole just sounded like a bunch of appliances malfunctioning to a beat, and not in a good way. Pretty big letdown from the sublime soundtrack of 2 and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the original.

Not ruined, but I turned the in-game audio off at some point:

1942 NES

Phantom 2040 MD/GEN

NewZealand Story SMS

Castlevania AMI

Doom 32X

Tom & Jerry SNES

Mega Man X PC DOS

Paperboy 2 SNES

Rambo 3 MD

Vigilante PCE

Zero Tolerance MD

Atomic Robo Kid PCE

Bram Stoker's Dracula SMS

X-Men MD

Prince of Persia 2 SNES

There is a very defined middle range of Rap music i like, so I'm often put off by some sports games where you cannot choose the tracks.

One game where it is funny that I hate the music is FIFA 98 Soundtrack Chumbawamba's Tubthumping is a song I never need to hear again!

I logged on just to comment this, looked up as I was typing, and saw your comment. There's just something about the tune that gets on my nerves. haha

Didn't exactly ruin the game for me, but I was a shitty try-hard metalhead growing up and the soundtrack to Burnout Paradise really pissed me off. Still played the hell out of the game though. I played the Remastered version a few years ago too and didn't really mind the song selection, but it did get repetitive so I had Google Play Music playing in the background so I could listen to high-energy Kpop.

Did anybody here play Backbreaker (the Euphoria physics engine Football game) back in the day, before they patched the music??

If you didn't, here's what happens without the patch.

Any time you kicked off, it played POD - Boom. it was meant to only play on the first kick of the game though.

Youtube vid to the original advert Ft. song

It's well done and ultimately fits the tone of the game when it chimes in, but as someone who relatively few complaints about The Last of Us Part II I can say I find the Mac Quayle inclusions to the score a bit disappointing. Gustavo Santoalla's score for the first game is so singular and definitive of that series' tone that it almost feels like a cop out whenever Quayle's big Zimmer bombs drop. Again, they're well composed and ultimately suit what that game is trying to do, but I can't help but feel Quayle's contributions helped lend to takes that the game was a bit of a try-hard.

The music isn't ruining Scarlet Nexus for me, necessarily, but it does feel about as generic as Japanese-based video game music could possibly be in 2021. Even when it gets experimental, it does so in a seemingly desperate way, not a clever way.

Likewise, Grand Theft Auto V's talk radio just didn't click with me the way previous games' talk radio did, and being set in the present day at a time when I was an active music critic really sapped a lot of the creative energy from what previous games had done. It didn't even have a "Flashing Lights" moment up its sleeve. Again, didn't ruin the game by any means, but I definitely wasn't very particular about what station I was tuned into from moment to moment the way I had been in the past.

Same problem with Watch_Dogs 1 and 2. Those games' radios felt even more generic and AI-driven than a sports game's menu music. Even though it had plenty of groups I enjoy(ed), it was just like, "what? this?"

If DmC: Devil May Cry weren't so hilariously committed to the bit, I wonder if the music would've ruined my experience. I hate the style of music the Devil May Cry series is defined by, but DmC's intentional trash aesthetic made it work, barely.

Sonic The Hedgehog 4, the music sounds terrible like it's trying to gimmick the Sega Genesis songs but fails.

Control's ashtray maze was pretty bad.

I really dislike Kanye West so the opening to saint's row the third was a huge bummer for me.

@urban_ryoga: @akeldama: Y'all wound me. WOUND ME. Two of my favorite music moments in games right there.

I expect it's already mentioned in this thread but that godawful screamo cover of We're Not Gonna Take It on the Wolfenstein The New Colossus end credits was pure trash and completely sucked the hype out of the room generated by the otherwise incredible final moments. BJ murdering the Nazi lady and hissing "You're among wolves now" and then almost immediately cutting to that dreck was an abysmal choice. Just do the original song! Or a 60s-style cover of it! Literally anything other than that!

i turned off music on river city girls it was so ass and just played stuff on youtube while i played it

oh man, I love the River City Girls soundtrack, I still listen to that soundtrack regularly. I assumed the switching between the more relaxed synthwave during the main stages to the more frantic chip bangers from Chipzel for the boss stages would work well in the game, but I didn't get very far in the game, so I mostly enjoy this soundtrack separated from the gameplay.

System Shock. It's a midi assault.

I find I usually have a better time when I turn down the music in "high action" games (or completely off). I mostly just don't like "boss battle" music that plays for 30+ minutes. The exception is games like BotW where the music all-around is pure bliss. I guess one recent example is the music in psychonauts 2. The music isn't bad, it just feels like an action movie sequence drawn out to 20-30 minutes, and gets tiring lol.

I won't say the music completely ruined the game, but Tekken 7's soundtrack is easily the worst in the entire series. Good thing you can unlock the soundtracks of the older games and replace the music with them. As if the people at Namco realized themselves how bad the music is. And the fact that Tekken 7 is one of the best playing entries in the series, makes the weak music even more glaring.

I got pretty sick of Sekiro's flute-driven battle music. I eventually turned it off and it actually made everything way better, not only because the (what would come to be ) annoying music wasn't there, but the sound design of the desperate grunts of battle/screams of the stabbed/clashing of swords is actually super good and really makes things way more intense. I guess the lack of music gives the battles a sort of intimacy and realness.

Also this is an obscure one but the original version of the indie game Flywrench had a soundtrack that was just a bunch of very noisy overdriven circuits that would sometimes make something that sounded like music. The remake has proper electronic music with drums and instruments and stuff but its definitely not the same.

I don't think it has ever happened. If it's really bad, i just play the game muted.