I'm bringing back one of my older features because Ys IX: Monstrum Noxwas robbed at GOTY consarnit deserves a closer look (hear?) at its exceptional soundtrack: a trademark of the Ys franchise and Falcom as a whole. Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana's was slightly stronger overall, for the record, but coming out the same year as NieR: Automata, Persona 5, Breath of the Wild, Yakuza 0, Xenoblade 2, and Super Mario Odyssey didn't do it too many favors. Ys IX had a bit more space to compete last year, at least.
For a little bit of story context, Ys IX: Monstrum Nox has famous adventurer Adol "The Red" Christin stop by the Gllian city of Balduq, presently occupied by the Romn Empire. The Empire has a dim view of Adol due to his involvement in many unexplained mysteries that have curtailed Romn expansion (see: almost every prior Ys game) so he's arrested on the spot and sent to Balduq Prison: a massive wartime fort transformed into a penitentiary (as in, the Bastille of Paris, which was used as a fort in the Hundred Years' War). He busts out of his cell, gets hit by the "Monstrum Curse" by a robed figure named Aprilis, and with the curse is gifted with the ability to teleport between points and uses that power to escape the prison. He's then soon introduced to the other Monstrum - White Cat, Hawk, The Doll, Raging Bull, and the Renegade - and informed that he is stuck in Balduq until the curse is lifted.
Here's my ten top BGM picks in the order they appear in the soundtrack (with alternating YT embeds so I don't overdo it) and a few honorable mentions worth checking out. Hopefully this convinces some folk to check out the game itself too: it's a whole lot of open-world action-RPG fun and will probably be my 2021 GOTY for some time yet.
Cloaca Maxima
Cloaca Maxima might cause an involuntary shudder if you paid attention to a certain chicken vagina discussion on Steal My Sunshine many moons ago, but it's actually the name of a real-life elaborate sewer network devised by the Ancient Romans. Which, yeah, means that the game drops you into a sewer dungeon almost from the get go: Ys IX is set in the enormous medieval city of Balduq after all, which in Ys's oddly familiar world of Not-Europe is roughly analogous to Paris - a city also known for its spacious sewers. It's the first big dungeon of the game, given a lot of verticality with which to teach you the second of the Monstrum gifts you acquire: the Heaven's Run, which lets you dash up perfectly straight walls.
Ys, much like anything else, understands the importance of a good first impression. Cloaca Maxima shows up as soon as it can to introduce you to the world of excellent Ys dungeon themes with one of this game's best. It's one of a handful of tracks contributed by veteran Yukihiro Jindo - he also composed the excellent Super Ultimate album of rearrangements - with the full Falcom JDK band, including guitarist Masaru Teramae (best known as half of Demetori, a name familiar to Touhou fans).
Monstrum Spectrum
Due to the action-RPG nature of Ys, there's no battle transitions and therefore no battle-specific music to set the aggressive mood for normal encounters. However, boss fights have always been their own special affair in any Ys game - an exercise in studying your colossal opponents and exploiting gaps in their attack patterns - and that's partly due to how effective the music is in pumping you up for the trial ahead.
Monstrum Spectrum is the game's "standard" boss battle theme, which is to say it plays in most of the non-story critical boss fights. Like Ys VIII's own standard boss theme Deadly Temptation, Monstrum Spectrum is a heavy metal jam right from Falcom's own one-man-Metallica Takahiro Unisuga, the company's erstwhile webmaster. I particularly liked the faster classical piano at 1:12 - integrating the European elegance of the game's thematic setting but in a very Unisuga type of way.
Norse Wind
The Ys franchise has a certain trademark when it comes to presenting the most joyful, freeing track whenever you hit a big outdoors "Field" area for the first time. The Boy Who Had Got Wings from Ys III (and its remastered version in the Ys III remake Ys: The Oath in Felghana) is sort of the poster child for this particular musical cue, but you also had something similar (and possibly superior) in Sunshine Coastline from Ys VIII. Norse Wind is this for Ys IX too: the theme for the first big outdoors area surrounding Balduq. However, it's a few chapters in before you hear it due to the unusually urban-centered focus of Ys IX's story.
Like its predecessors, Norse Wind immediately hits you with a fast, exciting beat and doesn't let up even during the jazzy bridge. As the track continues, the guitars get even more chaotic, encouraging you to let loose across its countryside full of monsters.
Marionette, Marionette
This dungeon theme isn't so much for the dungeon itself but for (at that point of the game) the most recently recruited party member and one of the best characters in the game: The Doll, the most mysterious of the five Monstrum. This mechanical being with a soul, graceful and robotic in turn, is perfectly represented with this chill track that is half delicate classical instruments and half thudding trap bass.
Another reason I really like this track, besides its effectiveness as a leitmotif for my favorite non-Adol character (both narrative- and gameplay-wise), is that there's nothing else like it in Ys IX: the light keys and heavy, mechanical percussion are two extremes that don't appear elsewhere else. The jazzy sax, returning from Norse Wind, works well here also to reinforce the laid-back mood.
Evan Macha
Evan Macha, a phonetic translation of the ancient Celtic capital of Emain Macha a.k.a. Navan Fort (the game uses the correct spelling), is the theme for Ys IX's customary spooky crypt dungeon of the same name, set in Balduq's cavernous catacombs that eventually open up into the titular enormous, sunken city of the dead. The dungeon's also designed to teach you how to use Renegade's Monstrum gift: a trick where you submerge into the shadows to get around barriers and avoid tough opponents, like the invincible LV 90 giants roaming around Emain Macha's halls (it's also useful for evading screen-filling boss attacks). Ys games are fairly sparing when it comes to the spooks and skellies common to many RPGs, often saving them for a thematically apropos dungeon like this.
I really love the way this track escalates. It starts off with that heavy song-wide percussion and a bit of a mystic, ancient Egyptian majestic feeling before bringing in the guitars at 0:25 and boosting the intensity of the drums at 0:50. And then that glorious hook comes in at 1:14 and you can feel the weight of a thousand spectral eyes following your journey through this dark place, forbidden to the living. The sense of atmosphere is off the charts, and it's a legit jam to boot.
Desert After Tears
More Field music, so we're talking a similar goal as Norse Wind in providing a track that creates the feeling of freedom and exploration. Desert After Tears also evokes an evening time frame, especially with that slow start. The area it pertains to isn't actually a desert - it's much like another great "desert" track, Ys Origin's Silent Desert, which isn't set anywhere near a desert either. Makes me wonder how good an actual Ys desert track could be (I guess we'll have to wait until the Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand remake to find out).
This is another of the precious few Unisuga tracks on the OST, evident the moment the smooth intro ends at 0:12 and those metal guitars and drums crash through the wall like the Kool Aid Man. When it picks up at 1:03-ish it sounds a lot like Sunshine Coastline (also Unisuga) from Ys VIII, which isn't at all a bad thing.
Crossing A/A
Ah, I love me some volcano music. The intense temperature of all those lava pools lends itself so well to evocative Ys music, as evinced by one of my favorite Ys: The Oath in Felghana tracks A Searing Struggle. Crossing A/A's name is actually a slight spoiler so I won't get into that, but the dungeon it belongs to splits its time between its first half, which is an ancient quarry ruin with its own comparatively chill music, before moving into this subterranean overheated nightmare and ramping up the danger and musical intensity in parallel.
My favorite part of this track is obviously that opening, with its slight Arabian/Indian tinge (always a staple of volcano music - see also Diddy Kong Racing's Hot Top Volcano or almost anything else on this list I wrote ages ago) and chaotic energy before settling into an upbeat melody with wailing guitars that's a bit more traditional Ys. The Super Ultimate rearrangement made the decision to go a little more acoustic guitar with it for a kind of Hispanic flair, which made for a divergent yet equally great dynamic.
Aprilis
Aprilis is the mysterious heroine character of Ys IX who leads the Monstrums and provides Adol with his new powers shortly after the game begins. She typically only shows up for cutscenes and bounty hunt quests: she sadly never joins the player's team, but you get the distinct impression she might be a little too overpowered to hang with you. Her theme music is appropriately enigmatic too, displaying hints of the tragedy and sadness of her backstory - the fact she regularly appears heavily scarred with two prosthetic limbs is indication enough that it hasn't all been wine and roses for poor old Aprilis.
I adore this character and the slow burn reveal of exactly who she is and why she's one the few to take the game's nightmare dimension Grimwald Nox in stride, even if it gets easier to figure out the more you learn of the city's history. Aprilis is more or less the analog of Ys VIII's Dana Iclucia, who herself has a similarly melancholy theme with Dana. I think I've made it apparent enough that the high-tempo synth rock is what I come to Ys for, but I'll sometimes stick around for its occasional bouts of JRPG-ass JRPG atmosphere.
Glessing Way!
The final Field theme on this list. You get a hint of Glessing Way! in an earlier optional dungeon set on a mountain before it shows up again as the theme of the last of the three major outdoor areas outside of Balduq to become unlocked. As with the others, it's all about pressing you onwards to explore an enormous open environment just tearing ass and tearing up asses (like, with a sword I mean) as you go.
Glessing Way! might actually be my favorite track in the game. I've no idea what a "Glessing" might be, but it's the longest track in the game barring the credits music and earns its stay with that escalation towards the final minute, along with that wonderful denouement. It is the most "Ys" of the music in Ys IX, especially the guitar riff at 1:30 (that appears again at 3:05), and probably the track I would've used to sell the game's award bona fides at GB's GOTY were I sitting at that table. Maybe once Ys X is out...
Gria Recollection
The city of Balduq itself has several BGM themes throughout the game, usually reflecting whatever stage of the story you're at or a part of the city that has recently become unlocked to explore. Gria Recollection is the last of these - excepting the epilogue - and the most downbeat. I wrote about this on Twitter, but Gria Recollection is one of a small group of themes in RPGs - Memories of the City from Persona 3 is another example - that are meant to evoke a combined sense of foreboding and bittersweet sadness about the imminent end of your adventure. Everyone's anxiously poised for the big final battle ahead, but whether they win or lose you know your time with this cast and this world is about to come to an end.
It's a beautiful track that builds in its emotional intensity with each new instrument layered in and it made me want to run around Balduq finishing up loose ends just to delay the inevitable as long as I could. Something about its use of lower-pitched string instruments reminded me of Dark Cloud 2's OST too: another exceptional RPG with exceptional music.
Honorable Mentions
- Welcome to Chaos: I said that Ys doesn't do standard battle music, but the exception comes from one of Ys IX's mechanics where there's pillars of dark light around town that you can trigger for a small fight against a bunch of "Lemures" monsters: demons residing in the Grimwald Nox. Welcome to Chaos is a track you'll hear a lot while exploring, and its anarchic thrash metal sound creates a distinct contrast to the otherwise calm town BGM.
- The Cave of Groan: Nice Celtic vibe with the start of this one too, leading to a great hook at 0:33 that progresses into the game's Baroque style and some up-tempo exploration music. The song name's another odd literal translation: the actual dungeon is named the Groaning Grotto, so named because it's a cave system you're traversing to figure out the source of a monstrous roar deeper within.
- Judgement Time: These next two are special boss themes that only play once apiece. Judgement Time's a little busy but it's already a rousing track with some fun rapid progressions by the time that fantastic hook shows up at the 0:46 mark. I might suggest not reading the comments for that YouTube video if you want to avoid story spoilers...
- Anima Ergastulum: The final boss track. As you might have figured from the ominous Latin chanting. It's solid and certainly sets the mood of what is the typical enormous opponent of near godlike ability, but most final boss tracks in recent Ys games aren't as brain-splodey incredible as you might hope (the exception being the Ys III's The Strongest Foe remastered for Ys: The Oath in Felghana, possibly the greatest final boss track of all time).
- Dandelion's Journey: I'm a sucker for some good relaxing staff roll music, and Dandelion's Journey is a sweet, introspective tune that makes me both sad the game's over and excited for Adol's next adventure, whenever and wherever it may occur.
Log in to comment