11/03/2024, 7:44 AM
i really do think the art of the videogame soundtrack is severely underrated. ever since i was a kid, my dad always told me, "videogame music isn't real music. it doesn't have the same structure, and loops too much!" well, DAD, have you ever played Crazy Taxi? yeah, get back to me when you're done coping with the fact that you said The Offspring, one of your favorite bands, isn't real music. emotional baggage aside, i do love videogame OSTs, and there's even some games that i wouldn't have played otherwise if i hadn't heard their soundtracks first. so today, i wanna go over a couple examples of those. but first, some ground rules.
with those rules set in place, i think it's about time we got started with our first case, and probably the most important of em all: Street Fighter III, specifically 3rd Strike. if you know 3S, it's for one of two things, either Evo Moment #37, or its insanely good soundtrack. composed by Hideki Okugawa in collaboration with Canadian rapper Infinite, the whole OST oozes with hip hop funk and flavor, and it was unlike anything i'd ever heard at the time. i'd probably say this was my first introduction to jungle and DnB, which eventually lead to me getting into Electronic, arguably my favorite genre of music now. the first song i'd heard was Killing Moon, Akuma's Theme, and i was addicted to that track for months. before this, i'd always seen Street Fighter as a generic, complicated fighting game about regular ass guys fighting, and i couldn't figure out how to throw a fireball like the computers did. i was a Smash baby, as unfortunate as it is to say, i didn't know what a quarter circle or frame advantage was. hell, i still don't entirely understand that latter one, but that's besides the point. i'd only seen Street Fighter II and maybe a few snippets of SF4 at this point, and they both looked just kinda... boring to me. but after hearing the SF3 soundtrack and seeing what the game looked like, i was almost instantly hooked. everything was so fresh, so snappy, so smooth! there weren't any of the boring guys from SF2, instead there were all these completely original characters, and weird ones at that! i gravitated towards characters like Twelve, Necro and Q, i loved how insanely satisfying it was to even land a single hit, and oh man, the sound effects! Necro saying "Let's get it on!" or "Outta my way!" have been forever grafted onto my brain, and not to mention the legendary Parry sound effect. and hey, parries are in this game! before becoming a staple in pretty much every tough-as-nails indie platformer trying to become the next Pizza Tower, SF3 was doing the parry thing in 1999, and it's killer here. everyone can do it, and having it be mapped to a simple tap forward on the stick means that even if you're not super great at the game (like me) you'll hit an accidental parry every so often, and it feels great every single time. SF3 is by far my favorite fighting game, and i don't think i'd have ever even considered giving it a shot if not for the banger soundtrack.
as most of you know, i really love the Mother series. the first game is my favorite game of all time, despite its issues, and a large part of my love for the series is the soundtracks. Mother 1 and Mother 2 were both almost entirely composed by Hirokazu "Chip" Tanaka, and the guy is a total trailblazer in terms of Chiptune. he worked on a lot of classic NES soundtracks, such as Metroid, Kid Icarus, Dr. Mario, and of course, Mother. but there was another game he composed for on the SNES that also had a strong relation to the Peanuts, and that's Snoopy Concert. on first glance, this game seems like a really strange... thing. it's a first-party developed point and click minigame collection for the Super Famicom made by Nintendo themselves, and it's a licensed Peanuts game, of all things. on top of that, it wasn't released anywhere except Japan, and is like, really polished and good?? i mean, what less would you expect from a first-party Nintendo game, but they did not need to go as hard as they did here. i first found out about Snoopy Concert through its soundtrack, of course, which is SNES remixes of classic Peanuts tunes from the animated specials. you know, Linus and Lucy, Benjamin, Little Birdie, the works. is it a good time to mention i'm a big fan of the Peanuts? because i am. i had this big anthology of the original comics as a kid, and i've watched the animated specials about ten billion times each. i love Schulz' art style, especially the way he animated, it's unrefined and messy, yet soft and cozy all the same. but back to Snoopy Concert, the first song i heard was Theme of Linus, and i almost instantly thought, "wow, this sounds a lot like Earthbound's soundtrack. i wonder what the rest of it is like?" and then went and listened to the rest of the soundtrack. no less than two hours later, i've already downloaded a rom (with no English patch because i was a dumb kid who couldn't figure Lunar IPS out) and am playing Snoopy Concert with a controller. yeah, i was also too stupid as a kid to figure out SNES mouse emulation, so i settled for the dirty way. i said earlier that this game is a minigame collection, but i don't know if that's quite right. you have three stages where you play as Woodstock, and by clicking (or pressing A) you can tell Snoopy where to go, like a point and click adventure game. Charlie Brown's stage is the closest to that kind of game, you go around town, talking to people, seeing what's troubling them, and trying to find items that might solve their issues. it's a little basic and feels mostly like a list of fetch quests you need to do, but i still find it fun and charming all the same. Schroder's stage has you solving a lot more puzzles, and i think this is where the game shines the most. there's tons of charming scenes whenever you put together a solution, and it's full to the brim with creative and challenging puzzles. then there's Linus' stage, which throws out all of the adventure game DNA and turns the game into a tight 2D platformer. now, i know what you're thinking, a platformer that you control with a mouse sounds fucking miserable, and that's what i thought too. but like... it honestly kind of works??? i said you lead Snoopy with Woodstock earlier, but there's actually more to it than that. double clicking makes Snoopy run, and clicking diagonally from Snoopy's position makes him jump. you preserve your speed when you jump, and it feels super satisfing to build up running speed, jump at just the right time, and just barely make a jump. if anyone could make a 2D point and click platformer featuring Snoopy on the Super Famicom, it'd be Nintendo. if you ask me, Snoopy Concert is a hidden gem on the SNES, and the soundtrack is a huge part of that for me. (personal track recommendations are Theme of Peppermint Patty, Rerun's Runaway Stroller, and Lazy Gym)
before we get into the last game i wanna go into depth with, let's do a quick lightning round of smaller examples. i got super hooked on Shin Megami Tensei IV's big boss theme about 3 years before my big SMT revelation, and i'd guess my prior experience with the OSTs is what pushed me to try the games out. Lisa: the Painful was a similar situation, i was addicted to Boy Oh Boy for the longest time and finally decided to bite the bullet and figure out what this game was all about. turns out, it's one of the best RPGs i've ever played in my life, who'da thunk it? MadWorld on Wii was a game i knew about for a long ass time, but only within this year did i finally check it out, and it's because i heard Look Pimpin'! on SaltyBet, and got so into the soundtrack that i burned it to a CD so i could listen to it in my car. i found Knuckle Sandwich by sifting through Nelward's backlog on youtube and listening to Side Street Step and Back Street Beat a million times. i then ended up following the game's development for like three years, only to discover the two songs i loved so much only played in one specific battle each in the whole game. (the entire game is great though, go play Knuckle Sandwich if you haven't yet, it's like a mashup of Earthbound, WarioWare and Australia, my three favorite things) i'm always embarrassed to tell people how i discovered Space Funeral, one of my favorite games of all time, but i'm a brave demon and i think i can handle finally telling the story: i was rewatching Markiplier's playthrough of Five Nights at Fuckboy's, (yes, really) when i heard a cool song using a double bass, one of my favorite instruments. i sifted through a playlist of the soundtrack on youtube, and while the song i was actually looking for was Faster Does It by Kevin Macleod, i saw another song called One-Eighty-One in the playlist with this weird image of a bloody, green face as the thumbnail. fast forward a few hours and i'm downloading Space Funeral onto my shitty 2013 hand-me-down Acer laptop, and trying to find the RPG_RT.exe for the first time in my life. so yes, i discovered Space Funeral, the game that forever changed my outlook on game development and art as a whole through a Markiplier lets play of a FNaF RPG Maker fangame where Springtrap is angry he didn't get invited to an orgy. life is pain, i hate, etc etc. (cool fun fact though, that game does reference Megaman Sprite Game, officially redeeming it in my eyes)
alright, here's the last big one. around 2021, i was starting to get more into DnB and acid jazz because of the aforementioned SF3 thing, and a friend recommended me a song from a PS1 racing game called Ridge Racer Type 4. the song was called Move Me, and it was unlike anything i'd ever heard before. the whole composition was so complex, there were so many layers, it was fast paced and almost magical, i loved it. i knew i had to listen to whatever else this soundtrack held, so i instantly listened to all of it and fell in love. a couple months later, i watched a friend play through the Grand Prix mode, and realized the game was more than just the music. the menus were so striking, it had all these visual effects i didn't even know the PS1 could do, and there was even a story mode?? and the story mode was good and had interesting characters??? i was surprised to say the least, but i didn't really end up dipping my feet into playing the game until just last month. i dunno, realistic racing games always kinda scared me. i'm good at Mario Kart Super Circuit and CTR Nitro Fueled, put me behind the wheel of a stock car and we'll end up in a ditch somewhere. but finally, in October of this year, i got a physical copy of the Japanese version and that finally gave me the push to check this thing out. and like, it's called one of the best PS1 games of all time for a reason. R4 may be intimidating at first, but once you realize that drifting is as simple as lifting off the gas, tapping brake, and then pressing the gas again, it really starts to melt into your hands. i love the look of this game too, it has some of the most beautiful landscapes out of any PS1 game i've ever seen, especially the stages that take place at sundown. there's all these cute references to Namco's old arcade games sprinkled into every corner, from the different racing teams being based on Pac-Man and Mappy, to there being Dig-Dug animations on the electronic signs at the beginning of each race. it really does feel like a labor of love, and the soundtrack is doing a ton of legwork here. and again, the story mode!! nevermind the fact that it's there in the first place, but the story mode is like, actually really good! i remember especially liking the story of the Pac Racing Club captain, Shinji Yazaki, which i experienced while watching that friend i mentioned earlier, but i also quite liked the story of the R.C. Micro Mouse Mappy team captain, Sophie Chevalier, which is the team i played on for my most recent playthrough. i won't spoil anything, but there is more depth to them than just "oh, we have to win this year, do your best!" and i love that. there's also time trials, which i'm a fiend for as always, a custom logo creator which is extremely funky and cool, and my Japanese copy even came with a bonus disc that has a PS1 port of the original arcade Ridge Racer?? which is so cool??? the game isn't very fun to play but like, it's awesome that it's here anyways??? overall, i love R4, and it's part of a genre that i would have never considered even looking at if not for its banger soundtrack.
so yeah, soundtracks are wicked important. i think they can be that push someone needs to finally check out a game they've had their eye on for a while, or even convince someone to check out a series or game they would have never otherwise. still won't ever get me to play a Sonic game and enjoy it, though.