Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Best of VGM

Or,

"So You Want To Get Into VGM?"

I just made a post saying how I wasn't going to go through with this. And then I decided to, since I have so many opinions and obviously the internet is ferociously interested in all of them. Actually, it's a way to systemize my own thoughts and maybe provide paltry entertainment for some passersby. Or maybe someone wants to get into VGM but doesn't want to wade through entire soundtracks. Either way.

But, in my defense, it's definitely a very different approach from my rough draft. Before, I was interested in trying to isolate the one best track, the superlative. Now, I'm going to try my best to identify, with a healthy dose of personal taste, the superior.

These tracks are a balance of my personal favorites and the ones I think are the "best" (two distinct but overlapping categories, to be sure).

EDIT:  I added stars. The stars/asterisks notate three (3) from each soundtrack that I would show to people who only wanted to listen to three pieces of music, which is reasonable. It's risky, because you definitely miss some gems if you do that, since I used only personal taste. But it may help some people.

Chrono Trigger:
- Chrono Trigger         - Epilogue ~ To Good Friends
- Frog's Theme           * Guardia Millenial Fair
- Lavos's Theme          - Robo's Theme
- Schala's Theme         - Sealed Door
- Secret of the Forest   * Singing Mountain
- To Far Away Times      - Tyran Castle
* Yearnings of the Wind  - World Revolution

Radical Dreamers:
* Far Promise ~ Dream Shore (1)
* The Girl Who Stole the Star
- Final Confrontation  * Gale
- Sneaking Around      - Frozen Flame


Chrono Cross: ("official translation"... for the record, this is my favorite OST)
- Forest of Illusion          - Drowned Valley
- Prisoners of Fate           - Isle of the Dead

Xenogears:
- Awakening            * Fuse 

- Crash Man         - Title
- Wood Man          * Air Man

Mega Man X:

Mega Man X2: (better track names, worse soundtrack)

Mega Man X3:
* Doppler Stage   - Vile

Final Fantasy IV:
* Golbez, Clad in the Dark
* Mystic Mysidia      - Fight 2

Final Fantasy V: (I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be, so this may be off)
- The Prelude of Empty Skies           
- The Last Battle        - Pirates Ahoy!

Final Fantasy VI: (another top OST)
- (The Opera, "Draco and Maria" / "Darkness and Starlight")
* Dancing Mad (1) (2)- Devil's Lab
- Battle Theme       - Fanfare
- Edgar and Sabin    - Cyan
- Ending Theme       - Shadow
- Mystery Train      - Kefka
- Opening Theme      * Terra
- Slam Shuffle       - Coin Song
- Spinach Rag        - Relm

Final Fantasy VII: (OSTs start getting big... selecting is more difficult)
- Who Am I?           - Who Are You?
- Great Warrior       - Cid's Theme
- Fighting            - Still More Fighting  
- Hurry!              - Hurry Faster!
- The Birth of a God  - World Crisis         

Final Fantasy VIII: (outstanding location music)
- The Extreme          - The Salt Flats
- Balamb Garden        - Cactus Jack
* Force Your Way       * Blue Fields

Final Fantasy IX: (another favorite - great "mood" and soundscape. choosing is difficult due to universal quality)
- Black Mage Village        - Fairy Battle
- Boss Battle Theme         - Battle Theme
* Hunter's Chance           - Quina's Theme
- Amarant's Theme           - Freya's Theme
- We are Thieves!           - Feel My Blade
- Dark Messenger            - Gurugu Volcano

Final Fantasy X: (suffered from conflicting styles)

Final Fantasy XI: (often overlooked, though the quality difference between good/bad is huge)

(FFXII/XIII to come once I better understand them)

Final Fantasy Tactics: (another great -- proof that contrary to FFX's results, composers can collaborate on a unified sound)
- Antipyretic         - Trisection
- Unavoidable Battle  * Apoplexy
- Enemy Attack        - Random Waltz
$ Uh, what?!

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (first game with interactive music. ZREO would add quite a few songs to this list, but I don't really think the orchestration is strong in the original. I also didn't include any of the ocarina tunes; they're all lovely)
* Hyrule Field Main Theme
- Inside Ganon's Castle
- Kakariko Village
- Temple of Time  - Shop
- Zelda's Theme   - House
- Zora's Domain   - Battle
To be continued/edited when I know more soundtracks more thoroughly.
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"Overscoring"

I had some other post about VGM in the drafting process, but it turned out to be kind of a silly venture in attempting to superlative-ize specific tracks, which has never really worked for me.

The longer I sit and listen to try to decide which track from a soundtrack is "best," the more tracks I decide should come in a tie for first place, and in a truly great soundtrack, I end up with more than 15 tracks all vying to be the best track in bunch. And that, I feel, is what makes a great soundtrack great -- cohesiveness, co-reliance, and individual attention to each track.

One thing people like to say about VGM scoring that I find questionable is that good VGM relies on being inconspicuous and "uninvasive." While I think it's certainly important to consider the context of a scene before loading it with bombastic material, I don't think I've ever experienced a game where the music distracted me in a negative way from the game (unless the music was bad, of course -- that's different).

I think the "uninvasive" rule is more important to film than it is to games. In film, everything has its time and everything is synchronized, so if the music is distracting, something else in the plot is likely getting covered up -- unless music and lack of dialogue are the focus, which happens. I have seen films where the music is distracting, though sometimes this is just as much a problem of poor mixing as poor composition ("The Social Network" is guilty here).

Games are different, and to my frustration, I'm not sure that I can articulate how. It might be obvious to people who have played many games.

I do think that with the advent of spoken dialogue in games -- welcome to 1999, Josh -- that mixing becomes more important when dialogue is involved, lest dialogue get "played over." I think games have addressed this. I've also entertained the possibility of switching to a different, "softer" version of a track when dialogue occurs.

So, this has been an unfocused ramble that I didn't even come on blogger to write about, but I ended up writing about it. It happens. Also, the spellcheck refuses to believe that "dialogue" is a word. Strange.

I was going to write about something else, but it's actually a bit too personal for me to want to share it here. So it goes.
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Monday, May 2, 2011

Games as Art; Language

One recurrent theme in my struggles to insist upon other people what they should or shouldn't think is the perceived legitimacy of video games as an art form. I usually don't care what people do or think or what kinds of structures they choose to impose on expression and media in general, but I guess I can't help it when it might affect the type of salary or "importance" I'm afforded while working for games. I won't pretend that, like everyone else, I have a slight fondness for my name being important. Everyone does.

I won't go through the reasons -- if you need convincing you're probably too closed-minded to be "converted" anyway, but I will point out one thing. No one is insisting that all games are art. No one claims that Tetris, Angry Birds, or Microsoft Flight Simulator are art. In the same way, though, no one insists that instructional yoga videos, pornography, or Power Rangers: Dino Force are art. Video games can only be a medium of art, just like film, music, etc. -- in fact, video games contain film and music, so if they are the sum of many pieces of art, from where does the confusion stem?

But I said I wouldn't go that route.

Moreover, it interests me most the language associated with the argument and with the entire situation in general. Let me demonstrate...

People watch films, examine paintings, listen to music, and read literature. Watching, examining, listening, reading. These words sound like things a dignified person does, just as the words film, painting, music, and literature have an innate legitimacy to them that makes them appreciable as something deeper than visceral entertainment. (Even the word "watch" will leave you slightly uncomfortable if you're not a film junkie, as is reasonable -- it's ironic that the very people who insist games are illegitimate are only very recently freed from the expressionless themselves.)

But people play games. Games were invented when they truly had no potential to be more than that -- amusing distractions, meant to be mindlessly enjoyed while you put off important things like watching, examining, listening, or reading. You're just playing those games, and that's all it can ever be.

But as the form evolved, and the capabilities changed, the language stayed the same. People played Tetris, played Mario, played Zelda, played Sonic, played Final Fantasy VII, played Xenogears, played Shadow of the Colossus, played Oblivion and played Mass Effect -- as the level of higher thought involved in "playing a game" increased, the language stayed the same.

Besides the inherent nonsensicalness, discard the denotation of the word "play" and consider only its connotation. Consider the phrase "to play 'Finnigan's Wake.'" Try playing "La persistència de la memòria" or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The word has such a stigma to it that you can't connect it to "real art forms" without creating a dissonance in character. (You can play Inception or you can play Beethoven's Fifth, but the former is a different action unrelated to one's enjoyment of the film. The latter case -- playing music -- can be replaced by the word "perform" in legitimate environments.)


The word "game" has, in history, never referred to anything that a mature human should spend any of his or her time doing. The word "play," except used as a noun in drama, has the same stigma. And the debreviation of game, "video game," makes me cringe. The word "video" in the title has little to do with the definition of what a game is besides that it is typically displayed on a monitor -- but does it have no sound? "Video game" just sounds like the 80's, and maybe that's why some people are stuck in an 80's mindset when it comes to games.

I think the best thing for the industry and for the form would be a change in language, but I can't think of any good alternatives without them sounding terribly euphemistic. Surely, if you called it an "interactive film" Roger Ebert would have a stroke in protest, even if it's the most descriptive term out there.

Maybe there's no great solution. But even if there isn't, I don't think that makes it less of a problem.

(I put a lot of phrases in "quotation marks," it's kind of ugly and overused. But I don't know how else to express that I'm only borrowing a vocabulary, not using it enthusiastically.)
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