Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. Would you believe I wrote this while listening to the FFT soundtrack? Don't say we didn't warn you.

Kinda tired at the moment, but responding to letters always cheers me up. So let's get this thing on the road.

Onward.

I'll ignore that blasphemy at the end of your letter and concentrate on the core truth of your statement - that games will every so often hit on a moment of pure beauty, despite less than perfect graphical resolution or sound quality. The thing is, I think it's slightly different for everyone - I liked Zeal, but I loved the opening forest in Dewprism, the northern lights as seen from the mountain in Soul Blazer, and a handful of other key moments that weren't important plot points, but made just being there made everything else in the game worthwhile.

No argument here. Unfortunately it's been so long that most of the NES's musical library has dropped out of my mind (except for Blaster Master, that game rocked), but not having great instruments didn't make the composers of that era any less skillful.

Of course, the question before us is at what point game music moved from good tunes of mediocre sound quality to being real music, which brings us to our next letter...

Actually, even though I disagree with you I can understand your argument. In a lot of ways I don't think game music has really achieved equality with "real" music yet... and that's ok. Nobody expects the theme from Star Wars to be a Bach concerto, or a tire store jingle to be Sgt. Pepper. There's all sorts of music out there, and not all of it has to be bona fide high art. The vast majority of game music does what it has to do very well - namely, enhance the game without overwhelming it - and we really can't ask for more.

At the same time, I think there's a tendency among gamers to overrate game music because of our emotional attachment to the games themselves. I love the FFT soundtrack, but that's probably because it makes me think of playing the game and experiencing that world when I listen to it. The same goes for many other OSTs. And in the lone case where I heard the music before I played the game, Chrono Cross, I loved the music because it suggested the outlines of a great RPG to me, as much as anything. (In hindsight, the game I imagined was somewhat different from what Chrono Cross turned out to be, which was a little unfair to the actual game.) The point is, I love game music because I love games, and if you took away the one, I'm not sure the other would be there any more. The few times I've played game OSTs for non-gaming friends has tended to confirm this.

This doesn't mean that game music isn't art - I think it clearly has crossed that line recently, with Chrono Cross and Vagrant Story's ambient stuff. But people looking at things somewhat more objectively, as DarkLao is, might see things differently, so don't be too shocked.

Donkey Kong Country fell in between the cracks of my early college years, when I skipped several of the major games that were out at the time. Still, I've heard the music, and it is indeed mighty catchy.

I'd also like to voice my agreement on the FF9 soundtrack coming out. Although this isn't the first time the US has seen a local OST release, it is something that's well overdue considering how popular the game is. We need to get out there and buy this thing, folks, so more such experiments come our way. Comprende?

Don't have a lot to say about this, except that I have a soft spot for the title screen theme in FF4, and fond memories of wandering around Tororia castle's waterways, listening to the great music and talking to the frogs. Good stuff.

Sometimes, rarely, game music will be this good, that it sucks you in and pushes you through the game without you even realizing it. Someone mentioned Silent Hill up top, and there are a handful of other examples as well. But again, I think this tends to be a bit more subjective than not, so what works for one person won't work for everyone... not that I don't want to see more developers try.

I've heard lots of people wondering what the heck is up with Uematsu's love of obvious synth now that we're in the (post) PSX era... but never any decent explanations. I can point out that not all of FF8 sounds artificial, but still, certainly more does than I'd like. On the other hand, can't say much about FF9 since I'm trying to keep myself as spoiler-free as possible about that particular game. Sounds good, tho.

I've had people wandering by tell me the same thing... and then again, I've had people wander by while I was listening to a voice acting passage in Brave Fencer Musashi and run screaming from the room. It balances out, I think.

There's something of a catch 22 in that last statement of yours - technically good game music is stuff that blends into the background and enhances a game without necessarily defining it, but how would you be able to remember how remarkably well it did its job if the whole point is that you didn't notice it?

On the other hand, Saga Frontier 2's excellent sound work was a standout for me precisely because it was such great background music, so perhaps I'm simply dead wrong about this one.

Right, except that even while making tunes that would work as MIDI beeps is certainly a task that demands a lot of musical ability, it's arguably not really "music".

Don't get me wrong, like I said I think some old NES game tunes were great stuff, but I don't think you can claim superiority just because they had nearly nothing to work with. Equality, maybe, but not superiority.

Ah, Actraiser. My personal answer to this column's main question, in case you were wondering. I'm not even going to say that the music itself was all that good - I barely remember the actual tunes. But I do remember the orchestration, which seemed sweeping at the time, and the horns at the beginning, which were simply overwhelming, even hooked up to our old mono TV via an RF converter.

Look, I'm not trying to say that Actraiser itself was great, or anywhere near it, but it was a key game in showing off the differences and improvements between the NES and SNES. Looking back, I'm not sure that Castlevania 4 seems all that much more advanced than Castlevania 3 when compared to the jump from SNES to N64, but Actraiser made it very clear that we weren't in Kansas any more. It, and a handful of other SNES launch titles, made it clear to me that there were great things to be found in the next generation of consoles, and that gaming could go to even greater places if I just stuck with it.

And what do you know, I was right.

Closing Comments:

I'd just like to take a moment note that I got some great feedback from this topic, and to thank Brian and everyone else who's done such topics. I'm very pleased with the way this experiment has worked out, because it often lets us talk about things I might have overlooked but that you folks are still interested in. And the moral of this story is to send in more topics, because I can tell you based on experience that if there's a burning issue you want to talk about, chances are other people do too.

Free topic day tomorrow, see you then. Adios.

-Chris Jones, always disappointed there aren't any dragons to fight in real life when he listens to FFT