The Greatest Game Music - Reviews of truly outstanding game music

Dragon Quest III Soundtrack (Nintendo 3DS) – Review

Dragon Quest III Soundtrack (Nintendo 3DS), Koichi Sugiyama, 2017

While its predecessors had been immensely successful in their own right, it was really with 1988’s Dragon Quest III that the venerable franchise turned into a commercial juggernaut. The original NES game itself sold a staggering 3.8 million copies in Japan alone. Add in a few more million copies for the game’s various remakes and Dragon Quest III turns out to be the franchise’s most successful entry (it also spawned an urban myth about the Japanese government blocking future releases of Dragon Quest games on school days to curb truancy). The game itself didn’t revolutionise the JRPG genre, but developer Chunsoft still expanded upon the gameplay of the first two Dragon Quest titles with the introduction of a character class system. This feature would become a staple of future Dragon Quest games.

After Dragon Quest II’s music had been a marked improvement over its predecessor, Koichi Sugiyama returned for the Dragon Quest III soundtrack, further expanding its breadth and diversity. Sugiyama continued to move away from the template he had established on Dragon Quest I, now including a greater number of location-specific compositions (as opposed to using the same composition for each town / dungeon / castle etc.) The NES score’s quality remained somewhat patchy, but the soundtrack also featured several highlights such as the magisterial ending theme “Into the Legend”.

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T2: The Arcade Game Soundtrack (Sega Genesis) – Review

T2: The Arcade Game Soundtrack (Sega Genesis), Matt Furniss, 1993

Game developers certainly didn’t pass up the opportunity to make the most of the blockbuster juggernaut that was Terminator 2: Judgment Day. At the time the third-highest grossing movie worldwide (behind Star Wars and E.T. the Extra Terrestrial), James Cameron’s work prompted numerous video game adaptations. In fact, when Midway Manufacturing Company ported their arcade rail shooter Terminator 2: Judgment Day to home consoles, they had to change its name to T2: The Arcade Game, to differentiate it from the already existing T2 games. That didn’t stop Midway Manufacturing Company from porting the game to as many platforms as possible – even to those that don’t seem like obvious candidates for a rail shooter (the Game Boy?)

The arcade original, with its polished presentation, remains fondly-remembered. The reception of its many ports was fairly varied. The Genesis adaptation fared well enough, with reviewers agreeing it offered a fun opportunity to blast away at robots – as long as you didn’t mind the inherently limited rail shooter gameplay. As was often the case at the time, each port received an original soundtrack – and the Genesis game was lucky enough to be scored by Matt Furniss.

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Terminator 2: Judgment Day Soundtrack (NES) – Review

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Soundtrack (NES), Geoff Follin, 1992

If you take a closer look at the history of movies and their video game adaptations, James Cameron’s 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day emerges as a watershed moment. At the time of its release, T2 became one of the highest-grossing movies of all time worldwide. Its futuristic, action-packed plot and revolutionary visuals made T2 an obvious candidate for a video game adaptation. What’s more, the film was released at a time when the home video game market had diversified and matured, to the point where it could support two console generations simultaneously. The result was a glut of T2-related games, followed soon by numerous titles based on The Terminator. The creators of Terminator 2: Judgment Day were certainly aware of video games’ commercial potential. After all, the film’s end credits finished with a message reading “Play the hit Nintendo game from Acclaim/LJN Entertainment.”

In the end, that game took nearly seven months to arrive, hitting the NES in 1992, with conversions to the Master System and Game Gear to follow. Coming from LJN, few contemporary reviewers were surprised to find the game a frustrating, at best middling affair – although the developers at Software Creations had at least made an effort to follow the film’s story line closely. Where the game really shone was with its soundtrack, penned by Geoff Follin on one of the few occasions where he didn’t share scoring duties with his brother Tim.

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Legend of Mana Soundtrack – Review

Legend of Mana Soundtrack, Yoko Shimomura, 1999

While the 32-bit generation saw a seismic shift in gameplay and graphics design from 2d to 3d, that didn’t mean nobody created pixel art masterpieces during those years. And given how much Square’s 16-bit games had pushed the envelope in the early 1990s, it only makes sense that the company would occasionally return to the art style that had endeared its products to countless gamers. Square’s major forays into 2d gaming on the PS1 were SaGa Frontier 2 and Legend of Mana – and it’s probably no coincidence that both games were produced by Square veteran Akitoshi Kawazu. That probably also explains the non-linear style of RPG gameplay both games tried to pioneer. However, while the lack of a strong central narrative was typical for the SaGa games, it set Legend of Mana apart from its franchise predecessors, reaping strongly divided feedback from gamers and reviewers alike.

There were other aspects of Legend of Mana that found more unanimous praise – particularly its audiovisual presentation, which included gorgeous visuals and one of Yoko Shimomura’s best scores. For Shimomura, working on the Legend of Mana soundtrack was a thoroughly positive experience. One of the reasons for Shimomura to move from Capcom to Square had been her desire to work on a fantasy title – and of course Square’s line-up of high-profile RPGs would be the perfect outlet for that ambition. As Shimomura put it in an interview: “I kept saying I wanted to work on a fantasy and this title finally came around. I really had fun with it. I tried hard to make it fit the style of the game and to express myself!!”

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Ultima VIII: Pagan Soundtrack – Review

Ultima VIII: Pagan Soundtrack, Nenad Vugrinec, 1994

In case the cover art – with its flame-engulfed pentagram – didn’t make it clear enough, Ultima VIII: Pagan was a far darker game than any of its predecessors. From Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar onward, series creator Richard Garriott had turned the Ultima games into explorations of morality. These pioneering titles didn’t reward gamers for the usual monster killing and treasure hunting that governs RPGs – instead Garriott asked players to act virtuously while pondering ethical dilemmas that had no easy answer. Pagan followed the same design philosophy, but added a grim twist. The game’s antagonist – the Guardian – transports the Avatar to his own realm Pagan – a blasted wasteland that is beyond redemption and hope.

What’s worse, winning the game – as in defeating all enemies – will inevitably bring suffering to the people of Pagan. As Garriott put it: “The challenge was that you had to stay true to your core personal beliefs without totally ransacking the place to achieve your ends and work with the system that was there.” Garriott combined this change of tone with a gameplay style previously unseen in an Ultima game. Pagan was an isometric hack-and-slash, not far removed from Diablo, released two years later. Unfortunately, all of these grand ambitions were foiled by publisher Electronic Arts (once again) imposing a punishing project deadline on developer Origin. As a result, the version of Pagan that was released was effectively incomplete. Consequently, Pagan has always been one of the Ultima franchise’s black sheep, although it’s often admired for its daring reinvention of the Ultima universe.

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