RonnieScholtes

0 comments by RonnieScholtes on May 15th, 2013

Hi guys,

I decided to write part 2 of my list of best game OST's. This is not a top 10 or whatever, more a list of soundtracks that have touched and inspired me as a composer.

I noticed I had only listed current gen games the last time, so it's time to retro things up a bit.

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
Harry Gregson Williams is originally a filmscore composer. He was asked because of this. Kojima wanted the game to sound like a movie. Nowadays this is a common thing, but back then, this was groundbreaking stuff. An actual Hollywood composer scoring a game. I love what he did to the main theme, but the entire soundtrack is great.

Final Fantasy X
I love FF soundtracks. Nobuo's work is magical. He writes very recognizable melodies. VII, VIII are great as well, but X holds the most special place in my heart as a game. I also love the piano collections albums. They're in part why I started playing the piano. I'm proud to admit that I mastered 3 of these brilliant reworks of popular FF themes. I really like how subtly the Suteki Da Ne theme has been used over and over in the soundtrack. A friend of mine never noticed this before, probably because there's so much difference in the ways that it has been reused. The theme never gets old.
I like the entire FFX OST, but one of my favorites has to be this one:
 
Alone in the Dark
This has to be one of my all time favorites. The game has been received poorly, which I thought was pretty harsh. Yeah, the game's mechanics don't always work the way you want them to, it gets bugged to the point of frustration, but it had some cool ideas. But what really made this game stand out for me, and made me finish this, is the OST. Epic. Just epic. A Bulgarian choir was used for the choirs, but other than that, I read that this was all electronic. So all of the symphonic sounds were sampled. When I first read that that was possible, it inspired me to start composing that kind of soundtrack too. I always loved the epic sound of an orchestra, but it never occurred to me that MIDI information and a few sample libraries could produce the same kind of sound.