First off, I'll say up front that this is the only one of the five temple themes in Ocarina of Time to make the list. All of them have their arguments--the Spirit Temple was the last cut, and my music expert friend Seifer swears by Fire Temple, which I didn't care for much. Forest Temple is the one that does the most for me.
It has no impressive melody, or harmony, or beat, and it doesn't want to make you dance, sing, fistpump, or kick somebody in the face, like a lot of good music does. But as atmosphere music it is tremendous. All of Ocarina of Time's music is like that--the soundtrack is full of tunes that don't stand alone very well, but are very, very good at setting the mood. The Forest Temple is strange, foreboding, and treacherous. So is this music.
This is not music you can assign to just any punk boss. It's not even music you can assign to just any non-punk boss. This is music that makes it clear right from the first note that you are in some serious shit. It's assigned to only one boss in all of Final Fantasy VI before the Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Atma Weapon. There's no build-up to the fight with Atma Weapon except a few rumors you heard around town about "a monster bred for mass destruction" and the fact that you're on the Floating damn Continent while Gestahl and Kefka are screwing around with the damn Statues. So you figure you're in for something rough when you get up to the top of that thing.
And boy, are you ever. Atma Weapon is no girly monster. Why exactly Atma Weapon wants to prevent you from interfering with Gestahl seems like a mystery, but it does make sense: he's all about mass destruction after all. Since Kefka (if not Gestahl) is there for the express purpose of wrecking the hell out of the world, it stands to reason that puts him and Atma Weapon on the same team, more or less. Ergo, Atma Weapon lets Team Evil right on by but is not about to let Team Good crash the party.
Then this music plays, and you think: oh shit. And with good reason.
You won't hear it again until you happen upon Atma Weapon's big brother, imaginatively called Atma, who is sitting around minding his own business in a random prison cell in the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. By then, of course, unless you're doing a low level game, you will confront him with a party full of gods and wipe the prison walls with his organs. But still.
And then, of course, the Goddesses themselves get this heart-pumping music. They're just the hors d'oeuvres before you throw down with Kefka. (You won't see THAT music on this list for a while yet.)
Ogre Battle was one of the neatest video games I ever played. I wouldn't call it legendary, and it doesn't quite make my top ten favorite video games ever list, but nonetheless it was awesome, and it was uniquely awesome. It featured a rich story complete with backstory and an ominous future even after you save the world, and events and characters would change substantially depending on your actions as Opinion Leader of the Zenobian Rebellion. But it's not an RPG, not like the various Square classics; it's a real-time strategy game with RPG blended in. Starcraft meets Dragon Warrior, if you will. For 1995, this was all very, very cool stuff. Come to think of it, it's still cool in 2011. Not many names had as much thought put into their story and design as this one. And it's very deep--one of the deepest stories ever, filled to the gills with deceit, betrayal, aggression, compassion, sympathy, and (depending how you play it) corruption or justice.
And the soundtrack fit the various moods of the game very well. This first of two Ogre Battle entries into this Top 50 is the overworld music for winter-themed lands; your enemy is located in the Highlands, and the further you penetrate into Zeteginean territory the more snow you see, and the more you hear this music. The music has a knack for making whatever you're doing sound urgent and inevitable. Perfect for a struggle for the soul of the continent in the snow-smothered Highlands.
Final Fantasy IV really did have awesome, awesome battle music.
This is FFIV's offering in the Major Boss category. And somehow, it manages to be even better than it's all-time-great Minor Boss music. It starts with one of the great opening riffs--that's another list I'll compile sometime, my favorite opening riffs, and this one will rate highly--and remains intense, high-tempo, and aggressive throughout, just like your battles with these Elemental Bastards.
I have no idea what they're really supposed to be called. In the original SNES "Final Fantasy II" they were called the Four Fiends of the Elements, which I read for about a year as the Four Friends of the Elements before I took a level in Hukd Onn Fonix and figured it out. Whichever mp3 I put on my player years ago is called "Battle With Golbeza's Four Emperors," and I've seen them called Lords a few times.
Well, they were all bastards. So the Four Bastards of the Elements suits me fine. Well, except Cagnazzo or however the hell you spell the water guy's name. That guy got his ass handed to him deep-fried courtesy of Tellah's Bolt3. But Rubicante more than made up for it by being, in many ways, a truly magnificent bastard. All in all, they were one of my favorite Quirky Miniboss Squads. (Though, as long as we're invoking tvtropes, Rubicante was really more The Dragon to Golbez, who turned out to be The Dragon to Zemus, and... yeah.) And they have the heart-pounding battle music to back it up.
As far as Very Definitely Final Dungeons go, the Black Omen is unsurpassed in magnificence. It has everything going for it: critical importance to the story, arch-villain at the end of it (the deranged Queen Zeal), the feeling of impending finality, grand architecture, a tinge of weirdness, and above all, the inescapable feeling that this is some major, major shit going on right now.
Oh, and of course the ass-kicking music plays into that a lot.
Oh, and did I mention that if you really want to, you can run this dungeon three times? In the same game. Hey, it's time travel after all.
What was, acceptably translated, called the Black Dream originally was renamed the Black Omen in the U.S. version, for reasons completely mysterious to me. Maybe they thought they'd run afoul of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy, I don't know.
The high-octane awesome that is Rainbow Road has been a Mario Kart staple since the original SNES classic. On the SNES, Rainbow Road was a bitch. No retaining walls anywhere, so the slightest misstep sent you plummeting out of the race, and it was manned by special glowing Thwomps that would not just impede your progress, but would send you spinning. Got a mushroom? Great! Good luck using it without sailing off into the long night or smacking into one of the hyper-Thwomps. Conquering Rainbow Road, and then being able to do so consistently, marked you as a Mario Kart expert.
In Mario Kart 64 it's the exact opposite.
Don't get me wrong; Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 64 is awesome and remains my favorite Rainbow Road in the series. It's very, very long--much longer than the second-longest track, Wario Stadium, which itself is nearly twice as long as the rest of the tracks--and there are giant chomps wandering around to dodge, but after the wackiness that was Yoshi Valley and Banshee Boardwalk, that was a welcome relief. And the track was 100% covered by retaining walls, although there was a gigantic jump where, if you angled it just a little cockeyed, you would sail into oblivion. Difference being that the track was so long you had plenty of time to catch up. Also that if you practiced it a lot--and here "a lot" is defined by "as much as I did when I was a teenager"--you could use the ramp as a massive shortcut. Not that it mattered; the computer guys would run like bats out of hell and catch back up in about a lap anyway.
Yeah. Rainbow Road on Mario Kart 64, like Mario Kart 64 itself, was a lot more fun than I just made it sound. But that might be mostly because of the music. It's damn fun. And it's easily the best Rainbow Road music yet seen.
You'll recognize this as the overworld theme for the World of Ruin, which you listened to for many, many hours while you were flying about and/or level-grinding in Jurassic Park. Actually, the first World of Ruin theme--you might say the real World of Ruin theme--is the haunting riff you hear as soon as Celes steps off the remarkably durable raft on the mainland. That track is just pure despair. Emptiness. A world of nothing but tumbleweeds.
You get your first taste of Searching For Friends, of course, when Setzer leads you aboard the Falcon, and the music is very appropriate for the moment, and indeed for the rest of the game after that moment, for which it serves as the theme song. It's morose, but it's hopeful. It's serious, but if you listen closely it's just a tad optimistic. Just like most of your World of Ruin game, as you slowly re-accumulate your team and gain uber-god powers. (Kefka gained his godlike powers by messing with the Goddesses; you gain yours by beating up dinosaurs and stuff while he sits around and watches.)
I'm not a big fan of most overworld music because it gets old fast, but this one is a no-doubt classic.
