My Favorite Video Game Music, #2: For The Savior

#2: For The Savior

Lufia II

It was an endless, brutal journey through danger after danger, all the way to the end of the earth, but you endured, you fought through the pain and despair, and you've done it. You have defeated the Sinistrals and saved the world--but at a devastating price. Your wife, mortally injured in the battle, has just died in your arms. The Fortress of Doom is collapsing around you. You refuse to leave her side; your friends have teleported to safety and you, savior of the world, are left alone to die in the wreckage.

But Daos, Master of Terror, is an evil bastard, and with his last gasp he sent the airborne fortress careening on a course that will cause it to crash on, and destroy, your hometown--where you and your beloved wife's infant son sleeps.

You have one chance to stop it, to alter the crumbling island's course. You have three minutes to live. You'll never hear the accolades or the thanksgiving for saving the world from the Sinistrals, but that doesn't matter anymore. One thing matters.

You rise from your knees, your hands and armor stained with her blood. If you can't get there in time, the last of her blood will be gone forever. Three minutes.

This music encapsulates the flavor of that scene, one of the most heart-wrenching in any storytelling medium, so perfectly it gives a man chills. Triumph. Determination. Desperation.

My Favorite Video Game Music, #4: Dancing Mad

#4: Dancing Mad

Final Fantasy VI

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the granddaddy of all Final Battle themes. One Winged Angel was a phenomenon, but Dancing Mad will probably never be topped.

Of all the great RPG's I've played, Final Fantasy VI feels the most epic. 'Epic' is a word you see thrown willy-nilly around the internet these days, but when I invoke it here I am using its classic meaning: grand and deep both in scope and impact; a long, involved and life-altering journey. By that definition, no game's story carries the weight Final Fantasy VI's does. And it all culminates with--and I mean this both in the classic sense and the internet sense--an epic final battle accompanied by epic music.

I think the second-longest piece on this list, not counting loops, is yet to come; it's about five and a half minutes long. Dancing Mad is three times that length, or about twice that length if you discount the fact each of the first three movements is played through twice.

Which brings me to my next item: This music comes in four distinct movements, which you will see called 'tiers' since they correspond to the four tiers of your fight against Kefka. Each has its own distinct flavor: the Face/Arms tier is menacing, the Four Parts tier is relentless and oppressive, the Hit/Girl tier is dark and spiritual, and the Kefka tier is powerful, out of control and insane. All the music falls into place. This is the closest thing to a bona fide symphony video game composers have ever assembled. Listened to in whole, the effect is tremendously impressive. Like Final Fantasy VI.

Consider the general story flow of Final Fantasy VI. You start out as the loosely-defined leaders of an underground resistance against the Evil Empire (yes, they're just called the Empire) led by Emperor Gestahl, who is swiftly and bloodily conquering the world with Magitek, machines infused with magic power drained from Espers, mythical creatures made of magic. Against Magitek no army has a prayer of standing. Gestahl is supported by three powerful generals who are kind of aligned against each other on the Magitek spectrum: Leo, Honorable Warrior Extraordinaire who refused to be infused with magic; Kefka, who happily accepted the magic transfusion but went semi-crazy and started dressing like a clown and generally became a very loose cannon; and Celes, who wasn't given the option but instead was infused with magic as a very small child, and who eventually goes rogue and joins/arguably takes leadership of the resistance.

I mean, right there, even if you'd never heard it before, you'd have to agree that's a hell of a basis for an epic story, right?

And so it is. Your Returners spend the first half of the game struggling against the Empire--and making use of Espers and magic themselves in doing so--and generally finding mixed success. But Gestahl proves a very wily opponent indeed, and successfully tricks the Returners into walking into an ambush right in his own capital city, resulting in the slaughter of pretty much all of them except your party of PCs. After which Gestahl reaches his ultimate goal: meddling with the statues of the three goddesses that created the world, the source of the very power of creation.

At which point a monkey wrench gets thrown into Gestahl's grandiose plan: Turns out Kefka had world domination plans of his own and Gestahl doesn't fit into them. And it also turns out Kefka has been studying. He knows a lot more about the Statues than Gestahl does. As soon as they find said Statues, and just as your party arrives to try to save the day, Kefka whacks Gestahl, tosses his dying body off the Floating Continent a couple miles up in the sky, and starts moving the Statues around. Which results in ripping the world apart and rearranging it pretty much at random.

You can guess why the rest of the game is called the World of Ruin.

So you flash forward a year, and then spend the rest of the game, starting with Celes, reassembling your party that was scattered to the winds to form one desperate assault on Kefka, who now is both certifiably insane and a god. Literally. Most Big Bads think they're gods or aspire to be gods, but this is the only game other than the Lufia games I know of where you are actually expected to fight and defeat a god.

So anything less than truly epic music to accompany your battle against a god would be disappointing. Final Fantasy VI does not disappoint.

My Favorite Video Game Music, #5: One Winged Angel

#5: One Winged Angel

Final Fantasy VII

Had I published this list ten years ago--and every track on this list was extant ten years ago--I would likely have been criticized for rating this track as low as #5. I might have gotten away with rating it #2. But mostly people would have expected it to be #1. That was the height of FF7-mania and Sephiroth-mania, and one of the big reasons Sephiroth got to be as popular as he did was this music.

There has never been a more popular piece of video game music in its own time. One Winged Angel was probably the first video game music to be so popular it got noticed outside the video game world. Remember how I speculated Bloody Tears (#13) may have been remixed more times than any video game track in history? If anything beats it out in remix count, it's this track. One Winged Angel launched (or, perhaps, re-lauched) a vogue in Ominous Latin Chanting that lasted a while and was seen in numerous big-budget films. (For a superb example of Ominous Sanskrit Chanting, check out the climactic fight in Matrix Revolutions.)

This music was something brand new to the video game world; that was a lot of its charm. It rolled hard rock, opera and brass into an ass-kicking package; virtually everyone that played it (on the Playstation; the music in the PC version of FF7 sucked) was blown away. It's not even that the final battle in Final Fantasy VII was tremendously great in itself; really it was pretty anticlimactic even by Final Fantasy standards, you beating the tar out of hapless ol' Safer Sephiroth and the battle mostly being slowed down by his various long-execution attacks so you can enjoy the music. But oh man, the leadup to that final confrontation: the opening horns and drums of this music blaring as the Kefka ripoff One Winged Angel himself descends to do battle with you. There has never been anything better for instant heart-pumping... with possibly one exception (still to come on this list).

But now it's 2011, and I am likely to be criticized for ranking this music far too high. Because no music was ever more popular, and that means no music ever suffered more from It's Popular Now It Sucks backlash. Especially in Internetland--and you probably noticed that there is a lot of overlap between Gamerland and Internetland--nobody wants to be seen liking what everyone else likes. It's a rule in Internetland that you have to be at least as unique as everyone else. That means you have to like stuff that isn't popular, preferably stuff most people have never heard of. (Find a movies forum and witness how 75% of the posters turn up their nose at all Hollywood films and seek out European or Asian movies that are obscure even in Europe or Asia to heap praise upon. And also how 90% of them are pissed off I just used 'film' and 'movie' interchangeably in the previous sentence.)

So now One Winged Angel is overrated. One Winged Angel being overrated has become so universal that it is now comfortably underrated. It is epic music, it was groundbreaking music in its time, and above all, it stands up extremely well today. It is by far the trophy winner in the category of "best video game music for a baseball closer to have blaring on the sound system as he walks to the mound to finish a close game". (For your reference, the most iconic rock songs that closers have actually used are Hell's Bells and Enter Sandman.) The message this song would send to opposing hitters can't be mistaken: I am a complete badass and you are doomed. Plus the lyrics would be good for your ass-kicking closing image. Burning with vehement anger and all that.

My Favorite Video Game Music, #17: Pokey Means Business!

#17: Pokey Means Business!

EarthBound

Ladies and gentlemen, I present the greatest track in video game history whose title includes an exclamation point.

EarthBound does an exceptional job of priming you for the ultimate confrontation with Giygas. Most RPG's I can think of don't make clear who the Big Bad is until you're at least a little ways in; EarthBound throws him at you in Chapter One. Whereas Lavos is a distant disaster you're trying to prevent, Kefka is an evil god you're trying to reach high up in his tower to dethrone, and it's been almost 15 years and we still don't really know what the hell Sephiroth's deal was... Giygas is an ever-present malevolent force throughout EarthBound. The game reminds you of this in several unusual ways, notable among them in straight text after you drink some drugged coffee or tea (no, really). "Your enemy is also struggling." "You are drawing near to Giygas."

And when you finally reach Giygas and are confronted by his twisted henchman Pokey (or perhaps more properly, Porky)... well, there are several video games in which you fight an alien. Your encounter with Giygas is by far the most alien of them all. There's no contest. It's eerie, it's upsetting, it is frankly terrifying.

And enter this music.

At first you think, especially if you played Mother, "huh. 8-bit music in the final battle." And indeed it's very good 8-bit music with a certain haunting quality to it. Then you get about 50 seconds in, and it kicks your ass. Alien thrash metal, ladies and gentlemen, and if you listen carefully you'll notice it's set to a similar beat to many other tracks in the game. Good soundtracks are like that.

This is only the first of four stages of your fight with Giygas, the all-mighty idiot, whose own mind was destroyed by his incredible power. The background noise gets creepier in every phase, but it can't really be counted here since it's not really music.

The endgame of EarthBound was magnificently done and remains unsurpassed.

My Favorite Video Game Music, #24: Last Battle

#24: Last Battle

Chrono Trigger

This is it. You've fought your way through countless dungeons, past myriad abominations and Evil Overlords, and even across millions of years of time. Your heroics have been accompanied by more awesome pieces of music than you can count. You have finally shown Lavos who's boss--perhaps by crashing your DeLorean into it at approximately 250,000 miles per hour and somehow surviving--only to discover the real Lavos was deep inside, a hideous cycloptic alien monstrosity with appropriately awesome Final Battle music. You bashed its brains in.

Only to discover that was actually just a giant alien mech, and, no, really, the real Lavos, the Lavos Core, was inside that. And just so you know this time it's really real, the Lavos Core sends you spiraling through an insane mishmash of time warps while it makes its last stand, its final attempt to kill you so it can get back to being Devourer of Worlds.

You have to admit, that is really damned epic. And it requires an epic piece of music to accompany such a battle for the fate of time itself.

And it got an epic piece of music.

My Favorite Video Game Music, #26: Billow Of The Dark

#26: Billow Of The Dark

Ogre Battle

As far as final battles go, you just don't get any more sinister than Ogre Battle's. And it has the music to match.

The final boss, the Big Bad of Ogre Battle, the one guy you have to defeat to prevent the destruction of the world, is--wait for it--Satan.

No, seriously. Satan.

Technically he's called "Diablo" in the U.S. version; that's the Spanish name for Satan. There is no question who "Diablo" is supposed to represent. The presumed Big Bad, Rashidi, with his Dragon, Gares, take off at the very end of the game to a super-secret dark temple where you have to race to track them down (OK, not really; you can take forever if you want, but the story makes it clear you're supposed to hurry) before they summon Satan. Which they're doing pretty much out of spite, because they're pissed off the Rebellion showed up and authoritatively kicked their asses. Stay classy, Rashidi.

Anyway, you might expect--I did--to show up just in the nick of time and deliver one final beatdown to Rashidi--but no! You don't show up in time, and you show up just in time to confront Satan.

This is the theme music, then, for your battle with Satan. And it works. The music is, simply put, very evil, and very intense.

Incidentally, if you use an appropriately pumped up unit and bust out your full deck of Tarot cards, Satan is kind of a pushover. But then, everyone is, by that point in the game.