Ask: What’s a game song seemingly much longer than the context required?

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melos asked:

What’s a game song that surprised you from being a lot longer than you would expect it to be in its context? An example for me would be Akumojo Castle: Outside, from Contact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6C9jeDXjww. IIRC the area was quite small but the song is like 8.5 minutes or so.

One of my favorite soundtracks from 2021 was Nymph’s Tower, a short, free Metroidvania I just happened to run across while browsing tags on itch.io. The music was done by Marek Poliks (Muxer), a composer who does a lot of experimental work with art installations and electronic synthesis/manipulation and algorithmic composition and the like, and whose stated goal for his work is “to invite people into material experiences of alien environments.” His soundtrack for Nymph’s Tower is really stark, corroded, yet beautiful ambient noise, with a lot of tracks having 4-5 minute loops. My favorite song from the game is this theme that plays during an autoscrollery boss that only takes a minute or two to defeat, so you’ll never hear even half of it unless you intentionally stall by refusing to kill the boss:

The abrupt loop at 4:40 is accurate to how the piece loops in-game; all of the music just loops back to the beginning, regardless of whether it was designed to loop, so this isn’t even the most jarring example. It makes me think that the composer just sent a bunch of music over and the developer just used it without a whole lot of back-and-forth, which would explain why there are other tracks that go on for a lot longer than is strictly necessary; the biggest “offender” is the main menu theme at the top of the post, which is five whole minutes for just a new game/continue/options screen(!!!)

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