Game info: Wikipedia
Music info: VGMdb
Info
Suppose I should listen to this thing in full if I wanna post something from it in the midyear VGM roundup. Whoops, I spoiled it! Anyway. I watched a friend play through a lot of this game so I heard a lot of the music a few months ago, but with sound effects and voices on top, and besides this game has entirely too much music so there’s a ton I never heard or just don’t remember. I mean, do you really need more than ten hours of music in one video game by like thirty different people??? Get real.
It is a good soundtrack, though. Like, anything with both Masashi Hamauzu and Mitsuto Suzuki on it is probably going to be a good soundtrack, and this one definitely is. Generally it’s orchestral with various amounts of electronic bits, varying in quality a bit from contributor to contributor so some of it’s not super distinct (especially given repeated quoted themes) and some of it is exceedingly great. Since this is a long video game with a bunch of different locations and approximately 1,000 different minigames, there is a lot of other music too, most prominently jazz but also electronic pop, chiptune, yee haw howdy western cowboy stereotype music, and so on so forth.
Like with the previous game, FF7 REMAKE, I went into this expecting to most consistently like the contributions of Masashi Hamauzu, a great orchestrator, sound designer, and chordsmith who’s never written a bad piece of music in his entire career, and Mitsuto Suzuki, who’s not too bad at chords himself and uses all the best synths in the world, and somehow gets away with writing significantly more electronic music than everyone else. And like REMAKE, that did hold true, though I’d say I liked Hamauzu’s pieces a little less than last time and Suzuki’s a little more.
A few folks I’m much less familiar with who I’d love to shout out:
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Shotaro Shima returned from REMAKE and was again one of the biggest contributors; while I find him a bit hit and miss, his music is always solidly orchestrated and produced and when it lands for me it can be really cool
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Ryo Furukawa I could usually count on to have good chords in his very serious orchestral music
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Yoshinori Nakamura I don’t remember really liking in REMAKE but he did a great job here, he did some orchestral and jazzy and electronic tracks that I all thought were very good
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Junnosuke Usui is a newer sound guy at SQUARE ENIX who’s mostly in SFX/technical roles and this is seemingly the first game he’s written more than one piece of music for? He had maybe the widest stylistic range of any single person on the soundtrack and some of those pieces were quite nice
They did the same thing with this soundtrack that they did with REMAKE, which is that the soundtrack is very easy to get digitally overseas, except that the final disc is exclusive to the physical release. Which is kind of vexing, but they gotta incentivize those physical sales. The music on that disc is from minigames and side events, so stuff that’s not of the utmost plot importance, but a lot of it rules and that has importance.
Recommended tracks:
Going with maybe an excessive number of tracks this time to show off a bit of the breadth of the soundtrack and music team. I suppose I could’ve cut down on the Mitsuto Suzuki a bit (this was never an option). Tracks where the artist is marked with an *asterisk are arranging/quoting something originally by Nobuo Uematsu from Final Fantasy VII or earlier.
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“Another Buster Sword” (Masashi Hamauzu) is some pretty classic Hamauzu
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“Subterranean Grind” (Shotaro Shima*) has a good clanking sound that shows up a couple of times
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“Mark of a Traitor” (Masaya Tsunemoto*) has some sick growly bass and a great chord part at 0:52
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“The Chocobo Cup – First Call” (Junnosuke Usui) gets pretty good at 1:09, reminiscent of older Final Fantasy music by like Hitoshi Sakimoto or someone
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“Cosmo Observatory” (Ryo Furukawa*) starts off with my favorite Furukawa chords of the soundtrack
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“Village of the Gi” (Mitsuto Suzuki & Nozomi Toki, arr. Suzuki) has the peak Myst-core sound design
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“Forgotten Specimen” (Mitsuto Suzuki) is my favorite battle theme in the game
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“The Turks – Tseng and Elena” (Yoshinori Nakamura*) is an explosion of jazz in 7/8
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“The Gold Cup – 2nd Leg” (Kengo Tokusashi*) got in my polymeter quota for the soundtrack
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“Galactic Saviors – Fate of the Universe” (Mitsuto Suzuki) is one of the shmup throwback tracks from the shmup throwback minigame
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“Beck’s Badasses – Sneakin’ for Meat” (Naoyuki Honzawa*) is some pretty nice drenched lo-fi
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“Gotta Walk On” (Mitsuto Suzuki & muyu/Nayuta Tamura) mixes enka-style vocals with a really quirky electronic instrumental that’s unusual for this style, it kinda reminded me a bit of Splatoon actually
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