Game info: NIER Wiki
Listening/music info: soundtrack album
Info
Speaking of mobile gachas, we’re back again with the NieR mobile gacha! The third and final story arc started in 2023 and concluded in 2024, and SQUARE ENIX finally released the soundtrack album for the arc at the end of last month. The composers from the first two arcs, Keiichi Okabe and Shotaro Seo, returned to once again do the bulk of the soundtrack, though they were joined this time by a third composer from their company, Kuniyuki Takahashi.
I said in my post about the second arc that the reason I’ve been listening to these despite not having a predilection towards these composers or the series’s music is that I’ve been chasing a track as good as “Ikō (Authority)” from the first arc, which unfortunately is a bit of an exception; the rest of the music from Re[in]carnation tends toward very synthy ambient stuff with some fun sound design here and there but otherwise nothing too wacky. But when I listened to the previews for this arc, I got super excited because they changed up the music direction a little bit, opting for similar sound design but slightly more active compositions with prominently glitchy production that generally fall a bit more into chillout territory than ambient.
And it’s pretty nice! For the most part there’s still nothing too wacky going on in most tracks besides the glitching, but I’ll always take glitching to spice things up, and I definitely did enjoy some of the chords here and there. A couple of tracks by Okabe do also approach the minimalism of “Ikō (Authority)” a bit, particularly “Kikkyō (Surprise),” though they don’t get all the way there, alas. The three tracks by Takahashi are jarringly different from the rest, incorporating cathedral choir and organ and therefore sounding much more like imposing JRPG music; I did not especially like these, but they’re there!
Recommended tracks:
-
“Kimyōna Michi (Strange Path)” (Okabe) is one of the cheerier tracks in the game
-
“Yugamu Kotowari (Distorted Logic)” (Seo) is one of the more overtly glitchy tracks and gets nicely tense after the drums come in halfway through
-
“Sokuin (Sympathy)” (Okabe) is one of the minimalist-approaching tracks thanks to the cool mallet percussion figure; the syncopated vocal interjection at 1:20 is fun
-
“Hengai (Endless Beyond)” (Takahashi, orig. Seo, Okabe, & Takahashi) was my favorite of the Takahashi tracks, due mainly to the 3-3-3-3-3-1 part at 1:09
Leave a Reply