Video game music is something that you only really think of if you are a musician, but with a deeper look at it, music can really change the way a game feels. It could be Hollow Knights piano and strings music giving a calm feeling as you walk around the world, but can also be intense and scary when you run into a boss. Or Doom’s heavy metal making you feel like the coolest person ever as you rip and tear throught demons. But one game has recently stood out to me in terms of it’s soundtrack and how it takes the player into account with the music, Octopath traveler.
Octopath Traveler is meant to be a love letter to the JRPGs of old, like Final Fantasy or Crono Trigger, where you play as 8 different characters with 8 entirely different stories, which that alone makes the game unique, usually the characters always have some reason to fight together, but not in this game. But the games greatness is only elevated by it’s great soundtrack, which has recently filled me with a musical inspiration that I haven’t felt for a long time. One of the great things worth pointing out is it’s music leading up to boss fights, depending on which character whose story you are following, one of 8 different songs will play leading up to boss fights. For example, Primrose, the dancer, has a song called For Revenge that plays because her story is about finding the people who killed her father. Or Therion, the thief, whose song is called For Freedom because his story is about stealing back a royal families heirlooms after being shackled with the fools brand, a bangle that marks his mistake as a thief. One thing all 8 of these songs have in common is they are all in both the same key and time, and so is the boss music. The composer does this to seamlessly transition from the scene before the boss into the fight itself with a simple transition piece that leads straight into the boss music. Even when you speed through the dialogue or skip the scene entirely the music will still transition in a clean way. Now when you think about how these 8 character pieces can easily connect right into the 4 boss tracks in the game, that’s pretty amazing when you think about. All of the music in this game is created with the player in mind, when you listen to the soundtrack there is never a concrete ending in the songs, they just start over and fade away, the songs are literally made to loop, and I think that’s awesome. I was recently listening to this soundtrack on a drive up to SF, and as I was listening to it, I suddenly felt a inspiration. My mind started think of ways I could change the song so I could play it, or what a rock version would sound like. My mind was growing with ideas, and it was the most inspired I have felt in a long time, and it felt great
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