SilverTrinity Rants About Video Game Music - BlazBlue

I've been playing BlazBlue a lot recently, and can tell you that there is more depth to this than there is to a lot of other fighting games. Whether SFIV is one of those, I'm not sure, but regardless, this ranks among my top 3 fighting games ever. If anybody's played and liked Guilty Gear, don't shy away from picking this up; it's awesome.

And so is the game's music. Much like Guilty Gear before it, the soundtrack in this game is heavily rock-inspired , yet still somehow strongly diverse among the 12 character's themes. Except for Taokaka's and Tager's themes, all the character tracks have an electric guitar accompanied by whatever fits the character (Rachel's theme has an organ and Hakumen' s sounds Asian, for example).

Now, usually, I don't approve of the game's music being too rock-heavy, or too biased into one any one genre, for that matter. but the action gets intense during play, and it fits that so well. As for the remainder of the tracks, they take on a much less bring-the-pain role. The intro has Japanese lyrics (joy of all joys -_-), and the main menu is actually pretty good and catchy, unlike a certain recent fighting game that I won't be playing for a while.

The song I'm most pleased with in the game is actually a lyrical piece that only plays when my favorite character (Bang) activates his Distortion Drive. This song right here can motivate a paraplegic to run a marathon, it's so good. It can motivate you to run outside in a snowstorm and DODGE SNOWFLAKES, it's so good. It can make you want to die, come back from the dead, and AVENGE YOURSELF, it's so good.

But I digress. Though it may not work for some anti-rockers, it's actually really good in terms of production and arrangement.

SilverTrinity's Score: 8.0 / 10.

SilverTrinity Rants About Video Game Music - Street Fighter IV

As there is not much else to do at this time of day but listen to music and chat with my buddies on MSN/AIM/what-have-you, I was doing just that when all of a sudden fellow Psychotic Gaming member Scykoh sends me an IM telling me that he sent me an invitation to be an author on his new blog. So, thinking about what I could blog about from one bad idea to another it occurred to me that I should express my opinions about something I'm knowledgable about.

Right off the bat, the first thing I thought of was my taste in music, for I prefer (In contrast to Scykoh's incoherent drivel) to hear the tunes of my favorite videogames over that of "real" music. As that's all I really listen to anyway, and as not many people favor VGM over other genres of music, I decided to have an episodic blog about various games, past and present, in which I critique their soundtracks.

The first installment of this frequent rant is about one of my favorite games of all time, for sure: Street Fighter IV. After a long hiatus since its last numbered entry in the series, it easily proved that this old series still has it, easily making my Top Game of '09 (Take that, Modern Warfare 2!) and redefining itself as a series. I can't wait until Super Street Fighter IV comes out; it's all Dee Jay, man, watch out.

HOWEVER!

As much as I enjoy the game and the series as a whole, I am displeased to say that the soundtrack in this game is somewhat lackluster. The majority of the stages (Except for the Training Stage, which is awesome) have these generic kind of synth-heavy tunes that are largely forgettable the instant you put the game down. There are 4 pairs of stages that actually use extremely slightly tweaked versions of the same song. C'mon, now.

The tracks in this game are a nausea-inducing, half-techno, half-crap hybrid that make me want to play (thanks to the beauty of the Custom Soundtrack feature) my good ol' Third Strike soundtrack over that of the game's. And I do. Because it's bad.

Now, that's not to say that every single track in this game is bad. There are indeed a few tracks that stand above the rest of the pack for me, and most of them are in the form of the remixed versions of the existing tracks in previous installments.

Ryu, Sakura, Guile, Chun-Li, Cammy, and Zangief all have wonderfully done renditions of their past theme songs. 4 of the fresh new faces in the games- Abel, Viper, El Fuerte, and Seth - have nice, fresh stuff to bring to the table. Akuma and Gouken basically have 2 halves of the same theme, but they're nice nonetheless.

The only problem is that these tracks only play during Rival Battles or the online lobby. Bad move.

Now, I have one more beef I have to address before I give a score. Everybody knows what it is, everybody has their own opinion towards it, and I repect that. But, I must be honest. THE INTRO/MAIN MENU THEME in this game makes me absolutely sick to my stomach. It's a completely and utterly terrible piece of music. In English and Japanese, the beat is grating, the lyrics are irritating, and it doesn't fit. If this load of crap taints the sanctity of my main menu on Super Street Fighter IV, you can count me out, Capcom. Ugh.

All in all, I don't think it really fits with the game too well, it's forgettable, and while it has its high spots, it has far more numerous bad spots.

SilverTrinity's score: 6.0 / 10.