So I've spent the majority of my weekend playing The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, and it has a lot of great music.
I was in one of the dungeons and it had some pretty incredible, elder god tier dungeon music that I was constantly forced to chop up and stop by the strong B+ of a battle theme the game has.
This is a prevalent issue in many JRPGs, repetitive use of battle themes cutting into a song you'll only get to hear one time (usually cause it's only used in a single area). The constant switching of tone because they need to have a hype battle theme for when you are fighting, even if its the same one over and over. Just about every JRPG has this issue, and I find it infuriatingly easy to fix: just let the dungeon music keep playing, and stop ruining the momentum of your tone.
Tales of Zestiria, localized into english last year, was one of the first games I noticed that made a conscious decision to not play the battle theme over and over in very specific areas in the game, notably only when Go Shiina's music came up (talk about the team shitting on Sakuraba's tunes, geeze). They just let the dungeon music play over battles and not get constantly chopped apart, and they made for my favorite JRPG moments in the past few years. It was that simple, it felt fucking great to not have to listen to a new song every 25 seconds.
All I ask is that games in the future give us an option to not use the battle theme, maybe allow me to feel the grandiose wonder that the dungeon theme inspired for longer than 15 seconds.
I was in one of the dungeons and it had some pretty incredible, elder god tier dungeon music that I was constantly forced to chop up and stop by the strong B+ of a battle theme the game has.
This is a prevalent issue in many JRPGs, repetitive use of battle themes cutting into a song you'll only get to hear one time (usually cause it's only used in a single area). The constant switching of tone because they need to have a hype battle theme for when you are fighting, even if its the same one over and over. Just about every JRPG has this issue, and I find it infuriatingly easy to fix: just let the dungeon music keep playing, and stop ruining the momentum of your tone.
Tales of Zestiria, localized into english last year, was one of the first games I noticed that made a conscious decision to not play the battle theme over and over in very specific areas in the game, notably only when Go Shiina's music came up (talk about the team shitting on Sakuraba's tunes, geeze). They just let the dungeon music play over battles and not get constantly chopped apart, and they made for my favorite JRPG moments in the past few years. It was that simple, it felt fucking great to not have to listen to a new song every 25 seconds.
All I ask is that games in the future give us an option to not use the battle theme, maybe allow me to feel the grandiose wonder that the dungeon theme inspired for longer than 15 seconds.