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Games with unique soundtracks

M

MetroidPrimeRib

Banned
Mostly unique in the context of other games, but unique in general across all media is better.

Drakengard 1

Drakengard is a fucking nightmare game and an extremely unique experience. From the story to the main characters to the atrocious and purposefully annoying gameplay to the last couple of chapters, Drakengard 1 is a uniquely nihilistic game that hates the player. But I think the aspect that sells you on the game the most is the music. When I first played the game I thought it was broken. The soundtrack is...macabre, industrial noise. What Nier is to orchestral choirs, Drakengard 1 is to... a rock in a metal trash can? I'm not a musical expert, but to me the soundtrack of Drakengard 1 doesn't seem to follow much of a flow or notation or...anything. Just listen to the first level's music -

Chapter 1 - On The Ground

What the shit? And as the game falls deeper and deeper into depravity so does the soundtrack

Fifth Chapter - Above the Ground, Part 2

Eighth Chapter, On the Ground - Go to 1:55 if you want the real Drakengard OST experience

Ninth Chapter - Closing

Twelth Chapter - On the Ground

'Nam flashback warning - Final Boss theme. If you've gotten to Ending E you know what I'm talking about

Its a weird game but the soundtrack may be the weirdest part. Well besides "The Greatest of Feasts."

Mad World (and Anarchy Reigns)

This black-and-white ultra violent Wii game by a Japanese developer has an extremely good hip-hop soundtrack.

Ain't That Funny?

Look Pimpin!

Survival

Bonus Max Anarchy/Anarchy Reigns tracks -

Here We Go

Kill em All

Quake 1

NiN's Trent Reznor's soundtrack to the original Quake may be the only soundtrack I can think of that is like Drakengard's, at least in sound. Drakengard's is still more broken and nonsensical. The Quake OST is extremely foreboding, claustrophobic and dream-like. Its hard to believe that these tracks are two decades old.

Parallel Dimensions

Hall of Souls

Track 06

Undertale

Undertale's soundtrack may be one of the best ever to begin with. Clearly inspired by Earthbound's soundtrack, it makes excellent use of re-using music either by slowing it down, speeding it up or remixing it. You may not even notice that its doing that, but your brain did.

Nyeh-Heh-Heh + Bonetrousle. Starts off 8-bit then gets better quality, reminds me of Pokey Means Business from Earthbound

Amalgam - I swear to God this track just has Earthbound SFX in it, especially Giygas

Your Best Nightmare

Metal Crusher

Megalovania because we all know thats the best song in the game by far

HONORABLE MENTION - Blue Dragon

Alright I never played Blue Dragon but can somebody explain what the fuck

Boss battle theme sung by the Deep Purple frontman???

HONORABLE(?) MENTION - THE CHOCOBO SONG IN FINAL FANTASY XIII-2

WHAT?
 
Transistor is a must for this thread. How often does something have 2 versions of each song, with or without the beutiful humming of the main character?
 
Good picks. One that's always stood out to me is HEALTH's soundtrack for max Payne 3.

Very bombastic and industrial.

Additionally, Nier asked a lot of its vocalists, including singing songs in an entirely made up language, and in spite of that, it still sounds beautiful.
 
Another one I can't believe I didn't think of first, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Amon Tobin is a trip-hop artist and it's not really what you would expect in a stealth game, but holy shit is it ever effective.

El Cargo
The Lighthouse
 
The Metroid Prime games have that synthetic distortion sound together with a generous use of high piched tones along with choirs that give it a pretty unique sound.

The obvious example is the Title Theme of the first Metroid Prime. But the title themes of Metroid Prime 2 and Metroid Prime 3 are also good examples.

Interestingly despite being that different, all three main titles sound like they're from the same family of songs. Because the music of Metroid Prime sounds like little else... other than another Metroid Prime. Even the remixed songs from other Metroids have that Prime sound.
 
The first Drakengard soundtrack is very unsettling, especially when I first played it, but I loved it.

The whole series had very unique soundtracsk.

The Weapon Selection track is my favorite track on the first games OST.
 
Stuff composed by Hip Tanaka can be pretty weird and unique. Also, there's the soundtracks to Persona 3 and 4 which are unlike most games out there.

Also agreed with Transistor, great pick.

I'd also add the variety of the soundtracks of the N64 Zelda games too. The melodic MIDI tracks transport me to the various areas as soon as I hear them. Kokiri Forest fits Kokiri Forest perfectly and there's no way you'll ever mix it up with some other song. Same goes for pretty much all the soundtrack on both those games really.

Oh and yeah, The Last of Us sounds like nothing else and really adds to that game's tone.
 
Since you're into MMOs MPR (WoW at least) you'd really appreciate the songs from Alexander in XIV, plus the song diversity in XIV in general compared to what Legion has to offer.

If you're currently playing Final Fantasy XIV and don't want to be spoiled on music/the fights, I'd recommend not watching these. This is all from the Heavensward raid Alexander.

Locus, Alexander boss theme


Alexander boss theme 2, Metal

Alexander Floor 8 boss music

Alexander floor 11 boss music, Exponential Entropy

Final Alexander boss theme, Rise
 
MetroidPrimeRib said:
HERESY

WoW has amazing music, just no one notices cuz most people play it on mute

FFXIV does have some godd music tho
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i can't remember a single song from wow other than the hearthstone music and the one night elf area music. all those alexander songs i posted have the crazy departure from what you'd expect from a japanese dev like the madworld/anarchy reigns osts. oops forgot the titan music too which is like a 20 minute song in total because it has 5 different parts that play depending on what phase of the fight you're in.

like, i can name every song in FFXIV but not a single song from wow other than those two (and i don't even remember what the name of the zone that second piece of music plays in is)
 
The soundtracks from Streets Of Rage 1 and 2 are some of the best in gaming. Expectations were high for the third game's OST, which made it all the more shocking that the soundtrack ended up being a huge departure from the previous games' OST's.

Wikipedia said:
The game's soundtrack was composed by Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima, who had both worked on Streets of Rage 2, and features influences from Detroit's hard techno scene which was popular in Tokyo nightclubs at the time of the game's development. For the soundtrack, Koshiro created a new composition method called the "Automated Composing System" to produce "fast-beat techno like jungle." It was among the most advanced electronic music creation technique at the time, incorporating heavily randomized sequences. This resulted in innovative and experimental sounds generated automatically that, according to Koshiro, "you ordinarily never could imagine on your own." This method was very rare at the time, but has since become popular among techno and trance music producers to get "unexpected and odd sounds." The soundtrack also had elements of abstract, experimental, gabber, and trance music.
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A few examples:

Beat Ambiance

Cycle 1

Crazy Train

Inga Rasen

Bulldozer
 
ibyea said:
I don't know if you count visual novels, but I would like to say that When the Seagulls Cry has this great array of electronic soundtrack that I haven't heard anywhere else and has yet to be rivaled.
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zts is a doujin music group that has been doing work for a while now, mostly fan arrangements of famous properties like Fate/stay night, Clannad, Higurashi and other highly-respected visual novels. Their inclusion into Umineko's soundtrack was a really, really good choice because they did a top tier job - their music is the 'face' of Umineko now, thanks to tracks like lastendconductor, worldenddominator, the executioner, and goldenslaughterer.

As for Dai, he also had already worked before with Ryukishi07 doing the music for Higurashi (When the Cicadas Cry) so he was just returning thanks to the previous relationship. Also made great tracks for it, too.

I got exposed to a bunch of new artists thanks to Umineko, which was cool. A bunch of artists that previously did a lot of things like Touhou fan arrangements, like Silver Forest, made appearances with great tracks as well.
 
ibyea said:
I don't know if you count visual novels, but I would like to say that When the Seagulls Cry has this great array of electronic soundtrack that I haven't heard anywhere else and has yet to be rivaled.
Click to expand...

Yeah, there are a ton of interesting examples from VNs.

I personally dig more oppressive sounding stuff like OPs Drakengard mention. Something like Virtue's Last Reward has a nice, weird sort of catchy menace to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC-J8fl0_Ik
 
Hyper Light Drifter. It is a great blend of techno sounds and classic ambiance. It sounds like cyberpunk Ghibli. I love it.


Loco Roco's soundtrack also made an impression on me. Even though it is just gibberish it is still really catchy.
 
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