Have We Already Witnessed the Best?
 

I have a simple question: Have we already witnessed the best that VGM has to offer? Is there any room for improvement?

I'm sure there are some that would argue that the medium's origins especially thrived, and the best qualities of those times are now lost in an emphasis on sample quality and a drive toward orchestral, movie-like soundtracks. And I'm sure there are others who feel the bleeps and bloops of the chiptune days are best left in the past, replaced with a wider diversity of talent and a more varied soundscape.

So where do you fall? Is the best still to come? Has it already occurred? Or perhaps we're enjoying the golden age of the medium right now.

How the hell can anyone realistically state that a golden age has come (and perhaps gone) in a medium this young?

Seriously.

If you are conservative then the Golden Age is perpetually behind you.

VGM is not a medium, just as it's not a genre. At best, you can say that particular formats or hardware were a medium (SID, S-SMP, etc.), but contemporary VGM isn't appreciably different from music you'd listen to anywhere else. So you're basically asking, "Has the golden age of ALL MUSIC passed?," which is a pretty silly question.

You forget that we have entire subforums devoted to people who believe they have an affirmative response to this question

There are only 12 intervals on the chromatic scale, although you can have different octaves and durations. I personally wonder how long it is before you eventually exhaust original musical motifs, mathematically speaking.

For example, when I first heard the tune of "The Colour of the Summer Sky" in Secret of Mana, I thought Kikuta was totally ripping off the chorus of Menken's "A Whole New World".

I don't know much about combinatorics, but it's easy enough to find the number of unique combinations of 12 tones, given n notes to work with: it's just 12^n.

4 notes = 12^4 = 20,736 unique melodies
5 notes = 12^5 = 248,832 unique melodies
6 notes = 12^6 = 2,985,984 unique melodies

And so on.

Yes, but you have to take into account that the same melody can be expressed in many different keys.

For example:

C D E F G is melodically the same as
D E F# G A,
E F# G# A B,
F G A Bb C+, and so on.

And one might argue the vast majority of those 3 million 6-note combos are rubbish :)

If you're worried about that, you could calculate it in terms of intervallic leaps. There are 12 intervals, and n-1 "gaps" for a sequence of n notes, so it would be 12^(n-1) instead. I think that's right, anyway.

In any case, you're probably correct about the amount of rubbish.

The thing is, you can always have notes that are repeated in there, so that increases the number of notes indefinitely.

Well really, there are too many nostalgia purists when it comes to video game music. The same can be said for video game fans themselves, sure; but particularly for music, a person won't ever be satisfied if they're always comparing things from now and the future, with the stuff from the good ol' days of yore. You know, days including that time you climbed the tree in the nearby park all the way to the top, or when you got to eat a whole bowl of ice-cream for dinner, or like the first time you listened to 'Liberi Fatali'.

It's not worth ruminating over it too much. You should just try your hardest to embrace music while appreciating music from the past, and not just using it for strictly evaluative and comparative purposes.

Of course you could be interested in the history of video game music. But devoting so much time to music of the past won't do the adventurous side of your musical palette any favours. In answer to your question however: as long as there are melodies, there will be music. Of varying quality absolutely, but whether replicating things from the past or creating something new, we'll always be entertained to some extent.

if you're bored with normal VGM, maybe you should try out h-game music or something

Zerg already mentioned Kikuta above ;)

I'm actually going through my first ever purge of music from my collection. I'm a huuuuge game music fan (I used to run a radio show dedicated solely to it during college, and ran a bigmog.com-like website to get more game music out there).

Over the last 10 years, I've amassed about 10GB of various specific game music mp3s - these are individual handpicked songs, I don't keep full albums around, just the songs I really like. I'm going through now and getting rid of songs that don't do anything for me anymore, and the carnage is surprisingly high.

The process is making me painfully aware of how much the emotion of particular games, and the easy attachment you give out when young, influenced my musical tastes at the time. Don't get me wrong, I'm keeping plenty of awesome game music, both old and new, but I cringe at some of the songs I remember showing to people when I was younger to try to get them to admit that game music has merit. I can do a better job now at recognizing more "objectively" good game music precisely because I have more emotional distance.

I guess this isn't really a direct answer to the original poster's question, but it's on my mind right now, so I thought I'd share.

Many of my favorite tracks come from the last 5 years of VGM releases. There's still good stuff out there, it's just different, and sometimes harder to find.

However, I will admit a lot of popular games are following a disturbing trend of overly-ambient music. Sometimes omitting music entirely (e.g. Shadow Complex, where 90% of the game is played in silence). And when music is noticibly present, it's usually dull orchestral filler that tries to make the game more "cinematic".

... you know that's the problem with about three-quarters of American VGM, right? American VGM composers (on the whole) are as following: film music composers doing a side job, a composer looking to break into film scoring by doing something "easy," or someone who wants some easy cash by writing some horribly muddy shit. Not everybody is Virt who at least cares about where VGM has come from in the past.


And let's not even get started about the number of American games that rely on licensed songs to pad out their music.

I look at it this way: For me to pick up a game nowadays and be amazed enough by the music to want a soundtrack for it is an extreme rarity. In contrast, this was never an issue back during the 8, 16 and 32 bit eras, where it happened on a seemingly weekly basis.

I also look at this way: The current gen is full of composers that I either used to really to enjoy and I feel have either burned out or just stopped trying or...well, when a company like Square -long known for its' guild of quality composers- has a talentless hack like Takeharu Ishimoto among the ranks as one of its' primary composers working on one of its' most renowned franchises (seriously...this dude couldn't even get Dissidia right, which should have been a dream soundtrack for everyone involved), it does make a bit of a statement about the current composer scene. Overall, my attitude towards game music has shifted from quality releases being at least 50/50 to more like an extreme rarity or sweet tributes to the past (Yuzo's Etrian Odyssey, Contra 4, Rockman 9, etc) when they actually happen. And...yeah, I wasn't going to bring up the subject of American VGM at all, but I definitely agree with wf's post above on that front. OUCH!

One thing is pretty non-debatable though: The golden era for arranged albums is definitely passed. Way fewer in number and listening to stuff like King of Fighters 2003 Arrange, Valkyrie Profile 2, Gradius Tribute and all 3 of the newer Rockman arranges make me wonder if the arrangers even tried making an attempt. Compare those to stuff like the Konami Battle Albums, the Falcom Perfect Collections, Uncharted Waters, etc. Leaves the door wide open for the fanmade arrange scene though (although to make a case for the golden era of all VGM being over...what tracks are usually the fodder for aspiring arrangers? Think about that for a second...)

Ishimoto = a hack > Uematsu, Mitsuda (=burned out geniuses) >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Sugiyama, Shimomura, Hamauzu, Kikuta (=overrated and burned out hacks).

I think that most of the games and vgm of the latest years have been really boring. Aside from HotD Overkill, Senko no ronde and Mario Galaxy what should I look to?

KICA-7895: Metal Gear Solid Original Game Soundtrack - VGMdb <- track 18, that's my opinion :)

As long as the Falcom sound team's around, I don't think I'll be able to shake the feeling that the best is yet to come.

As we all know and would fully admit, music is definitely subjective.

In regards to recent American VGM composers being untalented hacks I'd like to bring up the following recent franchises (quickly off the top of my head)...

God of War
Civilization IV
Warcraft
BioShock
Halo
Medal of Honor
Mass Effect
Oblivion
Afrika
Myst


It's completely fair to say that people here may not agree with that list. But along that same arguement I also don't think it is fair to say that American VGM has no merit.

I actually think it's a little silly to categorize VGM by country. Each country has its great composers and not so great composers... but what may be "not so great" to one person may be the "best thing ever!" to someone else.

I feel the same way about different "eras" of game music. There was a lot of great VGM in the 80's/early 90's and there was a lot of annoying crap as well. Every era has the good and the bad and I personally don't believe that one is better than the other... just different.

Just my thoughts. Thanks.

Rock On.

:)


Tommy

I'll jump in and defend Western game music too. A lot of great artists out there. In addition to the mostly great music Tommy listed, I'd recommended most of LucasArts' adventure soundtracks, the Need For Speed series, the Command & Conquer series, the Total War series, a whole load of indie game scores, and a lot of scores from the Genesis and SNES era. Some new releases I would recommend include Mirror's Edge, Assassin's Creed II, Dragon Age: Origins, inFAMOUS, Dead Space, and Halo 3: ODST.

There is some American VGM that I'd classify as "film composers poorly doing a side job" like Steve Jablonsky's recent inheritance of The Sims and Gears of War (boring and derivative in my opinion). I'm not a big fan of hyper-bombastic scores like Crysis either. But overall, I think there is a growing number of talented people in the industry and many scores on par with film scores and Eastern releases. Although I don't think Japanese game music should imitate Western game music, I think a lot of Japanese companies would also benefit from aspiring to their production values too.

That said, I think it's Japanese game music that I'm finding the most sterile at the moment. Things should improve, but I also agree we're past the first set of glory years. For my personal tastes, I'd classify those as 1995 - 2000, but I appreciate others prefer the similarly wonderful SNES and NES years. Just my thoughts too. ;)

I've got to side with Mr. X and Tommy here. If you can't wrap your head around how good the Lucasarts soundtracks have been, you are out of your damn mind. The rework of the Monkey Island: SE alone was glorious.

Have my favourites come and gone? Probably. I'm a grown man now, and I know enough to find fault in things more than I did as a child. So the simple nostalgia just isn't around anymore. But to say there's no talent left is just asinine.

Heh, if you watch the "let's play" videos for Halo 3 that the Japanese put up on Nico Nico, they're filled with comments on how the Halo 3 soundtrack is "godly" and the "best VGM ever".