The Klonoa games had some really good music and I get so mushy and nostalgic listening to it.
Epic Pinball? Epic Pinball.
I feel like Yokai Watch in general has an underrated soundtrack but I especially enjoy the battle themes.
This plays whenever you fight a boss based directly on an actual yokai like the Gashadokuro that… fights by cranking a giant gashapon. I’m sorry that pun is excellent.
Maybe this an unpopular Sonic track, but I’m not ashamed to say there was a time in my life when I had the lyrics to Eggman’s Theme from Sonic Adventure 2 memorized.
I’m still fairly charmed by that slap bass.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Metal Gear Rising’s soundtrack, which was absolutely ridiculous in the best possible ways.
Also, speaking of Platinum games, the all too often overlooked MadWorld had an exceptionally rad soundtrack too.
Aw yeah, video game music. Recently my friends and I have gotten back into FFXIV, which despite being an MMO has a great soundtrack, especially if you’re into goofy vocal themes, buttrock, and ominous chanting. I tried not to include anything too spoilery, if you’re into cheesy MMO plots and plan to play at some point.
Two of my favorite games ever are the Dark Cloud games on PS2. They were the first games I ever really paid attention to the music at all, so a lot of it has stuck with me over the years
Here’s a track so good that Stewart Copeland (The drummer for Police mind you) himself considers one of his best (He placed it in a compilation of what he considers his best works)
In my younger days I actually used to run a very mildly successful internet radio station for video game music. I fell out of the game hard, though, but I could probably make recommendations literally forever:
I’ll stop here, but I’ll also take a moment to plug my 8tracks Playlist I made in the spirit of my old internet radio station, called “Videogame Music Worth Listening To”
Right, keeping in the theme of chiptunes, this simple little song probably isn’t like, outstanding or anything, but it manages to worm its way in to my brain far too often.
A lot of Codemasters/Camerica NES games had some really nice music, if you ask me. Kind of evokes the same spirit Jake Kaufman channels for games like Shantae and Shovel Knight. Most of Codemasters’ NES games were ports of stuff they did on the Amiga and C64, so I guess that makes some amount of sense.
I absolutely love the Katamari series’ soundtracks. Shibuya-kai music is really great.
It’s also pretty interesting the evolution the soundtrack went through. With the original game, the composers had a lot of freedom with how the soundtrack should sound, only being told that it should be fun music.
For the purpose of showing how the music evolved through the games, I’m only going to be posting songs that are related to the theme song of the series (Aside for Beautiful Katamari and Touch My Katamari, but I encourage people to listen to the other songs! (Also the theme is iconic)
With We Love Katamari, a lot of composers game back, particularly Yuu Miyake (the sound director for the first game). For We Love Katamari, fitting in with the goal of “togetherness” that the game has, Miyake wanted to use a lot of non-Japanese artists since the first game only used Japanese artists. He wasn’t able to do this though, due to budgeting/other problems.
However we still got insanely great remixes of the Katamari theme.
With a the release of Me & My Katamari, Yuu Miyake was sound director for the series a third time. While I consider it a weaker soundtrack than most of the games (many of the songs were not new), it still has some pretty banging songs.
Next up in release was a change for both Katamari and the sound director. Unlike the prior games, Beautiful Katamari was released on the Xbox 360 instead of a Playstation system. Instead of Yuu Miyake as sound director, Tetsuya Uchida took over.
I"m unsure why the reasons, but the main Katamari theme prevelant throughout the series is missing (as far as I know) from Beautiful Katamari. However, it still has some pretty good songs:
With Katamari Forever, the dev team wanted to create almost a “best-of” for the series (I imagine this was expected to be the last game). As such, Miyake came back as sound director with a vengeance- employing a ton of people to remix the soundtrack established through the series and provide necessary closure to the soundtracks in Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari. Forever has my favorite soundtrack out of the bunch, since it’s almost like a Now That’s What I Call Katamari album. It also has a great remix that’s both a tribute to Katamari and Namco arcade games:
With the final game in the series, Touch My Katamari, Yuu Miyake was not Sound Director. Instead it was Taku Inoue. The soundtrack isn’t very long, and in my opinion, not very memorable (sadly). To me, it has a different feeling.
Once again I can’t find the remix of the main Katamari theme (I’m pretty sure it exists though) so here’s just a good song from it:
Sexy Synthesizer did a number of remixes for Katamari games and I just wanna say THEY’RE EXTREMELY GOOD. They do a lot of catchy synth and chiptune songs, you can listen to some of their other work on Spotify!