GTI music

Mar 26, 2015 17:35:09 GMT -5 @mnchino said:

GTI = Gates to Infinity
I don't know why I don't like it.
I am trying to figure out why I don't like it.

Maybe its too slow or has too long of intros for me to appreciate?  Maybe it's to soft?  Maybe I'm biased towards the game not being PMDEOS?
I don't know really.

Is there anything that stands out about the music in this game in particular?

1. It's composed by different people. The sound is necessarily going to be at least a little different due to stylistic choices.
   
2. It's a more high-fidelity sound system. Melody is going to be less focused on one instrument, wider in scope in general, and the instruments are going to muddy together a lot more. (It's also part of the reason we don't get as many super-memorable themes in modern games compared to in the past--the melodies just aren't as clear nowadays.) And, as you pointed out in your post, it might be "softer" in that the sounds tend to be substantially less percussive than in earlier systems.
   
3. The composers experimented a lot more with the tempo, key, and feel in the various "movements" of each tune, in such a way that the "main melody" and associated feel, progression, style, or what have you, is dropped completely for most of the track. Thus, it's not just remembering the melody to one song (as is the case with Rescue Team and Explorers, which had fairly straightfoward verse/chorus/bridge-style components), but several.
4. It's newer than Rescue Team or Explorers; you probably didn't play through it twice or three times, either, and the missions worked a bit differently so you probably didn't go through all the dungeons so many times.
5. Several of the dungeons had a theme-and-variations sort of soundtrack (Telluric Path, Kilionea Road, and several others all vary on the same theme--as did Theme of Hope, but as the "plot theme" it saw a similar amount of usage to the Time Gear melody variations in Explorers).
   
6. I don't remember some of them enough to be sure, but they seem to have experimented a bit more with "ambient/atmospheric" tracks in some spots, so the melody again wouldn't be as clear.
7. Plot events weren't executed as strongly as in previous games (in my opinion), so the associated tracks might be a bit hard to remember. I'd be surprised if you really liked, say, Silent Chasm and Brine Cave and themes like that, because there's not a lot of depth to attach them to. However, it's easy to point to "epic" moments like Mt. Blaze, Sky Tower, Steam Cave, Hidden Land, Temporal Tower, and things like that, because we were invested in the story while we were listening to each song. Honestly, Ragged Mountain alone was enough to persuade me to buy the game after playing the demo, because it really conveyed a sense of adventure (...which fell kinda flat later on), but the plot peaks weren't all that engaging compared to before (or were treated with irony rather than epicness, as in the case of Hydreigon's reveal followed by the whimsical Ochre Quarry).
   

Mostly reason 3 is why I like a lot of the starting sections to some pieces (eg. Scorching Desert) but then the song switches sections and I kind of trail off until it gets back to a similar style as before.