JRPG Soundtracks Were Better Before
Have JRPG soundtracks declined? This deep-dive into the changing soundscape of Japanese RPGs looks for the answer.
Fact: I listen to a lot of JRPG soundtracks.
Opinion: It’s more difficult to find stand-out JRPG soundtracks now than it used to be.
Video game music has been a staple of my musical diet since my brother brought home the multi-disc soundtrack to Final Fantasy VII nearly 20 years ago. I’d listen while I went to sleep, while I (sort of) studied, and while I dug through walkthroughs or planned teams for the next JRPG on my must-play list. I even made my own JRPG mix tapes because that was still a thing.
While JRPG music has come a long way since then — in terms of general polish and acceptability as a musical genre — I frequently ask myself where the future classics are today. It seems to me that JRPG music has waned in overall caliber for more than 15 years now.
Maybe nostalgia is painting my perspective a bit. Because so many of my foundational JRPG memories came about with older soundtracks playing, it’s hard not to wonder whether I now like that older music out of the bias of fond memory. However, even with this in mind, I submit that JRPG music was actually better in those good old days: more inventive, more expressive, more colorful, and more varied overall.
There are exceptions, a few of which I’ll highlight later on, but there are also cases to be made for the decline of JRPG music in recent years. Some of what I’m discussing is factual, but plenty of it is also opinion. To keep these at least moderately distinct, I’ll wave a few fact and opinion flags moving forward.
1. A lack of new blood
Fact: JRPG music is dominated by just a few leading composers.
Opinion: Most of these leading composers are writing music that sounds tired or repetitive.
Take a look at the longest-running and most successful JRPG series. It’s hard to find newcomers working on their music.
Some series, like Final Fantasy, have involved many composers over time, but none of these composers were newbies when they took the lead. Even Nobuo Uematsu, who composed the soundtracks for the first nine Final Fantasy entries by himself, had completed nearly a dozen other original soundtracks (OSTs) before he started working on Final Fantasy — and he was the least experienced composer to score a Final Fantasy OST to date.
It’s a similar story for the Dragon Quest, Persona, and the Tales series, where the composers leading now have led from the start.
Some especially notable examples of sticky JRPG composers:
- Yoko Shimomura (the Kingdom Hearts series, Final Fantasy XV, Xenoblade Chronicles, Parasite Eve, Front Mission, and Super Mario RPG)
- Shoji Meguro (the Persona and Shin Megami Tensei series)
- Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy XII, the Tactics Ogre, Valkyria Chronicles, and Final Fantasy Tactics series)
- Motoi Sakuraba (the Star Ocean, Valkyrie Profile, Dark Souls, and Tales series)
- Masashi Hamauzu (Saga Frontier 2, Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy VII Remake)
- Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Xenosaga Episode I, Valkyria Revolution, Final Fantasy XV: Episode Ignis)
- Koichi Sugiyama (the Dragon Quest series)
- Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy I — XI, plus the original soundtrack for XIV)
Having a small band of top-tier leaders isn’t unique in the music industry. Pop music has Max Martin, Hollywood has John Williams and Hans Zimmer, and the ecosystem of AAA video games has its star composers as well, inside and outside of JRPGs.
There are some benefits to having so few compose for so many beloved series. For one thing, these composers are good at what they do. Many of them learned audio programming or other technical skills on the job back when there were no veteran video game music composers. Yoko Shimomura, for example, shared in a 2019 interview that she “didn’t know you could write music with a computer” before she worked for Capcom. “They had to teach me from the ground up, after that it was less musical practice than it was technical.”
The dominance of the old guard has disadvantages too. Primarily, a lack of fresh sounds or innovation — and signs of burnout among leading composers. The Dragon Quest games, as one example, are often criticized for repeating old themes, delivering lackluster synthesizers, or just being boring (Kotaku, Gamefaqs, Resetera). And little wonder if it’s boring. Koichi Sugiyama has composed music for 30 different Dragon Quest games now.
It’s difficult to quantify or even qualify much of this, but I think you’ll find similar examples in most of the ongoing series mentioned above. The music often sounds a little bored, as the composers might well feel after spending 200 collective years working on these JRPG series.
2. Shifts in Musical Style
New composers do stil craft OSTs for video games, including some fairly big JRPGs. Take I Am Setsuna. Composer Tomoki Miyoshi had never scored a game by himself before, and this particular game garnered more than a little hype among serious, long-term JRPG fans, in large part because it touted itself as being quintessentially characteristic of golden age JRPGs. Miyoshi’s artistic decisions seem thoughtful and well-aligned with the vision of I Am Setsuna’s team. But in the end, much of the soundtrack is forgettable, despite some stunningly beautiful melodies and musical moments that fit the game well in many ways.
I Am Setsuna’s score exemplifies a few general stylistic shifts in video game music over recent years. First, a shift toward more atmospheric or even ambient music, and second, a shift toward live-recorded sounds, or at least the avoidance of sounds that are clearly synthesized (more on that later). For I Am Setsuna, this shift manifests via very light scoring and a minimalistic range of timbre, harmony, texture, and even rhythmic variety, with solo piano present throughout and no other sounds occurring in the OST except light percussion sections on occasion.
Older JRPG music tended to be much more bombastic and free-form, sometimes giving little clear thought to overall cohesion. Yasunori Nishiki — who made quite a splash debuting as the solo composer for Octopath Traveler — expressed it this way: There is a “special charm of older RPG music,” he said in a 2018 interview. “it’s generally simple and really catchy.”
For Nishiki, part of this stylistic shift is tied to choices of instrumentation: “You can get some gorgeous sound by using live instruments, doing so can also weaken the punch of the melody and end up blurring the player’s impression of the song as a whole.”
This brings us to the next big point: Live scores versus synthesized sounds.
3. Homogenous Sounds: Synth vs. Live Music
Fact: JRPG soundtracks are much more likely to feature recorded sounds now than in previous years.
Opinion: JRPG soundtracks are generally more homogenous than they used to be.
When Nobuo Uematsu moved from work on the Famicom / Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), he recalled starting his work day at 6 a.m. and spending the entire day “sampling tones and testing them out” with just one sound programmer as an ally. “Even then there wasn’t enough time,” he said.
With this much sampling, tinkering, and experimenting, it’s little wonder Uematsu produced such a variety of sounds and colors in his handful of soundtracks for the SNES — each which is recognizable by the synthesizers themselves and not just the music. I see a similar wealth of unique sounds among other early composers on 4th and 5th generation consoles especially.
Late in the 90s, many JRPG series began regularly incorporating recorded music alongside synthesized tracks. Yasunori Mitsuda, who was by then a clear leader in JRPG composition, championed this particularly often, recording small vocal or instrumental ensembles for Xenogears (1998), Chrono Cross (1999), and Tsugunai: Atonement (2001), and then recording several tracks with the London Philharmonic Orchestra for Xenosaga Episode I: Der Wille zur Macht (2002).
While I consider these examples some of the best JRPG music out there, later instances of studio recorded JRPG music don’t shine quite so brightly. Take Mitsuda’s OST to Valkyria Revolution, for instance. In this case, Mitsuda recorded the entire work with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, so the general level of polish is evident. The problem is that it’s just a little boring. The OST repeats both melodies and, even less interesting, repeats textures of sound in a uniform pattern (much as I am Setsuna repeats solo piano alone for nearly the entire OST).
I see this as the most common casualty in JRPG sounds today, many which feature orchestral tracks or other recorded music. As much as there is to love about rich orchestrations or clean Steinway grands, these are old sounds. I’ve heard them before, and you probably have too.
This is part of why Yasunori Nishiki says he “tossed out, to some extent, the traditional method of arranging for orchestra” when composing for Octopath Traveler. “Instead, I arranged the orchestra instruments in a style akin to simple, catchy vocal songs with strong melodies.”
This approach is much more like Mitsuda’s work on Chrono Cross, where he and director Masato Kato carefully planned a small number of sounds “like the sound of a plucked guitar string” which Mitsuda could then mix and layer in dozens of colorful ways — some with dense textures and many instrumental lines, but most with only a few combined in interesting ways.
Like Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura’s early composition process was built around trying things. “We had to tinker with everything,” she recalls in the interview cited above. “I was astonished how a single parameter could change the sound utterly.”
Uematsu expressed it this way:
“People often say that the NES or SNES must’ve been so hard to create music on with so few sounds available, but I didn’t really feel that myself. I think that the more limited people are, the more ingenious they begin to get…It was like a game to me…I’d shift the frequency a little for [one sound], and the timing of it. By doing that, even though they were electronic sounds, it created [a] kind of shimmer, and a sound that was full of emotion. I tested various things like that day after day.”
I sometimes find it odd that synthesized music has not advanced toward the illusion of reality nearly as rapidly as computer generated imagery. One benefit, though, is that we retain so much diversity of tone and sound. This variety is a large part of why I still gravitate to older JRPG music. It’s more unique. More distinctive most of all.
Some Exemplary Gems, Older and Newer
It’s harder to drop useful facts here, but I can easily nod to a handful of JRPG soundtracks that in my mind demonstrate the peak of their composers’ prowess and the heights of musical storytelling.
Final Fantasy VI | Composed by Nobuo Uematsu | 1994
I’ve never come across another soundtrack — in any genre — that successfully combines so many musical styles. Final Fantasy VI utilizes ragtime, opera, progressive rock, Baroque ornamentation, bluesy jazz, and many styles that can only be called Uematsu’s own. The sheer variety of new sounds, textures, and rhythms makes for an incredibly refreshing OST. Furthermore, the number of character themes in this game highlights Uematsu’s uncanny ability with melody more than in any other Uematsu soundtrack I know.
Bahamut Lagoon | Composed by Noriko Matsueda | 1996
Like so many others in JRPG music, Matsueda set a high bar with her very first solo composition, the OST for Bahamut Lagoon. While this soundtrack features excellent melodies and epic textures, one of the most impressive elements is its use of loud and soft dynamics, with crescendos or decrescendos in between. It’s rare, even today, to hear video game music combine loud and soft music so boldly.
Front Mission Gun Hazard | Composed by Nobuo Uematsu, Yasunori Mitsuda, Junya Nakano, and Masashi Hamauzu | 1996
Not only does this soundtrack gather one of the strongest teams of composers ever to work on a video game, but it features some of the highest quality synthesizers in 16-bit gaming, many that sound equivalent to early PlayStation sounds. Think of the flavor of Final Fantasy VII on the SNES. This soundtrack includes one or two of the most haunting melodies Uematsu has written, plus Mitsuda’s iconically layered rhythm lines. It also began not only Hamauzu’s career but his frequent collaborations with Nakano.
Pokemon Gold / Silver | Composed by Junichi Masuda, Go Ichinose, and Morikazu Aoki | 1999
Yes, this is a real JRPG, just like almost any game where humans fight or enslave divine entities possessing powers to destroy the planet itself. What makes an 8-bit OST stand out in 1999, though? In this case, it’s the refreshing use of harmony and truly satisfying chord progressions. To use a music theory term, this OST has brilliant voice leading.
Chrono Cross | Composed by Yasunori Mitsuda | 1999
It’s tough to clip my praise to only a few sentences. Suffice it to say that Chrono Cross shows off Mitsuda’s considerable skill with interesting rhythms, groovy bass lines, and startlingly fresh textures. Although this OST isn’t as stylistically diverse as something like Final Fantasy VI, it features more distinctive instrumental sounds than almost any other JRPG soundtrack out there. To top it all off, the quality of the synthesizers is off the charts. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that many of these tracks hold up better than synthesized tracks coming out in 2021.
Vagrant Story | Composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto | 2000
The best description I ever heard for this game was “metal Shakespeare solid.” It’s an apt description for the chillingly dark soundtrack as well. Sakimoto’s choices in instrumentation aren’t all that surprising, but this soundtrack introduces a few incredibly unique sounds: violins used in non-functional harmonies to make a sort of bat-like buzzing sound; the distinctive use of pitched male voices as a rhythm track; and some appropriately unsettling harmonies chord structures.
Octopath Traveler | Composed by Yasunori Nishiki | 2018
Nishiki’s solo debut is a shining example of newcomers bringing new life to JRPG music. With crisp recordings of live instruments, a variety of musical styles, and strong melodies to complement the game’s characters and story, this OST feels current while checking plenty of boxes to feel familiar too.
Some Honorable Mentions
- Threads of Fate (1999) | Junya Nakano
- Wild Arms 2 (1999) | Michiko Naruke
- Sigma Harmonics (2008) | Masashi Hamauzu
- Xenoblade Chronicles (2010) | Manami Kiyota, ACE+, Yoko Shimomura, Yasunori Mitsuda
- Terra Battle (2014) | Nobuo Uematsu, Kenji Ito, Yoko Shimomura, Yasunori Mitsuda
- Another Eden (2017) | Shunsuke Tsuchiya, Mariam Abounnasr, Yasunori Mitsuda
In Sum
Per major JRPG release, we’re getting less stellar soundtracks now than what we heard 20 or 25 years back. Nonetheless, I’m confident that RPG music isn’t dead or dying. The same composers who sometimes produce dull-sounding OSTs also continue to create amazing music — especially when collaborating with other composers, in my opinion — and the slow influx of new composers is revitalizing JRPG soundtracks as well.
So I’ll just summarize my feelings thus:
Fact: I’ve been happily listening to JRPG music for 20 years.
Opinion: Whether I’m listening to new music or old gems, I probably won’t stop anytime soon.
