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Carl2291 said:

Ive just decided my fave RPG music score...

SUIKODEN 2.
Pure epic, filled with a little epic sauce.
The only RPG with music to make actually feel sad.

 

 

 

The Suikoden games are great because when everyone was making the transition away from 16 bit music, a lot of it got more generic -- if you play songs from most games from the post-SNES era for people who aren't interested in JRPGs, they'll often think it sounds like pretty generic new-age music. The Suikoden games did a great job of developing a unique voice that could be distinguished from all the other piano-and-strings sad-and-relaxing scores people immediately started writing once they were freed from the SNES' midi capabilities.

 

However, the Suikoden games owe a LOT to the music that came before them -- for example, the solo piano that comes in after the intro/ABAC part of the song you posted, is directly borrowed from...

*drum roll* ...

The 600 AD theme from Chrono Trigger! (I think the same theme is used somewhere else in the Chrono Trigger score, but it's been a while since I played those tunes on piano.

Basically, in "Reminiscence" they chopped off the pickup and changed the rythym of one note in the melody, but aside from that the first 2 phrases are exactly the same as the song written years earlier for Chrono Trigger.

Anyway, all these games have great scores that should be remembered, so it seems silly to argue over which one is better. I just wanted to point out to the young'ins that Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger were first, and created the great tradition for JRPG music that future generations would follow.

 

(I'm not saying that earlier games like FFIV didn't also have great music, by the way -- just not quite as great or as central to the game as FFVI.)