These are the songs that touched our souls
Good lord is it a scorcher out there or what? All week long, I’ve been doing everything in my power to move a little as possible so as not douse my clothing in sweat from the near triple-digit temperatures I have to endure. With no end to the heat in sight, it seems I’ll be spending the next month or so the same way I spent this weekend: listening to music.
I haven’t done many music posts for the Destructoid Discusses weekend posts. Not because I don’t enjoy game music but because most of the tunes I know come from three or four franchises that get talked about all the time in this series. And today is no exception. I wanted to know what game music my fellow writers felt moved by, the music that takes an already extraordinary scene and amps up the emotion to David Cage levels. Easily, the song for me that fits that bill is “Midna’s Lament” from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
It may not be my favorite game in the series, but this is no doubt my favorite scene from a Zelda game. Midna, the imp-cat who’s been guiding me along on my adventure so far, is hurt. Close to death. I, as Link as a dog, must rush her to find help. To save her life. And while I run through this pouring rain, this is the song I hear.
Absolutely breathtaking. It’s one of the best compositions you’ll hear at the Zelda orchestral concert and is the “yin” to the visual’s “yang” that combine to create one of the most memorable set pieces in all of Zelda.
Peter Glagowski
The Zelda series has always had some incredible music and side quests (unless you’re Breath of the Wild), so I can’t even refute CJ’s entry. That is one of the greatest moments in Twilight Princess, so I’m on board with his answer. As far as I’m concerned, though, Majora’s Mask has the most emotional punch of the entire series. Basically every side quest is the entire scene with Midna’s Lament, so you’re on an emotional rollercoaster the entire time.
The most poignant scene, for me, is the one with Pamela’s father. You enter Ikana Canyon and walk into the first building you see and there is no one there. Since Link just loves invading people’s homes, you continue to press through in typical Zelda fashion looking for pots to smash or chests to open. This leads you to the basement where, upon stepping close to the closet, a deformed creature pops out. When you step closer, his daughter jumps in front of you and berates you for breaking into their home.
Since Majora’s Mask is all about curing everyone’s sadness, you whip out the Ocarina of time and play the majestic “Song of Healing” and the man returns to his normal self. His daughter runs up to him in a loving embrace and cries about how he hasn’t been doing anything bad. The man, looking dejected into the distance, realizes the pain he has caused her and the two hold each other as the song quietly plays in the background.
I can get pretty emotional when good music starts to kick in, but that scene really gets the waterworks going for me. I mean, a lot of other moments in Majora’s Mask do the same thing, but that one is just particularly dramatic.
Chris Carter
I don’t think a song has been stuck in my mind as long as “The Lost Painting [Portrait]” from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I hear it in my head at least twice a week, and when I do, I vividly envision the zones it plays in.
It’s haunting and beautiful in one breath, the exact qualities I want out of a Castlevania tune. I really hope Bloodstained comes even close.
Chris Hovermale
I love video game music so much it’s difficult to pin down my most important piece. Or it would be if this song didn’t leave such a strong impression in me at an early age. As you may remember from my first promoted cblog, Paper Mario TTYD means a lot to me because it broadened my perception of what games were. And “Sadness and Happiness” was handcrafted to show me what else games could be.
Unlike every other busy and master-crafted theme in this soundtrack, “Sadness and Happiness” is a very minimalistic song. It’s just a music box, and it sounds slightly off. There are clear moments of complete silence. My first impulse was that it feels “wrong” and out of place compared to the rest of the soundtrack, but in reality, it’s one of the least synthetic and most natural-sounding pieces this game has.
As its title suggests, it somehow works on both sides of the coin, perhaps because of its strange tone. It invokes tears of joy after a hard-fought battle leads to a well-earned miracle. It wells up tears of sadness when one of Mario’s friends has to deal with the lack of such a miracle. It challenged me to feel something other than “fun” when I played video games, and I lacked the ability to fail that challenge. “Sadness and Happiness” still gives me goosebumps without fail almost two decades later. It’s embedded that deep into my childhood memories.
Chris Seto
When it comes to video game music, one OST always comes up first in my mind and that is Xenogears. It’s one of my favourite games of all time and the music plays a huge part in why.
It’s one of the earliest games I played where hearing the tracks at certain points enhances the moment because you know what is about to happen and there are a lot of memorable tracks from the game. For me, there’s one which stands out. Yes, “Soaring” is a great track to get you pumped up, which is why it’s used in the action scenes a lot. “Stage of Death” is still a fantastic battle theme but the one that always gets to me is “The Treasure that Cannot be Stolen.”
It just fits so well into every scene it’s used and pulls at your heart strings just enough to add to the scene without taking you away from it. Whenever I want to listen to Xenogears music, this is the track I always play first.
Tian Ma
I’m going with “Snowflakes” from Persona 4 Golden, a song that is the very definition of “the feels.” I was already a huge Persona 4 fan when Golden came out, so I had gone through the social links and built up friendships in the original game. The track “Snowflakes” hits as the story is winding down, signaling your impending departure from the town of Inaba.
It hits hard. It felt like I had to leave my real life friends because I had invested so much time in befriending these characters, learning about their personal struggles, and helping them. When all the dust had settled from our adventures, all that was left was to run out the school year.
A melancholy intro leads into these lyrics: “Snowflakes falling on your face/a cold wind blows away/the laughter from this treasured place/but in our memories it stays.” Even writing about it, I’m getting a bit teary-eyed. The song is telling you, get your shit done because it’ll be time to say goodbye soon. Ah… can I just get one more day?
Josh Tolentino
I was about to cite Persona 3‘s “Burn My Dread Last Battle” for my entry (because it’s great, honestly) when I thought a bit more about what I wanted it to mean when music “moves” me. Honestly speaking, I don’t listen to music very often outside the context of other media, making most of my favorite pieces part of a soundtrack of some kind. That’s all well and good, but as a result, I don’t listen to a ton of music once I’m done playing the game or watching the movie or show it’s attached to. Can I really say it “moved” me when I let it sit by the wayside until the time comes for me to throw in an entry to a Destructoid Discusses installment?
By those criteria, one piece I’ve listened to consistently no matter where I’ve ended up is the soundtrack of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, specifically its “Radio Espantoso” station. Of those pieces, “Maracaibo Oriental” by Cuban legend Benny Moré is the one that does the trick, which is to say, whenever I hear it, I’m instantly transported to my high school days, remembering the times I skipped out on math tutorials to play Counter-Strike with my friends at a nearby internet cafe. If that’s not movement, I don’t know what is.
Pixie The Fairy
Before Link ever picked up an ocarina, he was mostly playing flutes but there was a journey in which he had to obtain and play several instruments to end a nightmare and awaken a mysterious being he had begun to share a dream with.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening has remained one of my favorite games in the Zelda series and Zelda wasn’t even in it. Ganon and the Triforce were not in it, either, and it didn’t take place in Hyrule at all! No, this was a game where Link had to prove his mettle on the mysterious Kohlint Island where he meets Marin, Tarin and its several odd inhabitants.
Marin’s song,”The Ballad of the Wind Fish,” quickly became a memorable tune even through Game Boy’s tinny little speaker and is one of those tunes that still affects me a lot like Final Fantasy X’s “To Zanarkand” does and for the same reasons.
All dreams must come to an end, but it doesn’t mean they can’t affect us or hold meaning or that who we met in them were not important. Though I’m still curious how Link came to dream of Goombas and saw a Chain-Chomp as a dog, which Mario only later viewed them as in Super Mario 64. Maybe the Wind Fish made a stop in the Mushroom Kingdom once?
Chris Moyse
Someone had to call it, right? In the decades I’ve spent playing games, there’s an abundance of amazing, amazing music that makes me feel happy, content, melancholic or like an absolute badass. But, sometimes, you gotta go with the classics. So I’ve chosen a piece of music I find so beautiful, but so incredibly sad, that just its opening notes get my chest fluttering.
“Aerith’s Theme” is used sparingly over the course of Square Enix revolutionary RPG Final Fantasy VII. While it starts out as just a piece of music used to identify a character of pure innocence, a gentle flower grown out of a world of dirt, the theme ultimately becomes the soundtrack for one of the most memorable and heartbreaking scenes in video game history, expertly directed to sync-up with the on-screen tragedy.
Beginning with 16 of the saddest notes ever, before blossoming into a melody of lost innocence, sad memories but eternal and undying hope, “Aerith’s Theme” is a composition crafted to draw tears, and for many, including myself, it did, retaining the power to do so today, some 21 years later.
