Music for FE switch

[Harvey]

The topic here is to discuss about FE Switch music..what songs you want to come back, what type of music you want to listen to etc.

Now, knowing that the music will obviously do well since FE has been having great music since the beginning of its existence, why worry about the next one?

Well..to me, I kinda found Fates music to be really underwhelming except two songs from Conquest side. If you are on Birthright, there's hardly anything memorable for me to hum about.

I get that they wanted to do something different. Its just that it should atleast stand out or at least sound right atleast for me.

As for what songs I want back, I want all of Holy War's ost to be back..like ALL of it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQSDkoGBzpA&list=PL1755CAC79F44DA32

 

[Party Moth]

I want Masato Kouda far away from the Fire Emblem series. His contributions to Fates were middle-of-the-road at best, atrocious at worst. Kanazaki and Morishita can stay, but only if they're kept away from the Japanese instruments (and especially the European folk ones). Kondoh's cool, and he and Morishita work well together.

That said, I quickly grow tired of Morishita and Kondoh's rhythmic tendencies and instrumental samples, so maybe someone new wouldn't be so bad. That, or bring Tsujiyoko back.

[Slumber]

I would like an OST that's a bit more atmospheric, or at least, slower and toned down. Fates and Awakening had bombastic OSTs, relative to the rest of the series, and while some songs worked when you listened to them on their own, they really didn't fit the gameplay tonally. It seemed like the pieces were purely an extension of the story at times(IE the mission after Emmeryn's not-death). You'd want a piece that was somber, but wouldn't lose impact when you have to listen to it for more than 5 minutes. Instead we got "Don't Speak Her Name!" carry over through the cutscene into the whole chapter. Again, fine piece on its own, and I understand why the developers thought it'd be a good idea to carry the emotions through the chapter, but that song is so melodramatic and there's no subtlety to it at all. When you listen to it for the length of a whole chapter, killing people left and right, watching your half-naked soldiers plow through another army, it loses almost all of its impact and starts having detrimental effects. And this was true for a lot of pieces in those games. Just really overdone and unnecessary for slow-paced strategy. They felt like melodramatic JRPG OSTs, which I'm not knocking by any means, just not what I want out of a game like Fire Emblem. 

On the flip side, I don't want them to go in the complete opposite direction and just compose a generic OST, like the Tellius OSTs. If anybody likes those OSTs, more power to you, but I found them very generic, and they rarely did the games any favors for me. 

The FE4-FE8 OSTs seemed to get the balance right. They didn't beat you over the head with the music like Fates and Awakening, but they still had a lot of personality. I'd prefer if they went in this direction again. I mean, ideally I'd want every SRPG to just have Hitoshi Sakimoto OSTs, but that's a pipe dream. 

Edited February 17, 2017 by Slumber

[bethany81707]

For specific tracks, I want a dark reprise of Together We Ride if one of the characters in your army was to side with the opposing one.

[Harvey]

41 minutes ago, Slumber said:

I would like an OST that's a bit more atmospheric, or at least, slower and toned down. Fates and Awakening had bombastic OSTs, relative to the rest of the series, and while some songs worked when you listened to them on their own, they really didn't fit the gameplay tonally. It seemed like the pieces were purely an extension of the story at times(IE the mission after Emmeryn's not-death). You'd want a piece that was somber, but wouldn't lose impact when you have to listen to it for more than 5 minutes. Instead we got "Don't Speak Her Name!" carry over through the cutscene into the whole chapter. Again, fine piece on its own, and I understand why the developers thought it'd be a good idea to carry the emotions through the chapter, but that song is so melodramatic and there's no subtlety to it at all. When you listen to it for the length of a whole chapter, killing people left and right, watching your half-naked soldiers plow through another army, it loses almost all of its impact and starts having detrimental effects. And this was true for a lot of pieces in those games. Just really overdone and unnecessary for slow-paced strategy. They felt like melodramatic JRPG OSTs, which I'm not knocking by any means, just not what I want out of a game like Fire Emblem. 

On the flip side, I don't want them to go in the complete opposite direction and just compose a generic OST, like the Tellius OSTs. If anybody likes those OSTs, more power to you, but I found them very generic, and they rarely did the games any favors for me. 

The FE4-FE8 OSTs seemed to get the balance right. They didn't beat you over the head with the music like Fates and Awakening, but they still had a lot of personality. I'd prefer if they went in this direction again. I mean, ideally I'd want every SRPG to just have Hitoshi Sakimoto OSTs, but that's a pipe dream. 

Well..idk...cause you can argue the same thing that Ys series has. lots of songs that don't make sense to be in the games....

I mean Awakening's music tracks are amazing and fit the scene better than Fates...but I agree that Fates wasn't that great or didn't make much sense to put in the game. The way Heroes is composed is like they are reusing the instruments more than doing something else.

I honestly think that Tsujiyoko should be back though.

30 minutes ago, phineas81707 said:

For specific tracks, I want a dark reprise of Together We Ride if one of the characters in your army was to side with the opposing one.

I concur. I really want together we ride back!

 

[AlexArtsHere]

While I love the Awakening and Fates OSTs, I think Fates relied far too heavily on the leitmotif of Lost In Thoughts All Alone, in comparison to Awakening and its main theme. Also, I agree that some of the tracks are sub-par for me in both OSTs, but Don't Speak Her Name is never one I had a problem with. Strangely, the big thing I miss is Id~Serenity. Not only was it nice for the Avatar to get their own confession music, it was just a good piece of music, whereas the generic confession theme in Fates just feels very sappy. I often play Id~Serenity in the background when I'm drawing because of the calm, tranquil feelings it evokes, as well as a kind of nostalgia. On the other hand, I can barely stand Fates' confession theme.

Mechanically speaking, keep the current duality soundtrack we have going. While the series does have some great battle themes, I've never been a fan of the disconnect between one piece stopping and another one starting. Speaking of, I want an arrangement of Land of Sorrow to be in the game with both a Calm and an Ablaze/Roar/Fire/Blast/Flow mix. Can't get enough of that track.

[Slumber]

On 2/17/2017 at 3:54 AM, InfinityAlex said:

While I love the Awakening and Fates OSTs, I think Fates relied far too heavily on the leitmotif of Lost In Thoughts All Alone, in comparison to Awakening and its main theme. Also, I agree that some of the tracks are sub-par for me in both OSTs, but Don't Speak Her Name is never one I had a problem with. Strangely, the big thing I miss is Id~Serenity. Not only was it nice for the Avatar to get their own confession music, it was just a good piece of music, whereas the generic confession theme in Fates just feels very sappy. I often play Id~Serenity in the background when I'm drawing because of the calm, tranquil feelings it evokes, as well as a kind of nostalgia. On the other hand, I can barely stand Fates' confession theme.

Again, don't think it's a bad piece or anything, I just don't think playing it through the whole chapter was a good idea. I'll reiterate why it bothers me, but it makes the game feel more like a melodramatic JRPG than a strategy game for a whole chapter. The developers obviously wanted to have an "Aerith's death" moment, where you're supposed to have a swelling of emotions as you fight the final boss of the disc while "Aerith's Theme" plays all the way from her death, through the final boss, until the end of the disc. Which IS a good use of such a piece. You're angry, sad, and hyped up all at the same time, and the piece plays into this, by just being a quiet, slow, somber piece with an occasional swell here and there.

But in the case of "Don't Speak Her Name!", it plays all the way through chapter 10. Chapter 10's not a climactic chapter by any means, the pace of the scenes are way different, you're just killing randies for 10+ minutes, and the boss is a man wearing a bone bikini. "Don't Speak Her Name!" is a lot more of a typical melancholic orchestral piece, and I don't think it does a good job at carrying emotion from the end of chapter 9 all the way through chapter 10. I also think "Don't Speak Her Name!" is a less interesting theme than "Aerith's Theme", but that's me.

Regardless, this was a small example of a point I was trying to make on how Awakening and Fates didn't really present their soundtracks well, and I think a different tone for the music altogether would get the games and the soundtracks to mesh better together. I don't think either game has a bad soundtrack when you're just listening to it on YouTube or something, but when it comes to actually being used in-game, I think they have done much better in the past. Like, Conquest(Ablaze) is a great song, but it doesn't fit a strategy game at all.

Edited February 19, 2017 by Slumber

[The Malign Knight]

On ‎17‎/‎02‎/‎2017 at 8:46 AM, Slumber said:

I would like an OST that's a bit more atmospheric, or at least, slower and toned down. Fates and Awakening had bombastic OSTs, relative to the rest of the series, and while some songs worked when you listened to them on their own, they really didn't fit the gameplay tonally. It seemed like the pieces were purely an extension of the story at times(IE the mission after Emmeryn's not-death). You'd want a piece that was somber, but wouldn't lose impact when you have to listen to it for more than 5 minutes. Instead we got "Don't Speak Her Name!" carry over through the cutscene into the whole chapter. Again, fine piece on its own, and I understand why the developers thought it'd be a good idea to carry the emotions through the chapter, but that song is so melodramatic and there's no subtlety to it at all. When you listen to it for the length of a whole chapter, killing people left and right, watching your half-naked soldiers plow through another army, it loses almost all of its impact and starts having detrimental effects. And this was true for a lot of pieces in those games. Just really overdone and unnecessary for slow-paced strategy. They felt like melodramatic JRPG OSTs, which I'm not knocking by any means, just not what I want out of a game like Fire Emblem. 

On the flip side, I don't want them to go in the complete opposite direction and just compose a generic OST, like the Tellius OSTs. If anybody likes those OSTs, more power to you, but I found them very generic, and they rarely did the games any favors for me. 

The FE4-FE8 OSTs seemed to get the balance right. They didn't beat you over the head with the music like Fates and Awakening, but they still had a lot of personality. I'd prefer if they went in this direction again. I mean, ideally I'd want every SRPG to just have Hitoshi Sakimoto OSTs, but that's a pipe dream. 

Ironically enough, I think that Fates map themes were really fitting in gameplay and helped the player being more...into the game, if that makes sense.

And I think everyone would prefer to have Hitoshi composing every SRPG soundtrack.

On ‎17‎/‎02‎/‎2017 at 4:25 PM, Slumber said:

Regardless, this was a small example of a point I was trying to make on how Awakening and Fates didn't really present their soundtracks well, and I think a different tone for the music altogether would get the games and the soundtracks to mesh better together. I don't think either game has a bad soundtrack when you're just listening to it on YouTube or something, but when it comes to actually being used in-game, I think they have done much better in the past. Like, Conquest(Ablaze) is a great song, but it doesn't fit a strategy game at all.

I think wherever a song fits a certain game or not, It's quite subjective: for example, many find Girl of the Spirit Forest fitting for Chapter 1, but I belive they could have done much more for that Chapter altough It may be very well my negative bias towards Girl of the Spirit Forest.

That being said, I personally don't want to have Yuka back: her work on FE3 was amazing and most of the map themes of FE4 were pretty good too. However, FE4's OSTs that wasn't a map theme were rather forgettable, FE5 only had few tracks I would consider to be actually good and FE6, while better than FE5, was still not at the same level of FE3 soundtrack of FE4 map themes(keep in mind this is just my personal opinion, of course). I would prefer if we had a new composer for the series, such as the already mentioned Hitoshi Sakimoto.

[Party Moth]

On 2/17/2017 at 1:54 AM, InfinityAlex said:

While I love the Awakening and Fates OSTs, I think Fates relied far too heavily on the leitmotif of Lost In Thoughts All Alone, in comparison to Awakening and its main theme. Also, I agree that some of the tracks are sub-par for me in both OSTs, but Don't Speak Her Name is never one I had a problem with. Strangely, the big thing I miss is Id~Serenity. Not only was it nice for the Avatar to get their own confession music, it was just a good piece of music, whereas the generic confession theme in Fates just feels very sappy. I often play Id~Serenity in the background when I'm drawing because of the calm, tranquil feelings it evokes, as well as a kind of nostalgia. On the other hand, I can barely stand Fates' confession theme.

Mechanically speaking, keep the current duality soundtrack we have going. While the series does have some great battle themes, I've never been a fan of the disconnect between one piece stopping and another one starting. Speaking of, I want an arrangement of Land of Sorrow to be in the game with both a Calm and an Ablaze/Roar/Fire/Blast/Flow mix. Can't get enough of that track.

The issue with "Lost in Thoughts All Alone" and Azura's leitmotif is that the motif itself is extremely easy to implement due to the intervals used in the first phrase. This meant that they could throw it in everywhere with little rhyme or reason, leading to places where it feels inappropriate to quote it. Awakening handled this better overall, as noted by the fact that there are indeed three major Awakening motifs besides the Id theme. Each of these motifs were written so that they could both adjust to different tonalities as well as flow between one another quite well.

The culmination of this is the next topic I'd like to address, "Don't Speak Her Name!". I believe that it is one of the best written pieces in the soundtrack, but its placement so early in the game is a detriment to the rest of the game's score. The three motifs (the obvious main title theme, the secondary Shepherd material as heard the Prelude and at the start of "And what if I can't? What if I'm not worthy of her ideals?", and the final motif that often follows or accompanies it as featured in the violin in the aforementioned ideals track) intermingle fully in "Don't Speak Her Name!", an obvious arrival point of the three identities. It's a piece that should have been further into the narrative as much of the later music loses its steam and begins to focus on the Id material instead (note that none of these prior Shepherd identities are present in, say, the final battle). This can largely be attributed to the messy narrative goals of Awakening, which seeps into other aspects of the game. I'm in agreement with Slumber that the piece is poorly placed in the narrative, but disagree on his comment regarding subtlety as it seems the motivic development in the early game is easily missed by many fans.

That said, I have much less love for Fates, which feels much sloppier than Awakening due to orchestration issues, sample quality, muddy motivic writing, and overall general confusion on tone due to both too many composers and too many instrumental aesthetics attempted. Less composers and less music aiming at a consistent tone would create an overall better soundtrack in my eyes.

[Slumber]

16 minutes ago, Party Moth said:

The issue with "Lost in Thoughts All Alone" and Azura's leitmotif is that the motif itself is extremely easy to implement due to the intervals used in the first phrase. This meant that they could throw it in everywhere with little rhyme or reason, leading to places where it feels inappropriate to quote it. Awakening handled this better overall, as noted by the fact that there are indeed three major Awakening motifs besides the Id theme. Each of these motifs were written so that they could both adjust to different tonalities as well as flow between one another quite well.

The culmination of this is the next topic I'd like to address, "Don't Speak Her Name!". I believe that it is one of the best written pieces in the soundtrack, but its placement so early in the game is a detriment to the rest of the game's score. The three motifs (the obvious main title theme, the secondary Shepherd material as heard the Prelude and at the start of "And what if I can't? What if I'm not worthy of her ideals?", and the final motif that often follows or accompanies it as featured in the violin in the aforementioned ideals track) intermingle fully in "Don't Speak Her Name!", an obvious arrival point of the three identities. It's a piece that should have been further into the narrative as much of the later music loses its steam and begins to focus on the Id material instead (note that none of these prior Shepherd identities are present in, say, the final battle). This can largely be attributed to the messy narrative goals of Awakening, which seeps into other aspects of the game. I'm in agreement with Slumber that the piece is poorly placed in the narrative, but disagree on his comment regarding subtlety as it seems the motivic development in the early game is easily missed by many fans.

That said, I have much less love for Fates, which feels much sloppier than Awakening due to orchestration issues, sample quality, muddy motivic writing, and overall general confusion on tone due to both too many composers and too many instrumental aesthetics attempted. Less composers and less music aiming at a consistent tone would create an overall better soundtrack in my eyes.

I do have a bias against motivic composition... At least when it's just 1-2 pieces just being reprised over and over and over again for seemingly no reason(Looking at you, Final Fantasy X). Honestly, I barely even noticed the motifs in Fates. I think the music in that game just left that little of an impression on me.

[Harvey]

 

6 hours ago, The Malign Knight said:

And I think everyone would prefer to have Hitoshi composing every SRPG soundtrack.

Meh...idk. I personally am a fan of Tsujiyoko-San's work and she has been composing FE music for a long time. So having her back to the FE series as a composer could mostly fix the issues I have with the recent composition of FE's music overall.