Why is Japanese videogame music so much memorable?
Why are Japanese composers so much better than western composers? ?
Listen to this
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Forgettable cinematic score, no passion, nothing
Japanese music is lots of fun, memorable, innovative
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Explain this
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weaboo
gayming retard
reddit spacing
wanna know how i know you're a permavirgin?
>No rebuttal
Ok
>best uematsu song
>terra's theme
it's clearly fucking Dancing Mad
also kill yourself
Because by and large in the West videogames are seen as pure entertainment. Certainly the "games as art" contingent is more of a fringe movement with people like ThatGameCompany, Supergiant, Chinese Room, etc. They might put out lower budget, shorter games but at least they are incontrovertibly artistic rather than corporate.
In the East, vidya are their movies. So vidya composers are looked at as more of John Williams' or Bernard Hermann's.
>playing video games
sometimes I forget I share a board with children and then posts like this come up
If you listen to Punk, Hip Hop, Indie, 60's Rock, or any Pop and yet still think videogames are childish then you are pretentious as fuck, kid.
Th soundtracks for the Bungie-era Halo games were really good.
>He still thinks that playing videogames is a pretty niche obscure genre
>complaining that people are videogames
>on fucking Sup Forums
>a website deliberately created to discuss videogames and anime and manga at first
>a website so weebish it is basically an american version of a japanese website created by a weeb
Ok then.
this
Made me check if I was in the right board fuck you Sup Forumsirgin
it wasn't always like that
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The Japanese Industry is cool that way. If you listen to alternative pop acts you can hear all the insane production that goes into them. There seems to be a lot of competition there with a wider scope as opposed to in the West where film music, video music and commercial music seem to have set boundaries. Similar to how in the West all animation is either comedy or for kids.
You know this actually makes you look a lot less mature than anyone who plays videogames, right?
There are great non-Japanese composers, it's just that they've never been exposed as much as the Japanese ones (and they usually did stuff for computer games rather than console games) except for some composers for more recent indie game OSTs.
Obligatory Solstice
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why are you on this weaboo website?
>where_do_you_think_we_are.jpg: the reply: the novelization: the official videogame of the movie: the soundtrack
Okay so I have a real answer to this because I think about it often, because I'm autistic like that. I believe it's because western videogames have their roots on PC compared to Japanese games which have their roots on consoles. We can get into the nitty gritty of PC engine shit, but the videogame crash never happened in Japan, so they were in the "home console" mindset a long time before we were. That being the case, western games were always created by a small fringe group cranking out the latest and greatest tech. Specifically, an intense focus on immersive simulation and realism. Real life doesn't HAVE music. Once music became the standard in games, western videogame still kept the immersion by having the music be "like a movie". Movie scores can be fine, but 90% of a movie score is fluff to add atmosphere - maybe throw a big theme song in once or twice, but most of it is incidental.
Japanese videogames have always been much less about realism, instead evolving out of a much more arcade place - the GAME part of things was always the primary ideal. Even with early dating sims, there was a shitload of abstraction. In that sense, it allowed music to take much more of a prominent role and it became another back of the box selling point. In that sense, videogame composers in japan took many more cues from pop music than movie scores.
Compare something like Final Fantasy 7 to something like Quake. Quake's got a cool ambient soundtrack while Final Fantasy 7 has a very thematic soundtrack.
In recent years, however, as western gaming has become the big money machine that it is, these two sides have kind of blended. I actually really miss memorable japanese music.
>I actually really miss memorable japanese music.
But most japanese games have memorable music
A lot of big mainstream Japanese games that've come out recently are going more the way of orchestral scene setting music imo
> has never heard of dragon quest??????
dude this list of japanese composers is pleb meme-tier
>Martin O'Donnell
Sup Forums is the 2nd largest board user, not expecting somebody to like vidya here is foolish
Even after the /vp/, /vg/, and /vr/ split it still retains it's userbase
Yoko and Jeremy are amazing
I believe the problem stems from different styles of video games, and the roles that music plays in them. Music in Japanese games often has a much more forward and important role in setting the tone and feeling of the game, while in American games, music only serves the purpose of being some ambient noise to make the part of the game more atmospheric.
With your specific examples, I guess because jazz is still fairly big in Japan among anybody who studies music, whereas lots of musicians here will, for some reason, avoid it.
But there's definitely memorable (though its quality is sometimes arguable) music in western videogames. Look at the Elder Scrolls series for probably the biggest example. I'd also argue Wolfenstein: The New Order had a wonderful score, and it stuck with me at least. I think action games in the US tend to do a little better but there is a point you have that Japanese game makers definitely invest more into their soundtracks. I get the feeling being a composer just commands a little more prestige in Japan no matter where you're applying those skills.
nice cherrypicking
the real answer is ymo
what the fuck are you talking about?
name one soundtrack more memorable than need for speed underground
Honestly, yeah, also shows up in pop music. The Japanese use a ton of chords that don't exactly break with western harmony but they don't mind creating more tension than your average pop song, even in the lowest common denominator. Rather than, say, G-D-Em-C, they'll do something like Gsus4-Dsus2-Em7-C9 for a simple pop song (by the way, this isn't exclusive to Japan, you can find similar stuff all over Western popular music, The Beatles being a particularly big example). So, yeah, lots of interesting chords and sounds.