music

Unatmed Heart / Klonoa: door to Phantomile

Sort of decided to type this on a whim because I was listening to it.
I like this song. It feels really out of place when you compare to the rest of the soundtrack but it fits perfectly in the stage it plays in.
The melody is slow and melancholic, which is unusual as this is the penultimate stage, but appreciated when you're playing it for the the first time.
Though, when you beat the game and see the ending it feels a lot more like it's foreshadowing what's to come at the after you've beaten the final boss. Yeah thats's all I have to say. Peaceful yet melancholic song. Also I love the part with the piano.

Sanctuary / Utada Hikaru

Not gonna lie, I just think that this song is goated and any words I use to express my liking towards it would be a disservice. Yes I am biased due to nostalgia and yes, the kh2 opening is pretty much the main reason I like this song. I really cannot put it into words. Even just the first moments before the electric guitar get me feeling emotional and I just end rewinding just to listen to it again lol.




Music I don't have too much to say about

So as I thought about it more, I realised that a lot of the songs that I listen to that aren't from video games or that I associate with a strong memory or moment, I wouldn't really have a lot to say about. Not that I don't like them as much but my words for them would more or less go along the lines of "it sounds nice and I like that one part and it makes me feel like this". In some cases though I might just write up something like that if I wanna bring up a certain song in particular. Anyway I'll probably add a link to a playlist of all the songs that come under this category.

Hatred - ずっとこの時を待っていた / Manabu Namiki

I've been playing Espgaluda II more recently and this song has grown on me. It's a medley of the stage themes of the original Espgaluda and it really elevates them considering that ost was always a bit lacking, at least with its sound font in my opinion.
It's composed fine but it doesn't sound as good but I guess that could just be as a result of what they were trying to go for being limited by the technolohy they were using at the time but I'm not the composer so I do not know. Anyway I like the part that uses the stage 4 theme of og Galuda. It sounds nice. Yeah.

DAIOUJOU - just the entire soundtrack / Manabu Namiki

Sometimes I forget how good it is because it's not as funky or upbeat as the post Mushihimesama Cave games but whenever I go back to play it, or watch a score run, I just find myself vibing to the music most of the time. The only track I'm not too fond of is the stage 4 theme, compared to pretty much every other song in the game it just feels meh, not to say that its bad but... it is indeed the kind of song that would play in a factory. It is very much a factory song.
It's hard to say which track is my favorite, I enjoy them all a lot and I'd say that even among other cave games, it has some of the best overarching themes. The ship select theme is great on its own but then the way it smoothly transitions into the stage 1 theme is beautiful.
I love the melancholic ending theme thats a bit more lowkey compared to the dfk ending themes and the name entry theme is chill and I like that. When it comes to the stages, I just like them for how relatively mellow and atmospheric they are, especially the stage 2 and 3.
The boss theme is pretty good for how repetitive it is and the final boss theme is alright I suppose, above average. This tlb theme is the first of the overwhelmingly intense ddp tlb themes and it's really good, however, in my opinion almost every ddp adjacent tlb theme has been better than this one because they double down on the intensity. Though in the case of this game, Hibachi's theme nicely contrasts the more chill stage themes.
The Doj section of the arrange version of the Sdoj tlb theme does the song justice though. Also Ketsui's tlb theme sounds really similar to this one but uses leitmotifs from the ship select and final boss theme of that game, which elevates it above the ddp tlb theme.
Anyway I'm getting off topic. To abridge all this, Doj's soundtrack is just chill and atmospheric and I like that. Yeah