Crap Games with Great Soundtracks

Visual Novel Community Anime/Otaku Discussions
#1

I saw the OST for Dawn of Mana in a bargin bin yesterday, and decided to buy the thing… just for the hell of it.

WOW! Just simply wow. Never played Dawn of Mana, because the game is reviewed as garbage by just about everyone. However the soundtrack generally got thumbs up (along with the graphics). I just never thought it could be THIS magnificent. I don’t regret skipping the game; I regret not hearing this awesome music sooner. Really a pity it was wasted on that trash. The biggest highlight are the remixed tracks from earlier Mana titles. Heavy metal rendition of Irwin on Reflection? Pure gold.

The remember getting this same feeling from SaGa Frontier - also a crap game with an awesome soundtrack. Shouldn’t surprise me that Kenji Ito also worked on that. Such talent squandered… :frowning:

#2

Lol that’s a strange topic.

Hum… I would not say the game was crap, but I really liked the OST of Silent Hill 4.
In fact I have Silent Hill 1 → 4 but I only plaid a few times at Silent Hill 1.
As for a shitty game with a great OST, I don’t know since usualy I play the game before listening the OST and I play only games I like.

My fav OST :

Moment of Silence
King of Fighters 95
RE2, 3, outbreak and code veronica (the best RE OST)
Silent Hill 4
Narcissu
Yume Miru Kusuri
Crescendo

#3

Clock Tower 3. Man, that OST is awesome … but the game is just bad.

#4

Oh yea! Both Castlevania entries on the PS2 sucked - Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness - but the soundtracks were just divine (or would that be infernal). Especially for Curse of Darkness.

#5

:frowning: I liked SaGa Frontier, but it was super repetitive. Crap game with good OST? Final Fantasy XI. Good songs but to hear the best ones you need to submit yourself to hundreds of hours of grinding. Ick. Berserk for Dreamcast has a really good OST, and it’s fun, but the camera controls (or rather the lack thereof) kill it.

#6

Snow drop smells like crap but I really like the two songs.

#7

Chrono Cross.

#8

Chrono Cross?come on ,man.Do you really think Square’s number one rpg is “crap”?

Couldn’t agree more

#9

Yes. It also has great visuals, but high production values can only polish a turd so much.

I didn’t even bother getting multiple endings. The game’s just poor.

#10

Going away from this little side discussion regarding the merits of Chrono Cross now, I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned Deus Ex: Invisible War in this thread. While the game isn’t utter crap per se, compared to the original Deus Ex it is a pale shadow of its former glory. One of the sequels redeeming features, however, is the liberal use of songs by Kidneythieves. If you’ve never heard their music, in my opinion you owe it to yourself to listen to the song Taxicab Messiah. (I would have preferred linking to “S+M (A Love Song)”, but I couldn’t find a good link for it.)

#11

CC was a great game that was plagued with being too ambitous for a budget-strapped Squaresoft. Had they not slashed the budget midway through production the game would have been much better.

Dragon Quest/Warrior 7 had good soundtrack…I wouldn’t say it’s a crap game, but certainly it’s soundtrack was way above caliber compared to gameplay.

#12

Wherever I go, Chrono Cross gets good reviews by the majority gaming population. Never played it, so I have no personal opinions outside of a business model. But when 9 out of 10 people says something is good, I generally assume that means it’s good, and the 1 person who dissents is the oddball. :stuck_out_tongue: There are exceptions of course - but I don’t imagine Chrono Cross would be one of them.

I wanna mention Devil May Cry 2 as a crap title (for a DMC game; its not even considered canon) with a great soundtrack.

I also liked the music in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake.

#13

There are several phenomena at work here. One is the tendency of people to rate something based not on actual quality, but pedigree. Another is the tendency of good soundtracks and music (bling) to kind of cloud people’s minds. I know there have been plenty of times where I played/read something, was thoroughly engrossed at the time, but later (say, when I tried to read it again, or even just thought about it) realized there were serious issues I’d overlooked. There are hordes of people who think Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth novels are excellent; I read the first one, got to the end, and was like “there were some real big issues with this book”, and never picked up any of the sequels.

Chrono Cross is very pretty and has awesome music. It was a sequel to a much-beloved game. Therefore it was going to get good reviews, unless it was god awful.

It is perhaps something of an exaggeration to say Chrono Cross is crap. In absolute terms, I have to admit no - it is not. But in relative terms? That is, as a member of the Chrono series? Can’t compare to the first game. It should have been awesome, but it’s not. Everything that made Chrono Trigger what it was, was stripped out for Chrono Cross. The characters were bland, the writing tortured, the pacing was terrible, the plot was overly complicated yet poorly explained, there were no combo attacks.

And I’m still somewhat pissed that they didn’t use the obvious plotline, but that’s just me being petulant :slight_smile: Basically, I don’t like Chrono Cross, because I feel that the whole game was honestly boring; that it was too different from Chrono Trigger (it ditched what I felt made the series what it is); and it wasn’t even as good as the first one.

#14

What you’ve said about Chrono Cross, Nandemonai, is somewhat like why Invisible War doesn’t compare to the original Deus Ex. Basically, they watered down the complexity because they released Invisible War for the console market (XBOX).