Critical Clash II

Track 4-14: Critical Clash II

And now for an analysis I think many readers have been eagerly anticipating: “Critical Clash II”! As I mentioned in an earlier post, “Critical Clash I” has a mainly orchestral sound, while “Critical Clash II” is more rock-oriented—and for an RPG, of course, rock-style battle music is the star of the show and an absolutely essential part of the soundtrack.

In this post, I’m going to explain the two most important elements making up this star track. The first is an unbeatable intro. As a composer, you have to put everything you have into this.

If you think back on the most magnificent battle music of classic RPGs, they always have unbeatable intros. I’ve given some thought as to why that is. One important part of the context is the fact most older RPGs had turn-based combat, while a significant number of recent RPGs have switched to a 3D action combat model. In a 3D action game, exploration and combat are seamlessly connected, with no “changeover.” This means that the music has to transition naturally as well. (Of course, there are cases where events heighten the excitement leading into combat, such as boss battles.) On the other hand, in turn-based RPGs, there’s no smooth transition between exploration and combat; when an encounter occurs, the screen goes dark and then snaps into combat mode, and the music switches to a battle theme. This effect, which is unique to turn-based RPGs, obviously has a high affinity with music that has an intense intro. I think we can identify that as one important factor.

In other words, in a turn-based RPG, a powerful intro is also essential in terms of gameplay. How much excitement you can impart during the intro is key, and that, I think, is exactly what inspired the creation of so many unbeatable intros.

OCTOPATH TRAVELER also has the Battle Extend system with individual intros for each character. The purpose of these is to create a neat musical transition between pre-combat events and combat—the basic idea was to bring the seamless musical transitions of a 3D action game back into the turn-based RPG genre. However, because the music after the transition is a combat theme with its own high-impact intro, the need to heighten the excitement as combat begins is already covered. You might say that the series takes the best parts of both recent 3D action RPGs and good old turn-based RPGs.

The other element I want to cover is something at least as important as the intro, and that is, of course, the melody.

Like “Normal Battle I,” “Critical Clash II” features a melody played on trumpet. As an instrument, the trumpet has a timbre that’s highly suited to RPG battle music, and you can hear many synthesized trumpets in the RPG music of decades past.

To be precise, though, those synthesized trumpets in older RPG music did resemble live trumpet in some ways, but they are really better considered completely different timbres, with their own unique appeal. As a result, I personally often find that simply replacing them with live trumpets gives awkward results, as if something were slightly off about the music.

It’s not that synthesized sounds are bad and live ones are good; it’s just that those unique timbres played an important role in conveying the appeal of the music. This means that if you simply record the same music with live trumpets, you sometimes end up thinking, “Maybe the synthesized sounds were better...”

To go one step further, the synthesized sounds heard in games back then were unique to each company. Depending on the game company, a “trumpet” could have a completely different timbre, and this also helped make each company’s game music unique. In other words, luxurious as it may sound, each game company—each game, even—used its own original sound sources that other companies didn’t have. In some ways, this could be called a richer environment than what we have now.

For OCTOPATH TRAVELER, I have to strive for live sounds that can stand alongside those classic synthesized tracks, so I try to record the strings and trumpets with timbres that are as crisp as possible, and then mix in synthesized sounds later if the track isn’t flashy enough.

The epic melody of “Critical Clash II” is played on a trumpet with just that kind of crisp timbre, contributing the element of melody that’s so vital for a pulse-pounding boss battle theme.

This post got a little long, so I’ll leave it at this one track for today!

Translation: Matt Treyvaud