I guess I like Burning Secrets and Infiltrate the Junk Factory, but these better tracks felt like the exception. Some of the early tracks felt strong, but by the end of the game, I just wasn't feeling it. I feel like the music got less and less impressive as the game progressed. That's one aspect of the soundtrack I specifically recall, actually. Great Cave Escape really stood out to me and it really got me excited to hear what was in store for me as I played. I feel like I played this game so early in the year that there's almost nothing I can recall. I had high expectations (but not as high as Woolly World) going into this game considering the fact that Kirby music is almost always good and I've yet to be disappointed by a soundtrack. At least it was better than Kirby this year. The more I think about it though, this game probably wouldn't have made my top 3 if I was able to make time for two other games. At the 1:37 mark, the track definitely hits its stride and the song ends with a nice piano outro that loops back into the beginning comfortably. The beginning of it reminds me of the opening to something you'd find on an older Smashing Pumpkins album. Up Shuttlethread Pass is also an interesting track. I'd like to think that it's the same synth/base that's being used here and it makes me feel good and nostalgic. That hard base/synth that comes in around the 8-second mark reminds me of Bomberman 64's soundtrack, specifically Green Garden. World 2 is probably my favorite world map theme in the game as well. It was the first and only time where I found myself placing the controller down, waiting for the track to loop a few times. Frozen Solid and Chilled was actually the first track that completely grabbed me, however. It just didn't do it for me like the last two games did. There's a lot of great, original stuff and there's good variety/ instrumentation, too. There's nothing inherently wrong/missing from the soundtrack, though. At the end of my time spent with Yoshi, I felt relatively underwhelmed. I love the soundtracks to those games and I still enjoy listening to them today. Good-Feel's/Tomoya Tomita's work on Kirby's Epic Yarn and Wario Land Shake It was so good. I had high expectations going into Woolly World. I could listen to this forever while flying around. Don't worry is without a doubt my guilty pleasure song of the year, too. Then there's tracks like Prone Base, for example, starting around 1:24, has what I'd like to think are subtle callbacks to the kind of music you'd hear Mitsuda compose, say for something like Chrono Cross. This one track really put the game over and it also provided me one of my few "Idle Moments" of the year. I was right at that sweet spot, some 50 hours-in, both physically and emotionally invested, when the nighttime variation of Sylvalum hit. There's moments in games where the right kind of music can become amplified and made even greater. I didn't hit this region until I was fairly invested with the game. I would hope these tracks were as good as they are as that's where most of the player's time is spent! Of all of the field themes, Sylvalum stood out to me the most, however. Primordia, Oblivia and Noctilum, for example, all have that "moment" or "hook" that everyone who's played the game long enough looks forward to. The main field themes all work so well thematically and I never grew tired of listening to them, too. There's so much variety and a lot of the good stuff seems to get lost within all of the racket/noise people make over how much they love/hate the NLA Theme, when there's shit like this or whatever this is called. I feel like this game covered everything I love about RPG soundtracks, too. I have a huge soft spot (or maybe it's a guilty pleasure) for games that have soundtracks with a strong emphasis on lyrical content. I'm not familiar with Hiroyuki Sawano outside of his work on this game, but I will argue that I enjoyed this game's OST, as a whole, more so than the original Xenoblade Chronicles. The soundtrack was more or less everything I expected and needed to hear. Xenoblade Chronicles X is the game I played the most in 2015.
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