Welcome to Gaia! ::

Here's a question. What did all of you think of the DQIX soundtrack in relation to the other ones? To those who have only played IX, what did you think of it as a stand-alone? It seems to come up a lot when talking about DQIX.

I personally think that, while it wasn't bad by any means, it was not nearly as memorable as most of the other soundtracks in the main series.

With one major exception, I find that most of the music really does not stick with me. Not to mention, there are quite a few tracks in there that are remixes of tracks from previous games. The ship theme is from DQIV, the grotto theme is from DQIII, and of course all of the Legacy Boss themes are from their respective games. Again, while that isn't bad, it causes the soundtrack to have less of an identity of its own.

There are other instances I can talk about, but I will leave room for replies now. What do you think?

Well, I sort of have a half-baked theory I am in the works of improving about modern video game music. I find that as the sound quality improves, the composers try and make it more orchestral-like thus the tracks losing the memorable sounds the earlier series have. An example would be like Sakauraba's work (Golden Sun, Valkyrie Profile , Star Ocean) his early works were uppity and all memorable from the simple, yet beautiful tracks. Now with modern technology, his works just seem to all sound the same (quiet and somewhat dull) don't get me wrong, having played flute for ten years, I actually prefer orchestral music to most genres and Valkyrie Profile 2's soundtrack was nice and all, I just miss the synthesizer rock beat he used to boast.

Dragon Quest IX-wise, I sort of felt the same about Sakauraba's work. Now I know Sugiyama has always been an orchchestral sort of guy, but he always had the tendecy to variate his music (eg: Gypsy-like, to the Egyptian feel of the pyramid in III to even the Asian feel of Jipang) but IX sort of all felt the same: either you were in a happy place or a scary place.