Nothing enhances a great game like great music to go with it. It's truly one of the things that have spoiled modern gamers -- while games pre-NES did have some music it was few and far between. For a long time not reconized as being an important aspect of a good game, that has recently changed, and game music is growing in popularity.
Some games have music so bad you hit the mute button and listen to something else. Others are so good you race out and buy the soundtrack. Nothing makes the fun factor of a shooting game better then a drving hard metal sounding track, or a college football game with the actuall school fight songs, or a RPG matching the sad moments with fitting music and the battle scenes likewise.
Here's the challenge -- if you had to pick ONE musical piece of all time as being your favorite, which one and why?
I really had to think about this one for a while, as so many good games have such wonderfull music -- Gradius, Castlevania, Final Fantasy -- in the end, I picked one not just because of the song itself, but how well it blended into everything else going on.
Dancing Mad from Final Fantasy VI.
For those who have played the game -- the final boss fight music. That's all I should need to say.
For those who have'nt -- in very basic terms, the main objective in FF 6 is to defeat this crazy bad guy named Kefka (who would also get my vote for 'best bad guy in a video game') before he destroys the entire world. He's insane, pure evil, and delights in causing death and destruction. Heck, he destroys the world just to gain more power, and that power makes him a god. But your party fights on, determined to defeat him, and finally you reach his tower.
First you have to defeat three statues, which look like angels, that are a lot of his power. Finally you can bring everyone together and assign your order for the final fight. You rank people so you have the main line and then who backs them up in case someone falls.
The Dancing Mad piece starts as you do the first part of the multi stage battle -- aganist one of the statues you previously defeated, only mutated. It's at the base of a 'tower' like creature, and very mean looking. After you defeat it, the screen shakes and moves up to the statue, and then on to the third. Each statue has a 'unique' part of the Dancing Mad song. The whole song has a very 'church like' feel and sound to it, with organs and harpiscords and flutes. Adding to the feel of the music is the intense fighting, where you unleash everything you saved all game, the great graphics (for the SNES, VERY good), and as party members die and get replaced by weaker people in your group.
Finally you break above some 'clouds' and find Kefka looking like a angel, complete with the sun beams in the background, and the forth and last part of Dancing Mad starts. He taunts you, you rumble, and finally you kick his sorry ass into death, which starts the ending of the game.
The whole song is about 10 minutes long, and made fantastic use of the very good sound chip the SNES had.
Pure. Musical. Bliss
If you have'nt listened to it, do yourself a favor and find a copy online. Even better, there are at least two orchastral versions of the song that I know off -- the best one, I think, is included in the recent Final Fantasy Battle Mages soundtrack. As good as the song itself is, these versions somehow crank it up even another notch.