A Casual Evaluation of the Xenogears Soundtrack, Having Not Played the Game

Well, folks, after relistening to the Xenogears score — by way of the CD, gifted by a friend years ago — I have to say that, against a majority opinion, I don't think this is a very good soundtrack. I should maybe also say that Yasunori Mitsuda has never been high up on my nonexistent list of esteemed videogame composers. When I do like Mitsuda's music, I enjoy it well enough, but I think the usual description of him as one of the medium's most formidable composers is as painfully wrong as the positioning of Vivaldi as a titan of classicism (a specifically made comparison).

Having not played the game, but knowing that Xenogears is an RPG that takes maybe around sixty hours to complete, it's concerning that the soundtrack is forty-four tracks long. For reference, the soundtrack to Final Fantasy VII (a soundtrack I'll be mentioning a few other times), which seems to generally take people about twenty hours less to complete, is eighty-five tracks long. This is kinda why I don't buy the idea that Xenogears' music takes full effect in its proper context — especially when many of the tracks start to get on the nerves after just the first loop. Consider, also, that this forty-four-tracks count includes two introductory tracks, three tiny tracks which, put together, don't come out to a minute's playtime, and the ending cinema and credits themes. So, in a more general and accurate contextual sense, you're working with a track total that's within the thirty-something range. I don't know how this wouldn't wear thin after the first five or ten hours, especially given the tyrannical predominance of battle themes in JRPG playthroughs.

What's most surprising to me about Xenogears' music is how often I've seen Mitsuda talked up as a wizard of eclecticism, which, to me, implies a sort of musical dynamism; and yet how static, how overly horizontal, so much of this soundtrack is. It's interesting to compare the material here to the Final Fantasy Tactics OST, composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata (Sakimoto ever being leagues beyond Iwata in every soundtrack they've co-written) where almost all you're getting are string, brass, and woodwind ensembles. But Tactics' music sounds immeasurably more dynamic, full, and energetic than Xenogears'; and this is, I think, a direct result of how its pieces develop, how they impart the sense that they are continually unfolding, and that they are eventful — to say nothing of Sakimoto’s considerable skill at part-writing and motivic elaboration. By contrast, I usually can't discern a point to how a given Xenogears track proceeds. Duration seems to simply be a function of needing the track to be a certain length, rather than a consequence of ideas richly explored.

Above: an example of a Sakimoto-authored track from Final Fantasy Tactics accomplishing much within the short span of fifty seconds.

The other thing I'd mention here is that, if Xenogears' music can be described as eclectic in any way, I see this eclecticism as more of a veneer. Many of the tracks adhere to either a military-parade bombast (for me, evocative of FFVII's soundtrack), or a non-percussive, sentimental format utilizing piano, strings, harp, woodwind, or some mixture of these. Outside of these two types, one does find some at least instrumental eclecticism. I've used the word "veneer" because Mitsuda's way of writing music usually doesn't change that much according to the instruments he's using, two exceptions being "Daijiru, City Of The Burning Sands" and "Aveh, the Ancient Dance." I'm not sure what exceptionalizes either from stock "ethnic" tunes, besides the fact that the latter is based on a melodic theme confined to the game. The most thrilling compliment one could devise for the former is that it is “appropriate” — a word I use here euphemistically, as appropriateness is often the bare-minimum attribute for descriptive work, and usually propagates clichés from a cultural fore.

In "In a Prison of Peace and Regret" and "A Prayer for the Joy Man Desires", Mitsuda adopts ostensibly "classical" attire via, respectively, a harpsichord and choir, and a pipe organ. What are the distinctions of interest here, though? With the former, Mitsuda seems to have thought that playing like a child at a keyboard recital, almost every note dropped in with exact 3/4 rhythmic compliance, would convey an antique effect, while in the other there are just a lot of sustained chords and a kind of dim adjacency to the most sluggish sort of hymnal accompaniment. Music by a master craftsman, a composer and synthesist at the height of his powers, this is not.

The main objection I take to Xenogears' music is the quality of stasis, the lack of appreciable formal development. This plays out in one minor respect through a handful of tracks which have intriguing openers and then proceed to go almost nowhere: for example, "Invasion", "Jaws of Ice", "The One Who is Torn Apart", or "Premonition." By far the most offensive instance of this is "The One Who Bares Fangs at God." For the first minute or so, this track could give the impression of an admirably unusual theme for a final boss; but it then shows itself incapable of doing anything except modulating according to wherever Mitsuda has pitch-shifted a vox sample, becoming little but a bathetic and mean pseudo-composition. A surprising counter-example to this is "The Beginning and the End" — the soundtrack's obvious highlight, and a sort of reverse of the aforementioned pattern, moving from a relative stage of development through its first half to a powerful reiterative stage for its latter half. It alone speaks to a more substantial and unusual eclecticism (how many other videogames feature Bulgarian choral folk music?) that the soundtrack asks for.

Above: the jewel of Xenogears’ soundtrack, only (presumably) heard at game’s end.

Weak formal development happens two other ways. One is an over-commitment to instrumental leads. There are just too many tracks with a lead instrument refusing to give up its spot for another, to the detriment of variance, contrast. Listen to (again) "Aveh, the Ancient Dance" (especially taxing on the ear because the melodies are ceaseless), "Longing", "The Gentle Wind Sings", "The Wind is Calling, Shevat of the Azure Sky", "Blue Traveler", "Flight", or "Wings." When I listen to these pieces, I can clearly make out compositional transitions to new phases (for instance, the 01:05 mark for the fourth track, or the 00:28 mark for the seventh track) — but, if this reflected in the instrumentation, it's just by the lead going higher up on the scale. As a consequence, these pieces are deprived of texture and form, turning into long, sheer blocks of sound which have unnaturally captivated and strained the melodic content.

The other way is through overly formulaic compositional decisions. I can hardly be against any given musical technique per se, since every musical decision must be evaluated within its context; but Mitsuda too often uses modulation or chromatic side-steps to bring a minimum of color to otherwise turgid compositions. After a while, the reliability of this technique, and the linear simplicity of its execution, feels more like a "get-it-done" trick, a quick and cheap injection of color, than substantial compositional expertise. Once the OST's first track moves past an introductory section, there's a chord slanting downwards three half-steps for forty seconds, nothing complicating it. This is the blandest drag-and-drop sort of chromaticism, and it's all the less impressive, given that what we're hearing here is just Lavos' theme from Chrono Trigger, but adjusted a whole step lower. This is repeated with "Awakening." Elsewhere, in a track like "Fuse", chromatic sides-steps in the melodic contours are the only remarkable attribute of a piece offering little besides the establishment of an urgent mood (and didn't Uematsu already do this much better with an equivalent theme?). At other times, brief bursts of modulation are almost the sole musical points of interest, as they are around the 00:36 mark in "Knights of Fire."

But the worst of anything are the pieces conforming to the, as I term it, sentimental format — pieces so schmaltzy, so dinky and stuffed with patchouli, that I can't imagine playing these in front of musically literate persons and not feeling a burning second-hand embarrassment for Mitsuda. Tracks like "Distant Promise", "Gem Which Cannot be Stolen", the aforementioned "The Gentle Wind Sings", "Lost... Broken Shards", "The Heavens, Clouds and You", "Gathering Stars in the Night Sky", or "Small Two of Pieces" — each of these is front-loaded with a day-time-drama banality that's as distant as anything could be from a musical, emotional profundity or the picture of a composer exploring beyond the pop-ballad range of diatonic triads and an inevitable capitulation to half-cadences.

It's easy, I think, to envision Mitsuda's score at one point impressing itself upon listener's ears much in the way Xenogears, the game, might have, in the sense that both may have served to open up a wider range of multimedia to an otherwise unfamiliar audience. See, for instance, Neon Genesis Evangelion and English-speaking audiences' awakened awareness of anime. But I can only really evaluate this music according to the current context. Taken as a whole today, the soundtrack comes off as terribly quaint. I get the sense that it is beloved by the sort of person who regards an easily retained melody as the core value of significant music, and so sees a soundtrack like Final Fantasy XII’s — “woefully” daring to go beyond the two-part mold of lead + accompaniment composition — as unmemorable. It is, to me, an unimaginable representative for what has been canonized as an essential title for the medium — although perhaps Xenogears as a totality has similarly come to betray the cultural insularity and naivety of contemporary, teen-age responses to it.

P.S.: I’ve never regarded the “OK, Mr. Critic: why don’t you do better?” response as legitimate, or even intellectually coherent — but, just for fun, here’s a piece I wrote about five years ago which I think finds some adjacency to Mitsuda’s work and can be used as a personal exemplar of what I find to be reasonably dynamic and eclectic.