PREPARE 2 SIGH: The Music of Dark Souls, etc.

Why do games of such rich aesthetic merit have such bland musical soundscapes?

The Dark Souls series’ soundtracks are, collectively, one of the largest recent aesthetic offenses perpetuated in videogames. To contrast their unimaginativeness with the rest of the games’ material, one feels a dulled sensation nearing depression, as if a bright gray sky, overcast yet with no distinction of clouds’ forms, has settled upon the mind. This offense was most recently extended to the 2022 release, Elden Ring, the soundtrack to which was written by five composers. What exactly is going on here? How can multimedia of otherwise such rich aesthetic merit continue to be saddled with such hackneyed material? and why does this arouse little critical commentary?

Let’s jump back to 2009 for a moment. As with so many other things, orthodox treatment of Demon’s Souls’ score has shrunken it in the mind of a popular consciousness to but a few themes: the Tower Knight and Penetrator (“lulz”) and Maiden Astraea (“i cri evrytiem”) — but it is, in fact, a very good soundtrack, full of considerable compositional interest and considerate instrumentation. The Nexus’ unusually tender theme is just as much silence as it is sound. You may find yourself struggling to bridge the last four or five notes’ phrasing with that of the present, trying to hold onto scraps of life and form a contiguous meaning. So effective was this theme’s formalities that it was subsequently troped: each hub area for the Dark Souls trilogy, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring has been similarly musically themed, although it is only Bloodborne’s which has matched or outdone its influence.

The ensembles for Shunsuke Kida’s compositions are small, most likely due to budgetary constraints; yet this works in the pieces’ favor. As they strive for shades of horror or tragedy, their textures are drawn out thinly. It is consciousness, the violence of willpower, striking out even as its voice cracks and the world collapses to dust: misery, greed, anxiety seeping through chthonic openings like purplish sludge. This is music hardly ever heard in videogames — or anywhere else. To my ear, it is only perhaps in certain passages of Igor Stravinsky’s 1927 work, Oedipus rex, that one finds a music of really comparable make, both handsome and grotesque, ultimately and lithically austere, like the enormous Boletarian Palace of Demon’s Souls.

Many new creative positions were assumed for Dark Souls’ development. Industry veteran Motoi Sakuraba became the game’s chief composer. One (excellent) piece, that of the file select/character creation theme, was authored by Yuji Takenouchi, who served as the highly capable lead sound designer for Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. It is confusing to speculate on why Kida and Sakuraba were hired for their respective positions — but for differing reasons. For Kida, it is because his résumé was and is hardly anything; even though, of course, one must start somewhere. For Sakuraba, it is because his orchestral music has hardly ever known what to do with itself besides be broad and dumb: caricatured chunks of western classical harmony pushed together and obligingly filigreed with a harpsichord or woodwind.

Even now, if you bring up Sakuraba, it is his frantic, colorfully outlined prog-rock themes for the Star Ocean or Tales series that come to mind first, and rightly so. At their best, they are strange manic creatures hurling themselves through wild acrobatics for the sake of the show, and it’s so much fun to get drawn into it. All that has transferred from them to Dark Souls’ soundtrack, however, is some metrical irregularity and the occasional familiar melodic contour. As it stands, Sakuraba’s contemporary status largely derives from older successes and an almost baffling extant ability to produce on the level of great quantity; although, it is not unfair to wonder if such quantities have been supplemented by ghostwriters.

And, let’s be clear: Valkyrie Profile’s crazily excited and idiosyncratic prog-rock/fusion really has no place within Lordran, Drangleic, or Lothric. The issue is, most of all, Sakuraba’s aforementioned clumsiness as a Serious Cinematic composer. This stodgy kind of “seriousness” has plagued the games since, despite the more classically competent Yuka Kitamura assuming a primary compositional role upon Dark Souls 3. Kitamura has simply brought in her own interchangeable, workmanlike tropes. I do not mean to knock the aspect of competency denoted by a term such as “workmanlike”; but I believe that soundtracks impress most of all when they can find a balance between the tonally appropriate and the musically unorthodox. Dark Souls’ soundtrack carries with it a fatigue, and not one with narrative relevance, but of imagination. The goal here seems to have been of reaching a threshold of loudness, density, and bovine vocalism, as if the majority of its compositional body were written with an assumption that boss themes need to be loud because they’re boss themes. Yet the very few highlights of Dark Souls’ music, such as the theme shared by the Moonlight Butterfly and Gwyndolin, come when the sound diminishes.

If the best thing about Dark Souls’ world is its mysteriousness, the worst thing about its music is its tyrannical success at turning its greater beings into mere husks of aggression. The long-term result is that, once you have become proficient at playing, the music’s very limited descriptive utility is outmoded. It’s screaming: “Be afraid! Be anxious! It’s a bossss!” — and, huh — you could not be less afraid. This trend has been escalatory. Compared to its sequels, Dark Souls’ soundtrack sounds downright varied and controlled. The theme for Pinwheel, however meager on its own, definitively stands apart from the theme for Seath in particularities separate from slack-jawed choral flatulence. While the former suggests something old, dry, and dim — occult and occulted — the latter stands up, rigid and imperious, pronouncing a kind of calculating arrogance. By the time of Dark Souls 3, whereupon Sakuraba was joined by Kitamura, Tsukasa Saitoh, and Nobuyoshi Suzuki (Kitamura having been present as Dark Souls 2’s secondary composer), hardly anything could escape from an undifferentiated Ｅ-Ｐ-Ｉ-Ｃ vortex of bells, choruses, brass, and strings.

The fact that Dark Souls 3’s still, black-and-white menu screen is matched to such a soundscape is like an unwanted joke. Elden Ring would do just about the same thing six years later. One recognizes the actual final boss’ theme for what it is only because Kitamura inserts Gwyn’s motif, from Dark Souls, into its latter half. Differently, what is probably the most atmospherically impressive of Dark Souls 3′s major antagonists, the Dancer of the Boreal Valley, is given a theme which imparts more than the banal fact of an imposing obstacle. Like the figure of the Dancer, it is always seemingly on a cusp, airy and cold, an ambiguous body swathed in thin sonic veils. Here, however, I am not sure that we are dealing with more than just tonal appropriateness.

I find it hard to not be condescending when it comes to wondering why anyone would like such grossly cliched music — and, for sure, people do like it. The general reception has been positive; even enthusiastic. A partial answer may be in the disparity between the attention given to certain tracks over others. Compare, for example, “Dark Sun Gwyndolin” (798,000 views) to “Great Grey Wolf Sif” (7 million views); “Sinh, the Slumbering Dragon” (414,000 views)¹ to “Sir Alonne” (1.4 million views); or “Oceiros, the Consumed King” (772,000 views) to “Abyss Watchers” (5.1 million views). Rather than literate preferences (there is, after all, not much difference between the last coupling), these disparities suggest that the music is being treated extra-musically. That is to say, Sif’s theme overshadows Gwyndolin’s because of how the fight with Sif has been built up within the fandom as an emotional spectacle on its own, much like the Maiden Astraea. Comparatively, “no one” cares about the Moonlight Butterfly, and the gender-bending Gwyndolin, offering no especially challenging resistance within the fight, has been reduced to a 4chan-derived slur.

What matters here are not quite the aesthetic qualities but associative ones: the fact that one will listen to a piece and be reminded, like others, of an in-game situation. It is a mimetic object to huddle around. None of this is to disparage listeners — too much, anyhow — but the phenomenon says nothing about the music’s actual merits. I am reminded of live recordings of music where, after the musician sings just the first couple words of a well-known song, the crowd erupts with swooning shrieks. A similar type of response is on display in the comments sections for the Dark Souls series’ soundtrack videos. It is not just the visual or narrative particularities of the bosses which prompt this kind of response, but the fact that FromSoftware’s dark fantasy titles have come to constitute a brand — just like how the most successful pop singer becomes an image to adore; and that whatever has settled within this domain has been granted extra-special treatment on the basis of that branding.

Worse, these scores lend themselves to the uncritical reading of the Dark Souls narrative being one of simply overcoming obstacles as the badass protagonist who owns combatants in epic showdowns. Again, in these appraisals, the particularities don’t matter: what does is the sheer level of impact, context be damned. A YouTube upload of Dark Souls 3′s “Slave Knight Gael” has 2.2 million views and twenty-two-thousand thumbs-up. The fight against Gael is empty of purpose, its conflict compelled by absent meaning, the nihilism of a dead world, now an endless series of ashen dunes. Tumblr user syzygyzip writes that Gael represents the archetype of the person who has “played beyond the point of pleasure”, and I agree. Yet the music here communicates nothing subversive, pathetic, or strained. In 2009, Demon’s Souls was bold enough to have its final boss be an incapable pile of sludge signifying the rotten fruit of megalomania. Seven years later, fully realized anti-climax had become unthinkable; and so, even as there is no more of a dead-end in the Dark Souls series than what follows Gael’s story, we are told through the language of blockbuster music that this clash is tremendous — not hollow at all.  But why care about badly told lies?

This indictment goes beyond the series’ composers and includes FromSoftware, for it’s not as if Sakuraba, Kitamura, et al are not held to an approval process. It surprises me that no one has yet thought to interview now-FromSoftware-president Hidetaka Miyazaki on his involvement with the musical creative process, or even regarding his own tastes. Perhaps something crucial could be revealed as to why, say, Bluepoint Games’ 2020 Demon’s Souls remake was allowed to steamroll over the original soundtrack in such a musically insensitive fashion. Of course, it is entirely possible that, for all of his apparent talents at cohering various material into deep and unified aesthetic visions, Miyazaki simply does not understand the role of music in this equation, and does not see how it can exceed said “descriptive utility.”

It’s been said — often enough for it to be seen as a general criticism, at least of a more vocal contingent — that Dark Souls 2’s bosses too frequently conform to the trope of Big Guy with a Big Sword. I’m not going to address whether or not this characterization is exact. The criticism concerns not just how an excess typology constrains the possibilities for how fights play out, but also the aesthetic consequences: that the game’s potential high-points are flattened when variety is curtailed by the establishment of an overt pattern — and not only an overt pattern, but precisely the typology one might expect where “dark fantasy” or “medievalism” is involved. I cite this criticism because I find it perplexing that there is no equivalent critique of the soundtracks. In a very real sense, the soundtracks for the Dark Souls sequels and Elden Ring are little but the audio equivalent of Big Guys with Big Swords — interchangeable, predictable — and even the most enthusiastic comments regarding the persons or beasts they pretend to describe only amplify this by their uniformity: “Once, they were magnificent; now, tragic.” Prepare to Cry. 😭

I also cite it because is not the aesthetically unpredictable — apparently unlike things forced together to form interesting synthetic unions — one of the greatest draws of these titles? A trailer for Elden Ring’s add-on, entitled Shadow of the Erdtree, was released a couple of weeks ago, and I think the effect it has had on people’s imaginations powerfully derives from its brief windows into such unions: a sky with colossal, diaphanous “drapes” hanging from a dull gold zone; a sentient wicker man with a solar face grafted on; a huge and bizarre hippopotamus-like quadruped suddenly growing a bed of quills from its body; a horse supporting a skeletal figure whose neck extends like a snake, and whose head is but a round black slab with two glowing eyes; a landscape where all of the color derives from a plain’s flowers and grasses glowing a garish blue-white; a writhing leonine monstrosity covered with armor and robes, and seeming to support multiple bodies under these articles. It is impossible to miss how such imagery thrives upon contrasts and derives from artists exploring unusual synthetic avenues.

And then (here, I shake my head) there is the music — exactly what anyone familiar with these games would expect, yelling and pounding as hard as its windbag-body can muster after the ol’ reliable cello has grumbled for a bit. Where is the novel contrast? Where is the strangeness? Where is the evidence of the artist as explorer, rearranging connective tissue and startling with coloristic combinations and formal evocations? How can a component so influential at its best as to become certain titles’ most beloved aspect continue to be treated in so adequate a fashion? As a person who helped to initially inspire my critical trajectories wrote, “Adequate does not intrigue. It suffices. It takes up space.” And is this not even adequacy anymore, since it demeans the content it is supposed to uplift, rendering it all as banal, a surface-level struggle of unmitigated competing forces?

It’s no longer enough to state that FromSoftware’s soundtracks are merited by infrequent contextual application, least of all because Sekiro and Elden Ring insert music for most of their locations; nor is it enough to refer to their own realm as differentiated from the rest, since their sonic population has turned incestuous and cannot be told apart. When the apparent range of the majority of a soundtrack seems to have hinged upon a ready-made route of whether or not to go more Epic or more Tragic, a very dead dead-end has been reached. If anyone is going to dare to critique FromSoftware’s output as by now approaching a bit too much of “more of the same”, it is in the music where such criticism, if it is to be particular, could begin.

1. This number is derived from a YouTube video which existed at the time of the original publication of this article. This video and the others for the three subsequent examples have since been deleted, either by the uploaders or by YouTube