Disclaimer: Contrary to this week's edition title, there are actually no rock songs featured in this edition of SuperPhillip Central's Favorite VGMs, but we can still celebrate tomorrow evening's beginning of Hanukkah to all of SPC's Jewish readers regardless!
It's an edition of SuperPhillip Central's Favorite VGMs spanning three generations of home consoles this week, starting with the new. Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness brings us a sweeping orchestral overture to start things off. Following closely behind is the Evil Forest dungeon theme from Final Fantasy IX. Then, Mario Sports Mix and a little known Wii game called Opoona bring us some lovely music, too. Last on this week's edition is de Blob 2, also a Wii era game.
Either click the VGM volume name or the embedded video here in this article to hear each song and game represented. Also, check out the VGM Database for every past featured VGM volume on this weekly SuperPhillip Central staple. Now, let's get on to the music!
v1521. Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (PS4) - Star Ocean Forever ~ Overture
We begin this edition with Star Ocean's fifth outing, a modest budget affair with lots of backtracking and corner-cutting to save money. Despite my issues with the game, I played through it to completion (well, getting one of the several endings in the game) and overall enjoyed my time with it. (Though it has nothing on the second or third games in the Star Ocean series.) Star Ocean Forever's Overture version plays at the title screen of the franchise's games. It blares as boldly as ever to great effect. Many problems persist with Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness, but Motoi Sakuraba's soundtrack is definitely not one of them.
v1522. Final Fantasy IX (PS1) - Danger in the Forest
Nobuo Uematsu is perhaps my favorite video game music composer in the industry. His soundtracks run the gamut of emotions and tickle my nostalgia bones splendidly. He was absolutely on a tear with his work on the Final Fantasy series, and my favorite of his during the PS1 era of games was Final Fantasy IX. It was a game that hearkened back to classic Final Fantasy games after multiple futuristic ones, and the soundtrack went right along with it to an epic medieval soundtrack featuring brilliant character themes, fantastic battle works, and dungeon themes such as this one for the Evil Forest.
v1523. Mario Sports Mix (Wii) - Peach's Castle
From one Squaresoft game to a Square Enix game, we have Mario Sports Mix up next with a catchy and jaunty tune played during matches at Peach's Castle. Mario Sports Mix is a bit of an underrated Mario sports game to me. I enjoyed all four sports in the package which included basketball, volleyball, hockey, and dodgeball. Masayoshi Soken composed the soundtrack, just like with Mario Hoops 3 on 3. This particularly talented composer would later go on to score a wide variety of songs for Final Fantasy XIV.
v1524. Opoona (Wii) - Bonbon Battle 1
Koei-Tecmo presented a whimsical role-playing game for the Nintendo Wii that players used the Nunchuk attachment of the Wii Remote exclusively to control Opoona through dungeons and in battles. Speaking of which, this battle theme might seem familiar to fans of Final Fantasy Tactics and Valkyria Chronicles as it's the same composer, Hitoshi Sakimoto, who provided the music. This theme uses similar synth and sounds to what Sakimoto generally uses. Recently, Opoona got a guest starring role in Koei's Warriors All-Stars as one of the playable characters along the likes of Ninja Gaiden's Ryu Hayabusa and Dead or Alive's Kasumi.
v1525. de Blob 2 (PS3, 360, Wii) - Boogaloo in Blue
Concluding this edition with more colorful and charming cartoon goodness, de Blob recently released for consoles on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The original de Blob was a Wii exclusive, but the sequel saw the series go multiplatform for the first time. The music of the de Blob series can be described as catchy, funky, jazzy, smooth, relaxing, and that just depends on which track you're listening to as you paint the games' levels with color. De Blob 2 is no different in this case, and thank goodness, as the soundtrack is just as fabulous as it was in the original Wii release.
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