Careening to your ear drums, we have the contenders for region 4. This round features the best audio quality and complexity. What are our thoughts you ask? Read on and find out!

Sean’s Picks

1 – Cuphead – If you haven’t listened to this before do it now. If you aren’t jammin to these songs right away you have no soul.

2 – World of Warcraft – Some of the most epic songs in all gaming. I get the song played is slow but you can feel it.

3 – Horizon Zero Dawn – Another game that gets you on the edge of your seat with the music.

4 – Bastion – Great music all around.

5 – Journey – I dare you to find a bad track in this game. If you do. I’m going to call you a liar!

6 – Lost Odyssey – Back in Black!!!!!!

7 – The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword – Oooooo look at me, I’m another Zelda game. Wooooo. Stupid.

8 – Gears of War 3 – I don’t care about the chants. This song is fucking amazing.

9 – Ori and the Blind Forest –

10 – Doom – 🤘🤘🤘

11 – Super Mario Odyssey – Who knew you can take that Mario feel and change it! Better than some Nintendo properties.

12 – Last of Us – How is this so low? These guitar riffs are just amazing.

13 – Mass Effect – Music always gives it that space opera feel.

14 – Okami – Epic music.

15 – DuckTales – Who can take the moon track from DuckTales and make it even better!

16 – Bioshock – Tough competition to make this last. But this is a great OST that adds to the game’s atmosphere.

Play-Ins

Octopath Traveler – Old rpg feel of music but beautifully done and makes me want to play it now.

A Flame in the Flood – Give me that banjo and let’s float down the river!

Mike’s Picks

1 – Journey – Grammy Nominated.

2 – Cuphead – The soundtrack and this game are the best matched pair on this list.

3 – Bastion – Composed by Darren Korb, this soundtrack brings the quality of this game up a few notches. You may recognize some of Korb’s other work from Transistor and Pyre.

4 – Lost Odyssey – The soundtrack was composed my Uematsu (do I have to give him even more praise than I already have? 😂) and therefor I ranked it high. Sue me. He is one of my favorite composers and my emotions won on this ranking.

5 – Last of us – This game received many honors after its release. It should come as no surprise the music from the game also received well deserved praise.

6 – World of Warcraft – I spent my first 2 years of WoW playing without the music on. I eventually turned it up when I wasn’t raiding and HOLY CRAP! I was blown away by it. Now WoW has more music on its soundtrack than most of these games put together. (No, I didn’t do the math haha)

7 – Mass effect – And now my ranking struggle begins. The music of Mass Effect is very emotional and really can draw you in at key points in the game.

8 – BioShock – I never realized how beautiful this music was until we started ranking the OSTs. BioShock was composed by Garry Schyman, who also composes for tv and film (Magnum P.I.?!?). Schyman left no doubt he is a master of the art of music composition by basically working with every major media.

9 – Doom – The most unique soundtrack on here!

10 – Gears of War 3 – I am upset I couldn’t correct Sean and remove the Mad World rewrite from the track list for this….

11 – Okami – This soundtrack does an excellent job of paying tribute to the Classical Japanese works that inspired it.

12 – Horizon zero dawn – I never played the game. I still appreciate the music. Excellent work for a game that deserved its game of the year recognitions/nominations.

13 – Duck Tales Remastered – So much more intense and powerful than the NES version.

14 – Super Mario Odyssey – Yesssssssssss! Nintendo killed it with this one. I love the Odyssey soundtrack. I don’t have much more to say other than it isn’t as good as the rest.

15 – Ori and the Blind Forest – I don’t have a lot to say about this one. It won out against The Flame in the Flood. 😭. Still a great soundtrack I suppose.

16 – Zelda skyward sword – Another Zelda soundtrack. Still great, but it forced me to move it to the bottom.

Octopath Traveller – Holy crap is this OST amazing!!!!! If the game had launched prior to our selection of OSTs we would likely have had this in there and quite near the top.

The Flame in the Flood – This soundtrack is great. Instrumental, moody, and at times very intense. The soundtrack grew on me as I played the game and eventually became one of the most memorable parts of the game for me.

Ben’s Picks

01 – Bastion – I never knew that I needed metal sitar in my life. I now know that I did. So I found some. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z5-ZVtJ31E In all seriousness though, this did make me click around and listen to other songs from this soundtrack and so far I really enjoyed them all.

02 – Cuphead – This song is sitting very high simply because it is absolutely perfect for the game it is in. It captures the essence and feeling of the time period being represented extremely well. It is also the rare instance in which I feel that the music is pretty much essential for the game to be what it is.

03 – Mass Effect – This song immediately made me think that I had already heard it before. After some thought and some searching I figured out why. The similarity to the song played at the beginning of the opening sequence to the Hulk movie is uncanny. Take a listen for yourself https://youtu.be/P6pXpBxotUA?t=1m10s Amiright?

04 – Doom – Pass me the creatine and give me the bar, its time to move heavy metal objects around! But in all honesty this is a bold choice in music, even when the game in question is Doom. While I enjoy it for listening as a musical only objective such as this, I fear that I would not like it during actual gameplay. In truth I probably wouldn’t even hear it to begin with if I have the option of turning game music volume down.

05 – The Last of Us – This has a soul. It was obviously written by someone who felt something for the song. As with the ones above and a few below its nice that it doesn’t just fade into background noise that I can do without.

06 – Horizon Zero Dawn – This still feels a little like a background song that I would barely even notice while playing the game, but at least it sounds cool and isn’t just background noise.

07 – World of Warcraft – Having been removed from WoW for a number of years at this point I had no idea what game this game from. Honestly I thought it was one of the games with a hard to pronounce title and non-english characters in the title. It wasn’t until about the 4 minute mark that it gets a little more “regal” sounding.

08 – Journey – This is damn calming. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. It does however have a very distinct feel and sound. It doesn’t fall into the category of background drivel as some of the following songs sadly do for me.

09 – Zelda: Skyward Sword – I spent a decent amount of time playing this game, and when it was played for me the first time I had to ask what game it was from. It did not come off as a Zelda franchise song to me (shut up Sean, they aren’t all the same song, but they do share a feeling) This didn’t come across as Zelda related on first listen.

10 – Gears of War 3 – This starts out sounding like its going to be the years vampire and/or werewolf blockbuster movie. Not the trailers, they would have better music, but rather the title sequence showing the background and history of the world you are about to be dropped into.

11 – Super Mario Odyssey – Behold! An epic journey! We must create a song that will both delight your ears with many different musical styles, yet drive you mad and cause you to turn off the music for the game! But at least it isn’t all flutes and piccolos.

12 – Bioshock – This is a bit on the screechy side at times, but overall it has a lot of nuance and layering going on. Sadly with other songs, they bring more to the table (or less depending on what element I’m referring to).

13 – Duck Tales: Remastered –

"This would have scored so much higher, had it gone lower. And by that I mean octaves.
It has a great beat, it just also has the downside of causing the local population of canines
to begin to plot a takeover"

That was what I said about this song as it was delivered in its original release. The game being remastered was the best thing for this song and was the reason I picked it for this region. It still has issues with overusing high pitched frequencies, but overall it adds so much more to the auditory experience that I had to at least include it so that it could be known that while I am a curmudgeon, I’m a curmudgeon who will see reason when shown a better solutionPhantasy Star Online – Help! Help! I just took 8 tabs of E and I can’t tell whats real anymore!

14 – Lost Odyssey – This was originally my last place pick, but I moved it up as it had more layers than the rest, and it ended strong. Other than that, see the text for #15 and #16.

15 – Ori and the Blind Forest – See Okami, and add to it that people can stop moaning throughout a song.

16 – Okami – So here’s the thing; I love the culture, the history, and generally everything about the areas of Japan, China, and the surrounding area. The one thing the I simply cannot get behind is the way that everything seems to either contain as the main focus, or even just including as part of the whole thing, sounds that are high pitched. This runs true for anything from music to even voices. If I could get away with some sort of device that blocked anything higher than around 2000 Hz I would. With that said, this track also just seems like generic background noise that isn’t necessary for gameplay.