Soundtrack Saturday: NieR - Automata

In this weekly feature, I recommend game soundtracks. I share a few of my favorite tracks, talk about why everyone should listen to the soundtrack, and a little bit about the composer. This week's choice is NieR: Automata by PlatinumGames.

THE STATS

Name: NieR: Automata
Developer: PlatinumGames
Publisher: Square Enix
Release Date: February 23, 2017
Genres: Action role-playing, hack and slash
Composer(s): Keiichi Okabe

MY FAVORITE TRACKS

(The titles link to YouTube videos... and I highly recommend some good headphones to best enjoy all of the subtle elements of the music!)

An Important Note! The NieR: Automata soundtrack is over 3 1/2 hours of music on 3 discs, so I selected 3-5 tracks from each disc for this entry. There were a lot to choose from, so I hope you enjoy my selection!

City Ruins - Rays of Light
(Length: 6:23) Beginning with light piano and guitar, it eases into something lyrical with vocals and percussion after a minute. The piano maintains the same repeated theme, and along with the percussion keeps the track moving--running forward.

Amusement Park
(Length: 6:19) I selected this track because I tend to be a sucker for great use of minor keys and progressions. Various elements of it reminded me of the Eternal Poison soundtrack and snippets of The 7th Guest. There's a playfulness to the composition, but also a lamentation.

Voice of No Return - Guitar
(Length: 3:52) As the title suggests, this is vocals and guitar. Don't try to understand the words, because the "words" are simply based on French phonetics (and still other tracks use Japanese or English). The combination makes for something romantic and forlorn sounding.

Pascal
(Length: 4:47) Everyone loves a moving marimba line, right? Digitally-altered vocals remind us that the theme of the game involves androids and enemy robots. I selected this track because of the flowing rhythm. It's just a pleasure to listen to!

Dark Colossus - Kaiju
(Length: 6:06) My favorite track *would* have the word 'kaiju' in the title. This track is a fantastic musical sandwich. The first two minutes and last two minutes are percussive, punctuated with epic strings, singing brass, and operatic vocals. The middle two minutes are a sinister pipe organ carrying the melody with further emphatic vocals standing out brighter (and more desperately?) in this quieter span of time.

Mourning
(Length: 4:51) The power of this track is that it is almost entirely vocals layering upon one another, with mournful strings entering just after two full minutes to fill a gap where the voices go silent. A minute later, the voices rejoin the strings and take on a wider, sweeping flow. The last minute is a powerful combination of the voices and full strings pushing out the melody at the same time and then diminishing.

Fortress of Lies
(Length: 2:49) The shortest of my track selections, this is a simple one that manages to stand out. It begins with an ethereal sound and sustained chimes, then adds vocals and subtle digital distortions. It has a very chillhop kind of sound, and I can only wish it was a couple minutes longer.

Vague Hope - Spring Rain
(Length: 4:40) You have to be a fan of breathy vocals to appreciate this track. If you spend the first 30 seconds wishing the vocalist would push with her diaphragm already, you might just want to move on. The melody of the strings, however, reminds me a great deal of musical themes I have often heard in Studio Ghibli movies. That is redemptive enough for me to appreciate the balance between instruments and vocals.

Song of the Ancients - Atonement
(Length: 5:10) Right off the bat you can hear this is an epic piece with the percussion, strings and brass laying a foundation for the harmonizing vocals. Having not finished playing the game, I don't know what the atonement is for in the track title, but the chord progressions in this piece do a good job of conveying a mounting struggle and attempt to succeed at something. Given that they fade out the end rather than give it a conclusive end, I imagine this is probably a backdrop for an intense and climactic boss fight that is pivotal to the story.

Faltering Prayer - Starry Sky
(Length: 3:44) Music box? Yes, please. I will listen to just about anything played by a music box. It is my weakness. (Which may be part of my attraction to wanting a kalimba...) This track will make you sad if you listen to it for too long. It's one of those pieces. A minute and a half in, a breathy voice is added to the mix for 30 seconds. I still don't know if it adds or detracts -- I'll leave that to you. But the music box continues on in a slower, heartbreaking fashion -- as music boxes do when they run out of torque.

The Tower
(Length: 7:44) I'm a big fan of this track, even though I'm not entirely sure why. It's the longest in the bunch, and it starts off with almost 80's-sounding ethereal sounds and vocals for almost 3 minutes before some percussion and more 80's sounding digital elements are added. It's a fantastic combination and reminds me a lot of epic ending scenes from many animes. As a bonus, there's a bonus 8bit version that should excite chiptune fans.

You can listen to the full soundtrack on YouTube: 

NieR: Automata Official Soundtrack

WHY I RECOMMEND IT

This soundtrack was recommended as one I should cover, and I readily agreed since I have played the beginning of it on PS4. Further research on it has only convinced me that I need to play the rest of it, and that I also need to add some of the tracks into my regular rotation of music. This soundtrack also won the award for "Best Score/Music" at The Game Awards 2017. The quality of the soundtrack is up there with those of some of my favorite composers, and I can only urge you to listen to the rest of the tracks yourself... whenever you have 3 or so hours to spare. Better yet, go play the game.

THE COMPOSER: KEIICHI OKABE

This is a name I didn't know until I started working on this blog entry. Despite that, I am quite familiar with many of the works Okabe has contributed to over the years. His video game works include the Tekken series, Super Smash Bros., Final Fantasy XV: Episode Gladiolus, and the "City Ruins - SOUL" piece in SoulCalibur VI. His anime contributions include Sekirei, Black Butler and Assassins Pride. He's the founder of the music production studio Monaca which composes for a lot of video games and anime. I'm sure we'll continue to see more from him in the future!

The 2018 Steam Awards

Have you placed your nominations for this year's Steam Awards, fellow gamers? Whether you have or not, here I will share my nominees for 2018!

The first thing I should mention about the award nominations this year is that they reduced the number of overall awards and made the categories less crazy. Keep it simple, Valve. Keep it simple.

Second, the nominations are happening at the same time, and the voting will take place during the December sale, but they apparently aren't announcing the winners until February -- leading me to believe the Winter sale will take place in early February instead of January in 2019. Alternatively, they may simply have a separate sale to feature the winners. Who knows?

That said, I'll get on with listing my nominees!

If you recall, I blogged about Doki Doki Literature Club earlier in the year. It's free, but it's phenomenal and really sticks with you. I think I coughed up plenty of spoilery things in THIS ENTRY, so I won't divulge anything here. If you haven't played it yet, download it now!

Admittedly, I did not play the VR version of Scanner Sombre, but it's the only game I have played this year that has a VR version. If you read my MARATHON RECAP, you know that the unique graphics in this game did a number on my eyes. I don't know if that would be better or worse playing a VR version, but the exploratory nature of the game and the way you reveal the terrain makes it an obvious nominee for the VR category.

By now you really should know that the game I play the most is The Lord of the Rings Online. If you know this and still haven't tried it, then I don't know what's wrong with you. The game has been going for 11 years now, and is still getting new quest areas, new cosmetics, new storylines, new gameplay. It has become a massive world, and I absolutely love it. Despite its age, it also has absolutely gorgeous landscapes that are obviously crafted by people who really care about it. You can see some great examples by visiting Middle Earth by Joego which showcases fantastic screenshots as well as running giveaways for the super nerdy Tolkien fans.

If you don't know who Obsidian Entertainment is, then you probably don't play games much or you're very young and simply don't pay attention to such things just yet. Let me list off some of their titles for you: Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II; Neverwinter Nights 2; Fallout: New Vegas; South Park: The Stick of Truth; Pillars of Eternity; Tyranny; Pathfinder Adventures; and the reason I'm nominating them: Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. I haven't played all of those games, but I am a HUGE fan of the Pillars of Eternity games. The stories are phenomenal, and your choices really (I mean, REALLY) affect how the game goes for your character. The amount of created lore alone is great -- I even purchased the beautifully crafted and lore-packed Guidebook (NOT a strategy guide!). Downside? They've been acquired by Microsoft -- so RIP, Obsidian. You deserve this award.

I acquired AER: Memories of Old from a Humble Monthly pack, and I was sold the moment I read I could FLY around between floating islands in the world to discover and unravel the mysterious story. Because of this, the game world is both beautiful and challenging to navigate. Realism isn't the goal in the graphics, but the stylization used is breathtaking all the same. (The best part was when a lamb fell in love with me and wanted to follow me around. TOO ADORABLE!)

Yes, Town of Salem is another game from the Marathon, and I have been playing it as much as I play LOTRO! What could improve my experience of the game? If I had friends to play it with me. I've convinced one former Extra Life teammate to try it, but imagine if I could have a whole in-game town of my friends playing together? It would be hilarious and amazing! (If you decide to pick up this game, feel free to put me down as your referral: snarkqueen.)

Alright, to be fair, I haven't been playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey on my PC, I play it on the PS4. But the game exists on PC, too, so... that's good enough for me! And while it doesn't necessarily portray an alternate history, the whole bit with the animus and going back into the past lives of ancestors is close enough for me. And have you seen this game at all? This is the kind of game that addictive personalities lose their jobs and relationships for. It's beautiful, well-made, and the fighting doesn't feel tedious like it sometimes does in earlier Assassin's Creed games. Plus, I get to redeem up to 12 codes from Totino's products for free in-game goodies. I like being rewarded for eating pizza rolls, like any good gamer.

No, I haven't been playing NieR: Automata on PC either. But it's the only game I've played this year that has obvious robots in it -- and is worth mentioning. I'm sure a contender for this award will be Warframe. People suddenly realized, after a few years of it being out, that it's actually a viable game. The sheeple astound me sometimes. Anyway, NieR has a fantastic storyline -- even if it's absolutely cray-cray. The guy at GameStop who told my husband and I to look up YouTube videos to catch up on the backstory insisted we'd be hooked. Instead, we watched THIS VIDEO from start to finish, and when it was over we removed our headphones, slowly looked at each other, and simultaneously muttered, "what?!"  So yeah, the story has been pretty cray-cray leading up to this point in the overall story, and... well, I maybe read a spoiler about the ending of NieR -- but I won't spoil it for you! The info makes me want to play it to see how it plays out to get to that point and how the characters respond.

So there are all my nominees! And if you did the above tasks like I did you'll have earned this year's Nomination Committee Badge. Now all that's left to do is see who the finalists are in December and vote for the best!

Like last year's entry about the Steam Awards, today is Giving Tuesday. I'd like to remind my readers that I am still fundraising until the end of December. There are kids who didn't get to see family or be at home last week for Thanksgiving and who will be spending the rest of the holidays in the hospital for various treatments. If you're looking for a worthwhile charity to support today, please consider the kids at Children's National and click on the image below to make a donation on my Extra Life page.

And thank you all for reading and supporting my fundraising efforts!