Best Game Soundtracks
Settle it: two at a time →A great game score has two jobs: carry the moment while you play, and survive on its own once you stop. The soundtracks here do both, whether that means a town theme you can hum a decade later or a dynamic score that shifts with every fight. Budget is no advantage; a chiptune written by one person competes directly with a full orchestra here, and often wins. Rank by the music you would actually put on with the game switched off, and by how much the game would lose if you muted it.
Ranked by 1 person · 15 items
Nier: Automata is first on the one ballot cast so far.
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Keiichi Okabe shifts the same pieces between vocal, instrumental, and chiptune arrangements as you move between layers of the world, and the invented-language singing makes grief sound alien and familiar at once. It is relentlessly melancholy; there is none of the light Undertale keeps finding.
Mick Gordon built his guitar tones up from raw sine waves and made a metal score that behaves like a synth score, surging with the combat instead of looping underneath it. Outside a demon fight it is exhausting listening, the honest cost of music engineered for one job.
Toby Fox wrote the entire score himself and threaded a handful of leitmotifs through every boss, shop, and gut punch in the game. The synth palette is deliberately thin, which is the point, but it means some tracks lean entirely on context to land.
Acid jazz as a life sim's heartbeat. Shoji Meguro makes menus, subway rides, and rainy days feel effortlessly cool, but the battle rotation is small for a game this long, and the same vocal hook ends up carrying most ordinary fights.
Nobuo Uematsu pulled more emotion out of the PlayStation's internal synth than most composers manage with an orchestra, and Aerith's Theme still does in seconds what whole scripts fail to do. The thin MIDI timbre is a real barrier if you did not grow up inside it.
Lena Raine's synths climb with you, the B-side remixes turn the anxiety up on purpose, and the final ascent resolves motifs the game has been seeding for hours. It commits hard to one electronic palette, and if the pads and arpeggios do not grab you, nothing here will.
Yasunori Mitsuda's debut as lead composer gives every era of its timeline a distinct musical identity, written under a workload so brutal it hospitalized him with stomach ulcers and left Nobuo Uematsu to finish a handful of tracks. The cartridge synth is even thinner than Final Fantasy VII's, and somehow it matters less here than anywhere.
Christopher Larkin's strings and piano lend a bug kingdom genuine tragedy, and the way themes decay as regions fall apart is the score's quiet masterstroke. It holds one mournful register for a very long game; next to Nier: Automata's range it can feel like a single extended lament.
Austin Wintory scored it as one continuous piece that swells with wherever you wander, and it became the first game score to earn a Grammy nomination. It only really works whole; individual tracks drift without the sand and the mountain in front of you.
C418's sparse piano drifts in at random, so the music arrives like weather rather than direction. It taught a generation that quiet ambient could carry a game. There is not much of it, though; long sessions are mostly silence punctuated by cave noises.
Andrew Prahlow's main theme does what the game does: it makes you homesick for somewhere you have never been. A campfire banjo binding a doomed solar system together is an all-time musical idea. There is not a lot of score beyond it, and the long quiet stretches ask patience of a listener.
Kow Otani saves the score for the fights, and the silence in between does half the work; when the strings finally surge as you climb something the size of a cathedral, no other action score touches it. Between colossi you ride through near-total quiet, on purpose, and it tests patience.
Akira Yamaoka swings between industrial scrape and aching melody without warning. Theme of Laura might be the finest piece of music ever attached to a horror game. Half the tracklist is deliberately unlistenable noise, correct for the game and rough on a playlist.
Nintendo finally put a live orchestra behind Mario, Gusty Garden Galaxy alone justified the expense, and the only knock is that pure joy has less to say than Silent Hill 2 sitting on this same list.
Koji Kondo made melody a mechanic: you play the songs yourself, and each one you learn rewires the world around you. Decades of the series still run on his themes. As a pure listening album it is thinner than its reputation suggests, a lot of short loops doing very big jobs.
