In my review for the Nintendo DS title Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon I mentioned that I thought there was little variety in the soundtrack while I was playing the game, so I was astonished when I saw this soundtrack had 63 songs. Were they playing the same songs constantly or were they just so unmemorable that I forgot them in an instant? Well, let’s find out.
You can never play a Fire Emblem game without the main theme and I never get sick of hearing it. It presents the series with a link that gets the heart pumping with familiarity while simultaneously presenting a brand new game each and every time. I find it one of the most effective series themes, along with Dragon Quest’s rousing overture. There are plenty of other familiar songs as well, including “Footsteps of Destiny” and “Time of Uprising.” One thing worth noting though is that this OST features redone songs from the original NES OST as well as brand new songs just for this remake. Unfortunately I (and many others) won’t be able to tell the difference since this is the first time this game has reached our shores.
One thing I noticed early on while listening to this OST was that a majority of the music is unobtrusive and sounds more like background music, which I’m sure, is why I didn’t notice half of the songs when playing the game. This is usually more typical of Western RPGs than Japanese. Most of the songs are also rather short (around a minute or less), so despite there being 63 songs the OST goes by pretty fast. I found most of the music didn’t leave much of an impression on me because it was over in a heartbeat. In fact I’m pretty positive they had to have some of these songs looping multiple times without any break during certain scenes in the game.
Much like the game itself, I found this OST to be the weakest of any game in the series to reach our shores so far. It certainly isn’t bad and fits the mood and themes of the game well enough, but nothing in it is particularly memorable beyond the songs that have managed to stay in the series for years. The OST and the songs within are over in flash and just failed to make an impression on me. I likely won’t remember any of the songs a day after writing this review. The only thing I can say is that if you are a huge fan of Fire Emblem music it’s probably a worthwhile purchase, but otherwise I wouldn’t bother.
