What’s being rumored as the next SRT series (after Alpha), Super Robot Taisen Z decides not to break any of the musical traditions. The PlayStation 2 Strategy RPG featured four discs’ worth of music, and as usual, it’s broken out as two discs of mecha anime themes, and two discs of original music for the game.
Frankly, it’s coming to be a bit much for me. If you’ve owned any two Super Robot Taisen OSTs since Alpha, you’ve heard like, 60% of these songs before. “Z” made great strides by adding a boatload of new anime to the roster, and thus, plenty of new music from those anime, but it wasn’t enough to sell me. Also, I generally tend to dislike the first half of anime SRT soundtrack, because I’m not a huge fan of the mecha anime themes. They’re more often than not subpar synth instrumental versions of the anime vocal themes.
Discs three and four also (unfortunately) failed to impress me. There were some decent battle themes on disc four, but for the most part, the newly-written music was underwhelming. It also doesn’t help that the synth is subpar considering 1) it’s 2008, 2) they could do streaming audio with live instruments if they felt like it, 3) even if they want to go synth-only, there wasn’t a lot of variety in the instrumental sounds chosen from one track to the next. I tend to find myself bored with this OST, and others like it, rather quickly. It suits the game just fine, but as a standalone experience, I wouldn’t recommend it.
The opening and ending themes from JAM Project are great, in their full-length forms. However, the one minute “game size version” of Crest of “Z’s” really doesn’t give you a good feel for what was written. Cosmic Dance comes out strong, but after nearly 100 tracks of repetitious synth, my mind was too deadened to care.
The only people I’d recommend this soundtrack to are those who have played Z and enjoyed it, and who also don’t own any of the other Super Robot Taisen OSTs. Hopefully, in the next console generation, Banpresto will find a way to “switch things up” musically. I’d truly appreciate it.