The Dragonborn Comes

 

Review by · June 22, 2013

The in-game version of The Dragonborn Comes is very bare, sung by Skyrim’s bards unaccompanied by any instrument. And because each line of the song is a separate dialogue bit for them, it’s filled with awkward pauses that stop it from being a very toe-tapping tune. Tera Catallo and Ro have, thankfully, filled things out with well-arranged backing music from guitar and drums, and as you would expect from actual humans with rhythm, they’ve eliminated the awkward pauses. The first half of the song is led by the singer, after which it moves into a guitar solo of respectable length. (Not too long, not too short.)

On the downside, the singer and guitarist get slightly out of sync with each other a few times, and the electric guitar seems a bit overblown to match the style indicated by the singer. Ironically, the style discrepancy really comes into focus in the guitar solo section, where the player has free rein to do as they please. This isn’t a bad version of the song, but I think it could have benefited from another take or two in the studio, as well as a little more aggressiveness on behalf of the singer or a little less from the guitar.

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John Tucker

John Tucker

John officially retired from RPGFan as Managing Editor in 2017, but he still popped in from time to time with new reviews until Retirement II in late 2021. He finds just about everything interesting and spends most of his free time these days reading fiction, listening to podcasts, and coming up with new things to 3D print.