Motoi Sakuraba Appreciation Thread

[SwordBreaker]

From his "After all" album, Megrim, a great, great song!

Wow. I admit that I'm not following his solo independent releases, but that was insanely cool! Synthing his way through as usual.

BTW, wonder if any of you guys seen his live performances with his bandmates? This is my absolute favorite part:

The bass solo is just freakin' cool! And Sakuraba comes in toward the end. Pure bliss.

[Bahamut]

If you're talking about the actual piano piece played around the 3rd act of the game, that was the pianist Stanislav Bunin playing. If you were talking about the rearrangement used during the final battle, then yeah, that was Sakuraba.

Personally, I just can't really get into a lot of Sakuraba's work. For me it's really hit or miss with mostly misses, however I think that when he nails it, he really does. In my opinion his work on Infinite Undiscovery, Eternal Sonata, and Tales of Phantasia(to a lesser degree) were pretty awesome and really added a lot to the games, but his stuff in the Star Ocean and Tales series sound pretty derivative, samey, and droll to me for the most part. If I can remember any of the music for those games, it's simply because of mass exposure rather than interest in them.

I think it was a good idea to pair him up with another composer a la Resonance of Fate(End of Eternity) with Kohei Tanaka, which was a bit of a stylistic clash, but I think it helped the over all feel and aesthetic of the game. Also much like Kid Icarus Uprising, when he worked with the "All-star composing team", which I think gave him more time to focus on just a few good pieces instead of being spread too thin.

I love his work on Tales of Eternia personally - it's different from a lot of Tales games, although the soundtrack is a bit aged since it was on the PS1.