Raziel wrote:Maybe not his best, especially if you're into his trademark rock, but it's soo Shin Megami Tensei: hostile, ominous, epic.
um. See, that's the thing. It may fit the tone of the games - especially Strange Journey - but it's not in line with the previous soundtracks in the series. Any of them, really. I honestly wasn't expecting Meguro to deliver another soundtrack along the lines of SMT3, and I was okay with that, but this really doesn't sound like anything previously heard in the series, especially not in the "core" games (Megami Tensei I/II/SFC remake, SMT I, II, If..., III).
On a basic level, I don't have a problem with this dramatic change in direction (although I really do not enjoy the music - it sounds like there's only three or four distinct "ideas" in it). But it's been emphasized several times that Strange Journey is the next main SMT game, and that Atlus was seriously considering calling it SMT IV.
I may feel that Tsukasa Masuko's work on SMT I/II/If.. was a step down from the original Megami Tensei games (although there's still some classic stuff in there), but I can definitely see the way the music evolved from one game to the next. Meguro's work on SMT III changed some things up a bit, but I felt it made a lot of sense in the context of the audio history of the series (the new compositions and remixes by the co-composers helped). But Strange Journey....it just feels wrong to me.
I'll probably change my opinion to a certain degree after I play the game some (my initial reaction to hearing the music was extremely negative, and I've softened since then), but there will still remain what I see as very troublesome flaws: a small amount of audio for an extremely long game and a very weak effort to make tracks stand out distinctly from each other.