The brass marches with huge whole notes while riffing strings and dynamic percussion fills circle the music. The music swells from soft piano to a grand theme that speaks less through melody and more through the harmonic rhythm of the orchestra, like “Time” from Hans Zimmer’s Inception. The music feels much more familiar when you reach the next track, “V Has Come To,” featuring the introduction to Venom Snake’s theme and the new heroic and Hollywood-orchestra style of Ludvig Forssell. In a way, it completely reflects Snake waking up from the hospital, hearing a familiar song sound different and feeling so out of place when realizing that he’s now a decade into the future after a close-to-death coma. It feels so surreal to hear such a pop-like track open up. Opening the soundtrack are an electric organ and mellotron-like keyboard playing the instrumental melody of Midge Ure’s 1982 cover of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World”, introducing Snake and you, the player and listener, to the setting of the game through a catchy new wave tune that wakes up Snake in the introduction scene. Let’s see how much this approach functions with the conclusion to Metal Gear Solid. This is the most Hollywood soundtrack ever made for an MGS game. The use of riffing strings, pulsing synthesizers, and a mix of organic and mechanic drums are much more frequent, pounding and grinding on many of the action scenes in the new open-world gameplay. The songs that appear in cutscenes and various radios around the game reflect the 1980s era where Venom Snake’s story takes place, and showcases booming and dynamic tracks composed by Forssell, along with Justin Burnett and Daniel James. Released in 2015, The Phantom Pain stands as a very unique game in the franchise while still having musical elements that have appeared in past MGS soundtracks: a score that mixes orchestra with driving percussion and electronica, original songs that reflect the time period and narrative of the game, and tracks with bits of sound design that reflect their respective scenes from the story. With all of these changes, what kind of music could score such a game that could potentially be the end of one of the greatest videogame franchises of all time? And now, Harry Gregson-Williams takes the new role of music producer for the soundtrack of MGSV, being primarily scored by Ludvig Forssell, a fairly new composer in the field who had recent experience working on Senritsu no Stratus from 2011 alongside MGS veteran Nobuka Toda. Famous voice actor David Hayter is now replaced by Keifer Sutherland who voices Venom Snake. This game is now Kojima Productions’ final release, and is the first MGS game without the famous “A Hideo Kojima Game” tagline on the boxart. The amount of attention and hype that came with the wait for and arrival of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain only rose with the interesting changes happening for the MGS franchise.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
Categories |