I Listened To Fifteen Hours of Armored Core Soundtracks
Like many, I am a newcomer to the Armored Core franchise, having jumped on the From Software bandwagon with the DARK SOULS franchise in 2011. My inexperience with this particular flavour of giant fighting mechs, though, hasn’t stifled my excitement for the recently-announced Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon. I’ve been watching playthroughs and speedruns, reading wiki pages, and, like any former music student with far too much time on their hands, I’ve listened to the soundtrack. All of it. Well, most of it. Seventeen out of twenty discs (i.e. the soundtrack for each mainline Armored Core game, excluding the soundtrack of AC: Mobile and bonus content) from the Armored Core Original Soundtrack 20th Anniversary Box, each disc with a runtime of forty-five to seventy-five minutes. I swear I didn’t set out to do this. It just happened on its own – I started listening to the first disc on Friday and by Tuesday I had successfully listened to an amount of music equivalent to all ten Mahler symphonies back-to-back – and I’m not about to throw away a timely blog post pitch after neglecting my website for far too long. In short, I’m going to discuss the Armored Core soundtracks for the next few thousand words, and you’re welcome to read it if it suits your fancy.
Act Zero
To start off, I’m going to discuss the myriad ways in which each Armored Core soundtrack evolves across multiple reboots and three console generations. While there’s a nebulous consistency of style across the music for all fifteen Armored Core games, each game possesses a distinct musical flavour, and the soundtracks’ genres shift across generations: where Armored Core and AC: Phantasma squarely rest in the environs of industrial techno, later generations – particularly from Armored Core 2 to AC: Silent Line – cross into more ambiguous and bespoke forms of electronica, incorporating techniques of musique concrete. Eventually, using the power of mid-late-aughts VST technology, one hears orchestral soundscapes in Armored Core IV and AC: For Answer, following market trends in the gaming industry that favored epic orchestral soundtracks and which would result in the DARK SOULS soundtrack just three years later. It’s a chronology that follows music production and video game technology alongside the core philosophies espoused by different eras of Armored Core, and one which is endlessly fascinating to me, probably due to my nostalgia for PS1- and PS2-era games that my friends all had when we were growing up. Moreover, it offers lessons to us composers - lessons about style and how it changes over time, lessons about how to (and how not to) experiment with style in order to further your understandings of your own interests and the general craft of composition.
Since I’m all about examining works of art holistically, I’d like to take a minute to discuss story in Armored Core. From what I’ve been able to glean from wiki pages and YouTube videos, the plot of the early games is little more than a framing device, offering narrative context to the player while they run around fighting in and upgrading their giant mech. Later installments offer more ambitious storytelling, such as the multiple alternate endings to AC: Last Raven and the secret side narrative of AC: For Answer; however, I’ve found the concrete details of these plots to be rather hollow and inconsequential, partially as a result of the manner in which these stories are told: From Software’s plots, when presented straightforwardly instead of in cryptic riddles attached to in-game items, become robbed of the delicious ambiguity of time, place, and character for which the studio is now famous. The element of Armored Core’s web of concurrent narratives that most fascinates me is theme – and boy howdy, are there themes galore in this franchise. In playing an Armored Core game, you’re engaging in media that discusses (and, in some cases, deeply engages with) themes of humanity’s relationship to technology and the Earth, ecological collapse, war, and apocalypse, among other sub-themes. These games aren’t about honing into the inner lives of specific characters, but rather invite the player to marvel at humanity’s self-destruction via hubris and avarice. I’ll discuss the ways in which each game engages with these themes in greater depth later, but I’ll note here that, to my knowledge, the music of many Armored Core games (especially those before Armored Core 3) doesn’t engage as directly with the series’ themes and plot in the way that, say, DARK SOULS III would.
Generation 1 (Armored Core, AC: Project Phantasma, AC: Master of Arena)
So what is the role of music in early Armored Core? The soundtrack to the first game offers a few clues. Certainly, the vibe of Armored Core (1997)’s music fits the setting of humanity forced underground after a cataclysmic war, and that of a civilization dependent on and ruled by technology beyond its understanding. This music is jittery, groovy, multilayered industrial techno with some breakcore influence mixed in. It’s an electronic soundscape built of sine tones, laser sound effects, drum machines, FM synthesis, and synthetic keys and bass; much of this music wouldn’t sound out of place in a German warehouse rave in the late 90’s. The setting of the original Armored Core pretty unambiguously reflects specific anxieties around Y2K, but there are some other, more general themes which would have been germane for the time. The game’s structure involves the player, roleplaying as a mercenary “Raven” mech pilot, completing missions for warring corporations. These missions range from busting strikes to “eliminating” protesters to protecting or destroying corporate property; one of the game’s early missions is given to you by the local city guard, who state that they need to get rid of a protest but aren’t themselves allowed to use lethal force, so they’ve hired you to do the dirty work of killing noncompliant civilians.
Perhaps the most iconic character from this first generation of Armored Core is Nine-Ball, the top-ranked Raven piloted by the enigmatic “Hustler-1.” Nine-Ball only appears in the final mission of the game, and is an extremely tough opponent, pushing the limits of the PS1’s capacity for three-dimensional, highly vertical combat to its maximum. Nine-Ball protects (and is strongly implied to be a part of) an AI hivemind. What I love about this encounter is the way it places this idea of technology surpassing human organization right in the player’s face: it’s a fight against a computer-controlled opponent that’s vastly superior to the player in its strength, maneuverability, and mastery of the game’s clunky PS1 controls. Nine-Ball’s track, “Complete Physical,” uses an eerie pad melody above jittering drums as well as occasional synthesizer ejaculations which leap upward from a static pitch, creating a secondary melody reminiscent of Baroque compound melody. The use of a technique pioneered in the precise, logical Baroque idiom reflects a deeply human fascination with the mechanical, with intricate parts interlocking to form a magnificent whole, much like the mechas driven by the player. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that these elements are a microcosm of what Armored Core has set out to achieve aesthetically. This is music that evokes the artificial in the original sense: music that evokes (and employs) cunning and clever devices for deceitful and dishonest ends, the musical dishonesty being the concealment of deep subtext under what is ostensibly an album of experimental electronic dance music. It’s little elements like these which, in combination with the creators’ eminent skill in building catchy, percussive textures, that make the soundtrack to the first Armored Core memorable. There’s a rawness to it, a sense of unrefined glee at the utter danceability of these beats, that makes this music stand out from many of its descendants and many lesser game soundtracks. It’s not just video game background music; it’s music for repeated, focused listening, a complete work of art on its own terms.
The soundtracks for Project Phantasma and Master of Arena closely resemble that of their progenitor; indeed, much of Project Phantasma’s music is shared with the first game. Master of Arena, being a large expansion, contains its own fifty-minute soundtrack, but it’s similar in tone to the original. One notable change involves the handoff between the composers Keiichiro Segawa and Masaru Tateyama, who collaborated on the soundtracks for Armored Core and Project Phantasma, to Kota Hoshino, who would go on to become the primary composer for Armored Core from Master of Arena onward. Hoshino’s style is markedly different from that of Segawa and Tateyama – Master of Arena’s soundtrack, while still groovy, feels more like through-composed video game music than the EDM album stapled onto the previous games. This newer music is less songlike, instead moving through peaks and valleys of intensity that mimic the ebb and flow of the game’s combat. There’s also a significant difference in the timbral identity of these two eras; Hoshino much more liberally employs melodies and chord progressions with salient pitch characteristics. In other words, we can actually hear musical notes in the newer soundtrack! The timbral diversity isn’t hampered by this, though – Master of Arena’s soundtrack is an odyssey through different forms of musical synthesis, from FM-synth bongo drums to synth pianos to booming bass drums to classic breakcore reversed cymbals. There’s even a bit of acoustic piano sprinkled throughout, an element which would become much more prominent in the Armored Core soundscape as the series matured.
The game’s plot is more character-oriented than that of its predecessors. You play as an anonymous Raven whose mission is to destroy Nine-Ball after you see it destroy your city. The famously-challenging final battle pits you against three phases of Nine-Ball: a single mech at first, then two, then an upgraded Nine-Ball Seraph, each of which demands mastery of both the game’s controls and its labyrinthian progression system. The track accompanying the ultimate Nine-Ball fight, titled “9,” is, to put it bluntly, awesome. Funky sequence piano and synth oscillate below an unsettling pad before being interrupted by raucous drums and an electric guitar ostinato. This song is notable not only for its coolness or its introduction of electric guitar to Armored Core, but for its inclusion of ominous processed vocals; it sounds like the AI controlling Nine-Ball is trying to break through the music and speak to you directly. It turns out that the player’s nemesis in the first generation of Armored Core is confirmed to be one of many Nine-Ball mechs controlled by an AI which itself created the entire game setting, corporations and mercenary corps and all. The motivations of this AI are, to my understanding, never made totally clear, but it is cool, I guess.
Generation 2 (Armored Core 2 and AC: Another Age)
To be honest, I may have skimmed over the soundtracks for the second generation of Armored Core while listening to them. They don’t offer all that much that can’t be found in previous soundtracks; while they certainly aren’t lazy rehashes of their predecessors, I struggle to identify much about them that’s unique enough to warrant discussion. Much of this generation’s music returns to the song forms of Armored Core and Project Phantasma, with a notably heavier sound overall; while there are some moments of levity, the synths are all darker and richer, and the drums more compressed than before. Again, this music is more akin to an electronica album stapled onto a video game, and it mostly lacks the quirky je-ne-sais-quoi of Master of Arena’s soundtrack. I say “mostly” here because two of the tracks on the Armored Core 2 soundtrack do something new and exciting. “Magnetism” and “Beatmask” manipulate vocal samples to an extreme degree, using them to form a percussive texture. This technique reminds me a lot of musique concrete pieces like Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain;” it’s a unique and interesting sound that’s heard often in the following generation. Overall, these soundtracks are good, and they preserve the sonic identity of the previous generation to an extent not seen in later installments. This is particularly appropriate given that the story of Armored Core 2 occurs in the same chronology as the previous games, taking place several decades after the events of Master of Arena. That’s about all I have to say on this one.
Generation 3 (Armored Core 3 and AC: Silent Line)
Armored Core 3 opens with an ominous low pad punctuated by booming drums. Eventually, the hint of a groove emerges, accompanied by… VST cello? That’s right, Hoshino and friends brought out their inner Halo: Combat Evolved and put some low strings into this soundtrack. Frankly, it’s awesome, and a welcome reprieve from the stylistic sameness of generations 1 and 2 of Armored Core. This music is less “underground industrial techno” than its predecessors, being a bit sparser and rock-oriented while still maintaining some of its prior EDM flavour. If I might risk a music history analogy, this soundtrack is to generations 1 and 2 as Mozart was to Bach and Handel; deeply indebted to its progenitor in style and technique, but less complex, less intense, updated for a wider audience of merchants and commoners in addition to clergy and landed gentry. This also means that I don’t enjoy this music as much as I did the previous soundtracks, but I still respect it for its artistry. It’s just as timbrally and texturally diverse as one would expect from an Armored Core sound, and the strings are integrated skilfully into an otherwise electronic musical fabric; no element feels at odds with any other, and heterogeneous ensembles work in concert to guide the listener through emotional peaks and valleys much like in Master of Arena. This comes at a cost of complexity, though. Because there are so many timbral elements floating around, it’s less expedient for Hoshino to build interlocking rhythmic textures as before, so the music – especially the drum and percussion parts – are markedly simpler than one might be used to.
One benefit of this new approach is that Hoshino is now able to take a moodier, more emotional approach to the soundtrack for Armored Core 3 and Silent Line. Energetic percussion is replaced by sweeping string crescendos and moody arpeggios; one particular motive, a plaintive descending scale (Db-C-Bb-Ab), recurs across multiple tracks, adding some neat consistency to this soundtrack. There’s an overall sturm und drang feel to it that predicts the temperament of future games and serves to contrast the mood of the first two generations in a way which I find quite pleasing. Electronic components dilute this feeling somewhat, though, and prevent the music from getting too depressing. It might not be my favourite, but it’s a bold stylistic turn for the franchise that was, in my opinion, very well executed. Also, some of the string lines remind me of Halo: Reach, and I like the music in Halo: Reach.
Generation 3.5 (AC: Nexus, AC: Nine Breaker, AC: Formula Front, and AC: Last Raven)
AC: Nexus is the first game in the third-and-a-half generation of Armored Core which acts as a somewhat-direct sequel to AC: Silent Line. It’s also the first game that allowed players to use the PS2’s dual analog sticks to aim their mech, rather than the baffling left-bumper control scheme that had been the norm in previous games. The sound, however, bears little resemblance to that of its direct predecessors and instead seems to reach back towards the first generation: its dense, hypnotic rhythms, pulsating square-wave bass, and funky sine-tone melodies are a far cry from the melancholy of AC: Silent Line. There are a couple outliers to this trend – “Prankish Jelly” is a hard-rock jam session featuring analog drums and electric bass alongside synthetic elements – but the soundtracks of this new generation seem to be aimed at renewing an older aesthetic. To me, this music represents an apotheosis of the original generation’s raw and focused approach into an all-you-can-eat buffet of awesome sounds, expanding a solid formula and granting a diversity and breadth of approach that makes its earlier iterations sound hollow and restrained by comparison. Despite the incredible wealth of delicious noises that one hears in this soundtrack, the work’s style remains coherent throughout – any acoustic elements are skilfully weaved into its sonic fabric, and Hoshino is careful not to push any one sound too far. Above all, the soundtrack for AC: Nexus is a swan song of the earlier generations, the golden utterances of a style that had been the signature of Armored Core since its inception, and which had been explored to its farthest reaches by skilled composers for more than half a decade.
The other games directly related to AC: Nexus – AC: Nine Breaker and AC: Formula Front – are still good, but not quite as stellar as their progenitor. Nine Breaker’s music is largely unremarkable, but I enjoyed Formula Front’s cooler, lower-intensity vibe in its soundtrack that contrasts nicely against the intensity of most other games. It retains the energy one would expect from an Armored Core soundtrack without resorting to harshness or excessive volume, and while it’s not quite at the level of Nexus, there is a lot of creativity and technical skill on display here.
AC: Last Raven, the final game in this generation, is the missing sonic link between generations 3.5 and 4. Rather than pivoting directly into uncharted territory as had been done in generations 2 and 3, Last Raven’s deviation from a now-familiar techno-rock style occurs in degrees, with an overall bias towards rock songs with techno or breakcore elements. “5 Point Five,” for instance, sounds as if Rush got trapped in a German warehouse rave and needed to use power tools to fight their way out. Its odd-meter rock beat placed alongside techno breakcore and honest-to-goodness electric drill sound effects had me practically headbanging at my work desk. More than any other soundtrack, this one might actually kill you if you listen to it too loud – all of the previous coolness of Formula Front is blown apart by the sheer forcefulness of it all. This is Armored Core music at its most extreme and overstimulating – it honestly sounds to me as if Hoshino is trying to test the limits of what sounds people will find accessible in a game soundtrack, pushing the style of this generation to the breaking point and wringing every last drop of inspiration out of it. I love this soundtrack dearly, but I can imagine many people will find its raw energy quite grating, so I recommend you listen to this one with caution and keep the volume at a sensible level for when things get choppy.
Generation 4 (Armored Core 4 and AC: for answer)
Generation 4 represents a fundamental shift in gameplay, story, and sound for the Armored Core franchise. Occurring in yet another alternate timeline wherein the slower and more methodical Raven mechs have been replaced with agile NEXTs, the combat in Generation 4 is frantic and vertical, with many mech designs being easily capable of infinite flight and daring aerial maneuvers. I’m happy to say that Armored Core 4’s soundtrack matches this new intensity to a T, its opening track featuring agitated downward scales in the strings and syncopated, mixed-meter drum patterns underneath a soaring choral part – think Orff’s O Fortuna in a 7/8 rock beat. This soundtrack seemingly acknowledges that the previous generation represented the apex of its previous style, and in doing so reaches for a soundscape heard only in the more off-the-wall tracks of generations 2 and 3. Blocky, compressed drums and hard-edged square-wave-synth arpeggios give way to smooth, streamlined guitar, synth strings, and piano, with only a delectably rough bass tone linking it to its earliest incarnations. It leaves generation 3.5’s mastery of dense techno behind and begins the trend of later Armored Core soundtracks containing fewer rhythmic and timbral layers than their predecessors in favour of texturally simple micro-rock-opera ballads that punch above their weight in melodrama instead of all-out rhythm. The track “Sound You Smash” encapsulates the tone of the Armored Core 4 soundtrack in its shifting time signatures and descending countermelodic lines that make you feel as if you’re following them into dark recesses of your mind – those primal abysses that scream in delight as you explode and smash stuff with your big in-game mecha. Overall, the soundtrack to Armored Core 4 feels like the next step in a long-telegraphed stylistic shift; its sonic identity evokes Linkin Park’s offering for Transformers (2007) and, as such, taps into the zeitgeist of a time for which I am deeply nostalgic.
Where Armored Core 4 is a blaring rock ballad continually asking What you’ve Done, AC: for answer is like if Philip Glass made a video game soundtrack, at least judging from the opening track which retains its piano ostinato and harmonic progression from beginning to end. If the music in Armored Core 4 descends into visceral parts of the human psyche, revelling in the destruction you cause and flipping the bird while you kill in service of corrupt, world-destroying corporations, for answer’s soundtrack is an exhortation to transcend that animal glee and think, if only for a second, whether it’s right to perform fun actions in your cool mech. Like no other, this soundtrack leans into the theme of endless, ruinous violence, and, in my opinion, the result is of mixed success. On the one hand, I appreciate the variety – I found the brooding, intimate menu track “Someone Is Always Moving On The Surface” to be a bold and delightful choice of mood – and, on the other, much of the music on this soundtrack (the stuff that plays during the actual missions) to be far too badass-sounding to evoke the kind of pathos that I feel would have been necessary to really drive home the ambitious theming. What’s worse, the addition of a few tracks that match Armored Core 4’s gloomy energy steer the whole soundtrack dangerously close to “generic edgy grimdark” sonic territory, which does the overall work no favours.
There are some tracks in for answer that I really like, some moments of genuine compositional genius that I really appreciate. “Water Down” begins with a slow string ostinato and builds into a truly delicious climax, and “Scorcher” is a no-holds-barred jam session that, while undermining the game’s theming, is probably a blast to listen to while playing. “The Bloody Honey Cannot Stop” matches its awesome name with rad guitar licks, creepy vocals, and a drum beat with string shots that both goes hard as hell and returns to a breakcore-adjacent sensibility that was largely left behind in later generations of Armored Core soundtracks.
Overall, this generation is a mixed bag for me. As the music of this series evolves, I find myself missing more and more the industrial techno vibes of earlier games, and while this generation’s alternating rock-metal character and emotional minimalism do have great moments, they certainly project a different kind of intensity that I find harder to get into. Nevertheless, I appreciate the variety – I can always just go back and listen to the soundtrack for the first Armored Core, after all – and I would rather get something new than more of the same. At their worst, Armored Core 4 and AC: for answer are generic mid-2000s game soundtracks; at their best, they encapsulate much of the musical landscape of the post-Iraq War era while offering some true bangers.
Generation 5 (Armored Core V and AC: VERDICT DAY)
Don’t ask me why the “5” in Armored Core V is a Roman numeral and not an Arabic numeral like all the other ones. I’m running on three hundred milligrams of Wellbutrin and half a cucumber right now, and we have more important things to get to. Armored Core V and AC: VERDICT DAY each have not one, but two sixty-minute discs to its name, so there’s a lot of music to get through in not very many words. I’ll start with the menu music for Armored Core V, titled “V Computers are Talking.” It’s bombastic and martial, a heavy military drumbeat that steeply contrasts the thoughtful piano ostinato in the previous game. More than in any previous soundtrack, Armored Core V relishes in downtempo backbeats; this game has tons of slow and laid-back tempi, mirroring a shift in gameplay from high-intensity duels to more methodical wave-shooter combat. There’s also a smattering of purely orchestral tracks, the first of which made me check that I was still on the right YouTube video when I first heard it. These pieces are perhaps the only ones in my Armored Core journey thus far that I actively dislike; they go beyond simple banality into the realm of legitimately bad composition. “Cadence Call” begins with a disaster of an ostinato in a brass sound font that makes Finale’s MIDI playback sound like the Berlin Philharmonic; things don’t get any better once the strings come in. I can’t stress enough how bad this ostinato sounds: it's like the composers were on a huge Percy Grainger kick while making this soundtrack and decided that their mecha game could really use some orchestral music that evoked seventeenth-century English folk song. It’s not subtle and it doesn’t remotely fit the music around it.
In fact, the whole soundtrack for Armored Core V is littered with uninspired melodies and bland, empty sections containing nothing but a middling percussive texture. It feels as if the shift from vertical to horizontal form and texture has forced a reliance on string ostinati and melodies that don’t follow a satisfying shape. For my money, I’d say that the composers were put in a serious time crunch and needed to bang out a large amount of music in not enough time, so they developed a couple of generic musical frameworks and copied them several times with minute variation. It’s honestly a bit of a disappointment at times to hear what the music in this game has resorted to. That’s not to say there aren’t any redeeming points in Armored Core V; “Lithium” takes the menu music and turns it into an actual listenable track that’s timbrally interesting and groove-focused, an element which I feel comprises the core of the Armored Core sound. Overall, though, I’m not too impressed by V’s soundtrack.
AC: VERDICT DAY, on the other hand, opens with an octave C in the piano, instantly . What follows is something I can best describe as the electronic equivalent as the big percussion crescendo from the fifth movement of Mahler’s second Symphony, followed by a succession of brassy melodic fragments over a cranked-up version of the beat from the Armored Core V menu music. The harmonies here are pretty experimental, and while I wouldn’t call them a mastery of the twelve-tone scale, I will say that I really like how this track (cheekily entitled “V for Two”) builds up towards its various section changes. The next track contains an awesome drum pattern accompanied by a quiet synth that honestly reminded me of Medieval recorder music, and any part that reminds me of Medieval recorder music is doing something very, very right. Every measure in this soundtrack feels more polished and exciting than anything in Armored Core V, and the work as a whole is completely cohesive, each track stylistically linking to the last without seeming repetitive. It takes the best parts of its hard rock roots and pushes them to their absolute limit, incorporating soaring string lines, harsh noise beats, and a guy singing what sounds like “hang yourself” over and over again. If you’re going to listen to a newer Armored Core soundtrack, this is the one to reach for.
Looking Forward
Those are my thoughts on most of the Armored Core soundtracks. Despite whatever criticisms I might have made to each generation, I think it’s telling that each soundtrack compelled me in its own way; even the ones I disliked had some cool moments that made them worth listening to at least once. I’ll go on record saying that the soundtracks for the original Armored Core, the generation 3.5 soundtracks of AC: Nexus and AC: Last Raven, and AC: VERDICT DAY were my favourites, with those of AC: Silent Line, AC: Last Raven, and AC: for answer coming in at their heels. The others ranged, for me, from middling to actively terrible, with generations 2, 3, and Armored Core V being the ones I would suggest skipping. Otherwise, I would honestly recommend listening to the better ones on their own terms; the best among them deliver musical ingenuity in spades, offering exciting rhythms, timbres, and textures above a reliable framework of solid melody and harmony. The fact that AC: VERDICT DAY was so vastly superior to Armored Core V, in musical terms, gives me reason to hope that the soundtrack for Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon will be just as good.
I’m sure the other FromSoft fans out there are wondering whether there are any noticeable differences between the pre – DARK SOULS soundtracks and those made afterwards, and I can’t really say that Armored Core’s composers were tangibly influenced by Motoi Sakuraba’s work on that game. There are a couple tracks in AC: VERDICT DAY that definitely achieve a similar level of epic, orchestral grandiosity, but they’re so seamlessly integrated into the game’s particular sonic world that any resemblance to DARK SOULS exists only on the surface. If you were some sort of recent music graduate with far too much time on your hands and the capability to listen to and compare each of the soundtracks side by side, then I’m sure you could make a case for the slower, more orchestral approach in generations 4 and 5 being similar in tone to the music of DARK SOULS – perhaps even in dialogue with market trends in the game industry at the outset of the 2010s that favored grandiose, epic music above all else – but that’s a topic for another essay.
Armored Core’s musical evolution continues to be fascinating to me, and I hope you’ve enjoyed tracing this evolution alongside aesthetic trends in wider culture. Throughout its vast lineage, Armored Core’s music has continued to be unique among video game soundtracks in its zany timbres, exciting textures, and catchy melodic hooks. It’s music to jam to in its own right, something not many game soundtracks can attest to, and even its worst incarnations manage to remain singular despite their mediocrity. In my mind, a piece of music is most successful if it engages the listener – whether by entertaining or thrilling them, bringing out of them an emotion or group of emotions, or by exhibiting exceptional craftspersonship (or lack of thereof). Beyond being simply interesting, though, I find the lessons from the music of Armored Core to be extremely important for my work as a composer. It’s hard to create work that is stylistically coherent but varied enough to be interesting – it takes hundreds of hours getting to intimately know one’s style and musical materials, hours spent figuring out every possible combination of sounds that have even the slightest chance of working in the context of a larger piece. Armored Core is a massive, sprawling canvas for all its creative workers, and what I find most admirable about Hoshino and his colleagues is their willingness to step out of their own conventional sound and explore new horizons. When something doesn’t quite work, or feels boring, the composers aren’t afraid to shake things up by adding new elements or combining old elements in new ways. AC: VERDICT DAY, for instance, is built on the hard lessons learned from Armored Core V – it takes the new and experimental approaches from V and combines them with a tried and tested sonic framework, and the result is deeply satisfying to listen to. The music may not all be perfect, but it has enough great moments that prove the composers’ mastery of their craft, and I don’t think the unrivaled excellence of AC: Nexus and AC: VERDICT DAY would have been possible if Hoshino and company hadn’t risked making a bad soundtrack once in a while. Even the worst of Armored Core’s music is made listenable by the knowledge that something incredible is always on the horizon. The composers of Armored Core navigated six reboots over three console generations by producing music that not only enhances the in-game experience but stands alone as great art in its own right. That, more than anything else, is a legacy to be proud of.
If you’d like to listen to the Armored Core soundtracks on your own, a YouTube playlist containing the entire 20th Anniversary Box collection can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojtl4UdCDYM&list=PLXP-0dK0eHWHqFnQbgtoVe1tFbUK2PzDk