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Originally Posted by Aifread
I'm as much of a fan of JRPG soundtracks as the next guy, but most of them are so long that they inevitably have a lot of dud tracks in addition to the great ones, which would keep them off of my list too. More condensed works like Mystic Quest, Crystal Chronicles, Valkyrie Profile, and Baten Kaitos have all of that fat trimmed and make for better listening experiences start to finish imo.
The one sole exception I've found to this is Shin Megami Tensei IV. That soundtrack is massive and yet consistently high-quality. Recently we've been seeing these huge soundtracks productions with a lot of talent behind them, but it feels like there are too many cooks in the kitchen and no clear focus, whereas SMTIV is pretty much Ryota Kozuka's baby and you can hear his vision throughout. I really hope Atlus let him lead a project again (fingers crossed for SMTV).
PREACH. I always considered Alien Soldier to be like the FM synth equivalent of Evergrace and I adore both. One more I'd put in that camp is Drakengard/Drag-On Dragoon 1. That soundtrack actually got a lot of negativity from people back in the day because of how unconventional it is and led to them changing composers for the rest of the trilogy, but nowadays I think more people are coming around to it.
Aside from the ones I mentioned above: R4, Klonoa 1 (on par with Kirby 64 imo), Street Fighter 3rd Strike, Tales of Legendia (still far and away Shiina's best work) and Golden Sun. I'd probably wanna include Hirofumi Taniguchi in there somewhere as well, but I dunno which one I'd go with. Moon feels like cheating because of all the licensed indie music, so maybe Chulip?
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I'm a fan of Shin Megami Tensei IV. I remember older composers being in it and a lot of good tracks.
I remember two other soundtracks that were odd sounding are Granhistoria and Psycho Dream. Granhistoria has that traditional JRPG sound but with some interesting bits of industrial and abstractness thrown in a few songs. Psycho Dream is even weirder with songs that sound like random machine sounds and baby crying sound effects throughout the soundtrack. The ending stood out to me from what I remember.
I owned Moon at some point. I had the shirt that that came with the soundtrack in my trunk for years; I had forgotten about it until I found it recently. It does have an immense amount of composers because of the indie music.