Quote:
Originally Posted by Eriksharp
But, I think in west there are a lot of Sakuraba's fan, but the haters are always more visible :P
|
I find it pretty reductive that you speak about "haters". Talking about my own experience, I discovered Sakuraba's music around 2002, 2003, at the time Star Ocean 3 was about to come out. So I started listening to his past works, for example Shining Force III. I didn't like it so much at first, but as I discovered other works like Beyond the Beyond (still one of my favorite CDs by Sakuraba), I came to like his music more and more. By the time the Star Ocean 3 soundtrack came out, I was ready to fully appreciate it—and boy, was it awesome! I had become a big Sakuraba fan.
But starting with Baten Kaitos 2 a few years later, I started feeling Sakuraba was moving away from his progressive roots and using more and more brass in his orchestra music, which became quite... bulky. I enjoyed the Valkyrie Profile 2 because it had a number of nice and peaceful acoustic tracks, and thought he would be using that style more and more, but he didn't. Then came more and more Tales of soundtracks (I never enjoyed them), and Infinite Undiscovery, and... Star Ocean 4. The SO4 soundtrack was a nightmare to me. I thought the music was just a formless piece of orchestral mud. I hate it.
I did enjoy a few of his recent works, lighter soundtracks like Beyond the Labyrinth, his solo albums (Forest of glass is excellent), but the rest just sounds like the same to me, and not only the brassy orchestral stuff; even his recent progressive rock music sounds uninspired to me. It's nothing like his amazing albums from the 1990s.
So I'm not a hater. I'm just disillusioned. But I'm curious about Star Ocean 5, so I'll be sure to give it a listen.