LogFAQs > #962570737

76st
Game: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Title: Rundas
Composer: Kenji Yamamoto
Nominator: @tazzyboyishere
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nMFLquJeCc

i'm a big metroid fan, and prime 3 is one of my favorite metroid soundtracks!!! like the music a lot more than prime 1-2 (though the game a great deal less than prime 1-2), probably just because it has a greater variety of styles within (partially because of having 3 composers, tho this one is just by the one composer connecting all 3 games: kenji yamamoto. not all of prime 3 has indiv artist credits but this song is known to be him specifically at least)

this song stood out to me as like a "new sound" to the prime series the first time i heard it, and i know exactly why: that cool almost metallic lead sound at :07, it's so unlike any sound i've heard in...honestly anything! it's a very unique instrument, it's percussive, but sometimes morphs into something more organic and warpy. you can't tell when the sound is going to be "hard" or when it's going to be "gross alien tissue" or when it's going to be "a hologram" next. i think that conveys the setting of this game (and series) pretty perfectly. biological weapons and technology so directly tied organic things. un-natural versions of nature. i had a severe phobia of stuff like that when younger, especially anything to do with the inside of the human body, which was cataylzed by a specific startling moment at a young age. but even without that incident, i think un-natural versions of natural things are one of the most viscerally creepy things to any given human being. i see a metroid, or like, half the enemies in these games really, and it makes my skin crawl. i mean, imagine what would happen if there was an artificial potentially deadly virus that was far more contagious than what was ever seen before, escaped from containment and just spread across the earth and completely stopped normal functioning of human society for 3 years?! that would be a nightmare, good thing that would never happen and is completely left to fiction like metroid instead.

but really, i think it's a very natural instinct to fear broken versions of nature, they relate directly to disease and harm to a species' survival as a whole. anything unnatural and alien in a way that feels like a living thing, "foriegn objects" are scary and life-threatening, but "foreign living things" are extinction-threatening! and that sound is just...exactly that. EVERY sound in the song (except the guitar) basically is that. it's uncanny as fuck and i love it. those weird unsettling voices, it's like, weird cysts forming on an alien creature's arm turning into an poisonous needle that will inject alien eggs beneath your skin that will tear you apart from the inside out. or something

compositionally this song is pretty simple, and sometimes i come across as not liking that, but i actively like it in things that give me like "80s action sci-fi" vibe, and think it works really perfect to convey that here. but what i'm really here for is the instrumentation

for christmas i wound up getting the e-mu audity 2000; a synth from 1998 which is basically THE sound of the metroid prime series. sounds in this song are definitely contained in that. anyways there's a reason i had it on my list, and it's because i love how oppresively alien the sounds in that thing contain. i had that whole vaguely rare old synth on the top of my christmas list, half because i liked the sound of this series so much---this song is near the top of my list in the prime series in terms of instrumentation specifically. i love the soundtrack's sounds as a whole, but this song is one of the first ones i think of when i think COOL SOUNDS IN METROID PrIME. i may 'only' have it ranked down here because i like the composition of other songs more (tho it might be higher in my re-rank), but this song's instrumentation just creates such powerful visceral feelings in me, and it's definitely in my regular rotation of prime tracks i'll come back to even just for wanting to attain that feeling. it's very compositionally "epic", and that highlights half the reason dark settings in fiction are so cool: you get to be the one who overpowers the darkness. an epic battle that you'll win, but you have to risk incomprehensibly unncomfortable scenarios to do so.

a gun can kill you, but it's shaped comfortably like the cubic structures of homes we associate with safety from eternal danger, a threat, but a familiar one. an alien parasite can wipe your whole species out, and is shaped like nothing you've ever seen before. the alien parasite is far more horrifying, and that's the thing that this song (and soundtrack as a whole) conveys to me perfectly, and i love it