Favourite Panzer Dragoon music

My favourite is that music that you hear when your inside the tower at Saga, when you just met with Craymen.

Nobody has a favourite music :anjou_wow: ?

Underground Ruins of Uru… if I absolutely had to pick one. It was the atmosphere of that whole sequence, combined with the cut-scenes preceding it, and the closing cinema of disk 2, that made me sure I was playing something very very special indeed.

Youtube video with the specific music?

Interception (first Tower theme in PDS) is one my favourite tracks as well.

I also love “Giant Creature” (third boss theme) in Panzer Dragoon Zwei, and “Ruins” (fourth episode).

Some of my other favourites in Panzer Dragoon Saga are:

A Premonition of War (Above the Excavation)
Transformation 1 (Mutated type battle music)
Rest (Campsite theme)
Pure Blood Seed (Pure type battle music)
Atolm Dragon
Shelcoof (music when inside)
By the Source of the Protective Flame (Holy District music)
Holy Chariot (Mel Kava)

Sona Mi Areru Ec Sancitu and Anu Orta Veniya are both beautiful songs.

It’s all good really, no major complaints about the music from any of the games.

Sona Mi Areru Ec Sancitu for sure, there’s an incredible feeling I have associated with that song. Obviously you only hear it when you finish the game, so it makes me both happy and sad at the same time.

I also enjoy the theme that plays through the opening promo fmv thing when you first insert disc one. It’s just bad ass, and gets you in the mood.

That would be Atolm’s theme. :anjou_happy:

Should’ve clocked that, really.

My personal favourites (in no particular order) would be:

PDE
Main Title
Empire
Creature Revived
The Imperial District Goes Up in Flames
The Staff Roll

PDZ
Ruins
Water Dragon
Sea of Ice
Duel
Lagi and Lundi

PDS
Wings
Atolm Dragon
Paet
Sealed Spirit
Source of the Protective Flame
A Century Gone By
Village of the Seekers
Into the Promised Land
Tears
Soni Mi Areru Ec Sancitu

PDO
Pain
Ancient Weapon 2
Anu Orta Veniya

The thing is, I’m boring in the way that if someone were to ask me what my three favorite videogame soundtracks were I’d be hard-pressed to not say Panzer Dragoon Zwei, Panzer Dragoon Saga, and Panzer Dragoon.
This, understandably, makes it difficult to pick one track out of the 60+ available selections and say “This, this one right here is the super-plus awesomest.”

Still, I do admittedly have something of a soft spot for Lagi and Lundi.

I’m also one of those weird guys who thinks Ecce Valde Generous Ale is a far more powerful tune than Sona Mi Areru Ec Sancitu. To me the former seems to have grown naturally in the Panzer atmosphere, while the later was imported.

Ecce Valde Generous Ale is a powerful theme and gets you ready to enter the world of Panzer Dragoon.

I like to think of the two songs as folk songs that would be sung by peasants (or perhaps Seekers) in the PD world.

The Expected Enemy (Guardian Dragon theme) always stuck out for me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkyAIzB3C3U)

epic moment man…

I never had that feeling especially since Ecce Valde is basically a reprise of “Azel’s theme” throughout the game. for that reason especially the voice sample in “pure blood seed” gives me the chills, it is taken from Ecce Valde.

I really don’t like Anu orta venia that much, it sounds like a cheap remake of ecce valde. and it’s more noticable that they didn’t use a real orchestra (in Ecce Valde you hardly notice) especially when the midi choir kicks in it starts to become knda mindless and repetitive. lol, some serious bashing, but that’s what I feel, sorry.

I love all the vocal tracks … in terms of gameplay tracks, ‘Interception’ is also one of my favorites - I really like the structure of it- very non-typical.

The one youtube vid I saw from the playthrough of disk 2 sounds awful for that Uru track windrider, half the harmonics aren’t audible so it’s kinda pointless sorry.

This topic has been thought provoking, as well as provoking me to listen to many of these tracks I haven’t heard in a while. I’ve never really contrasted them deliberately before, and I’ll say (attention Mr. Solo Wing in particular!) that listening to some of the Zwei tracks on their own has given me new appreciation. They just don’t get lodged in my head from playing the game so much, in a sense that means they’re more successful at ambiance maybe…

I would say that Sona Mi Areru Ec Sancitu is firmly in the Eins idiom, and Ecce Valde Generous Ale is closer to the Zwei idiom. A generalization of course, but Zwei defined a much more unique and alien space for the music, and locked in the tribal/eastern percussion influence. Because I always liked Panzer Dragoon’s music as well, it’s just as legitimately Panzerish for me I guess, there is a well established dichotomy because of it. And the close of Azel called for some shameless melodramatic heart tugging I think! :anjou_happy:

Coincidentally, a couple months ago I started listening to a bunch of Genesis/Mega Drive music again. And such nostalgia tripping always has the effect of focusing my lamentation of the near demise of game music as a true genre… :anjou_sad:

ah yes, when i first played through the demo, i used to love pure blood seed.

I’m listening to a premonition of war now, i think this track sums up panzer dragoon is to me, i love it.

I find that second full paragraph of yours interesting, Heretic. One of the big reasons as to why I like Zwei’s soundtrack so much is the sheer weight of its character. To me it defined the sound of the Panzer world, or, as I’ve put it elsewhere, it “has thousands of years of history behind it. It couldn’t be anything other than what it is.” And while I think the original Panzer’s soundtrack is wonderful, it doesn’t strike me with the same sense of identity that Zwei does, and comes off as more (and I hate to use this word, as its not exactly what I want) generic for it.

I guess then, it’s now not much of a surprise to you that I’m far fonder of Ecce Valde Generous Ale than I am of Sona Mi Areru Ec Sancitu, nor is my reason for it.

Brandt, I wrote that as a round about agreement with your sentiment actually. But even since then I got a little more educated and it comes across as a far worse generalization than I even thought.

http://forums.thewilloftheancients.com/viewtopic.php?t=1407

In that topic, Sestern makes a comment similar to what you just said, and also quotes someone who’d know a lot better than either of us:

“What makes the music of Panzer Dragoon different,
is that it is based on Japanese traditional song, but in saying that;
it does not adhere to nationality nor music genre.
It is focused on the point of wanting to express ones music.” Saori Kobayashi.

Taking it on faith that she actually wrote that of course, but once told it’s easy to hear in Azel/Saga, and I can perhaps identify at least some of it starting in Zwei. But all three soundtracks are quite distinct from each other, it even seems vaguely ironic that so many people love the Expected/Unexpected Enemy tracks, since of all the Zwei or even Azel tracks it is perhaps the closest to the krautrock sound of the original game. And speaking of Eins, although I’ve heard nothing else of Yoshitaka Azuma’s to contrast it to, he seemed to lean it in a light classical direction for the purpose of the game,

The avant-garde electronic influence is intrinsic to both soundtracks, so I think the main subjective distinction between them is not that Eins is generic precisely (as you say), but that people identify the melodic phrasing as being relatively conventional. And for Sona Mi Areru Ec Sancitu, it may be more accurate to say that it’s taking some of the light classical tone of Eins, and the traditional Japanese folk influence, but then rendering something closer to a standard JRPG/Anime kind of song, than anything else had been.

For that matter, I could argue it’s the concession to standard RPG conventions that brought the more folksy influence to Azel in the first place. And so in the end, for myself at least, what makes Azel’s soundtrack so exceptional is more than just a set identity, but the very fact of it’s breadth of style and influence.

I even clearly remember something from my very first time playing Saga. I had decided to restart my game before going on to disk 2, having got to grips with the battle system I wanted *Excellent *on all my enemies… and going through the first area again the instrumental chip rendition of that melody indeed seemed very generic compared to the later music. Then when I started up another game immediately after finishing it the first time, I was all “OH! Hey this music actually sounds really good now…” after my eyes had just been watering up listening to the song version of it. So it apparently did it’s job very well, on me.