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Jul 15, 2020 · What makes good “boss battle” music? This is a question I asked myself after a prompt from a client to create a track in the style of a Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep boss battle. This lead me to the deeper question of what characteristics do classic boss battle tracks from video games have in common? Listen to this piece from Kingdom Hearts.
Yep every boss has their own theme song, they sing a different verse during each encounter shining light as to why they’ve appeared. Normal enemies have their attacks synced to the soundtrack of the area but no songs of their own!
- 51 sec
- Megalovania – Undertale
- Molgera Theme – The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
- Serpent Eating The Ground – Bravely Default
- Vs Sayu – No Straight Roads
- Hela – Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
- Apex of The World – Fire Emblem: Three Houses
- Guzma’s Theme – Pokémon Sun / Moon
- The First Hunter – Bloodborne
- Final Sin – Doom Eternal
- The Greatest Jubilee – Bayonetta
Before we rush to the comments, let’s make one thing clear: Toby Fox put all his heart, soul, and determination into every track in Undertale, and ‘Megalovania’ is the cherry on top of a delicious, delicious sundae. It’s only number 15 because of just how well-known it is. Despite only being available in the game if you undertake the difficult (and...
Plenty of Legend of Zelda bosses have memorable and unique tracks, but there’s a special mix of mystery and playfulness to the battle against the giant worm Molgera in The Wind Waker. Four composers, Kenta Nagata, Hajime Wakai, Toru Minegishi and Koji Kondo, had their hands on The Wind Waker’s music, and none of them missed a beat. The jittery rhyt...
The final boss of Bravely Default pumps a heap of musical theater pageantry into its standard JRPG fare. It’s like The Phantom of the Opera with the power of a god. Choral chants mix with hair-metal riffs and apocalyptic strings to make a track that feels like falling down a slide into a supernova. The highlight comes midway though, when composer R...
No Straight Roads, being a game about music and the liberating power of playing your heart out, places a strong focus on its own score. The standout is this track, which accompanies the boss fight against a Mermaid-themed vocaloid called Sayu. As a song, it’s completely believable as a stellar electronic pop track, the kind of thing that might scor...
Whereas most of the score in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrificetakes cues from brutal, bloody, Scandinavian metal, this climactic track flips the script and brings mellow, meditative pace to the final battle. Protagonist Senua, battling inner demons and the tide of the dead to attempt to bring back her departed lover, faces increasingly overwhelming odds...
Who doesn’t love a leitmotif? At the end of two of the four routes in 2019’s best child soldier simulator, your final battle will center around the final clash between former friends Dimitri and Edelgarde, and composers Takeru Kanazaki, Hiroki Morishita, and Rei Kondoh rose to the momentous occasion. Threading the game’s regular battle theme and ma...
While we almost went with the classic Rival Battle theme from Pokémon Red and Blue, there’s just something special about your boy, Guzma. The leader of Team Skull cuts an imposing figure, and his crusty, trip-hop adjacent battle theme sells the mix of danger and delinquency that Guzma and Team Skull embody. You still have the classic Pokémon battle...
While Bloodborne, and the Soulsborne series as a whole, are rife with memorable scores that set the stage for life & death (mostly death) showdowns, the climactic (if not necessarily final) battle of Bloodborne hits particularly different. The composing team of Ryan Amon, Tsukasa Saitoh, Yuka Kitamura, Nobuyoshi Suzuki, Cris Velasco, and Michael Wa...
All hail Mick Gordon. The man is a heavy metal impresario, and after bathing DOOM 2016 in his bloody, feral power chords, he returned for Doom Eternal and brought the mother demon of all tracks to the final boss fight of the 2020 smash hit. The Icon of Sin towers over you, making you feel like you’re staring down hell itself, and this track reinfor...
Of all the games that end with you and your friends fighting and killing God, Bayonettahas got to be the most fabulous. The operatic vocals and instrumentation sound like Beethoven’s been resurrected, and the song’s various movements each feel like they could be the final, climactic moment. Bayonetta has a host of composers: Rei Kondoh, Norihiko Hi...
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- Hollow Knight: Hornet. Composer: Christopher Larkin. Hollow Knight is a platformer that is loved by most indie game fanatics. It has an art style and storyline that are both beautiful and a little eerie, and the gameplay is tricky enough to keep your interest.
- Super Mario 64: Bowser In The Dark World. Composer: Koji Kondo. To this day, Super Mario 64 is often thought of as the best Mario game in the series. The game holds up decades later for just being good plain fun.
- Cuphead: Floral Fury. Composer: Kristofer Maddigan. Cuphead is a game with a unique cartoon art style, and this helped it gain popularity. The characters are based on the “rubber hose” style that was popular in 1920s animation.
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: Majora's Wrath Battle. Composer: Koji Kondo. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask embraced the trope of a boss with multiple forms in many games.
- Raphael. “Baldur’s Gate 3” (2023) What’s better than a boss battle with a charismatic, menacing, Luciferian figure? A boss fight with a charismatic, menacing Luciferian figure…who sings his own theme song!
- Senator Armstrong. “Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance” (2013) Practically every boss encountered in Raiden’s hack and slash saga comes equipped with an outrageously awesome theme song, but there’s one that stands above them all in both stature and sound.
- Infernal Eikon & Infernal Shadow. “Final Fantasy XVI” (2023) It’s Soken. What did you expect? The man has been releasing hit after hit for years now, though we’d argue that his collection of tracks chronicling Clive’s tale of revenge might just be his magnum opus.
- Dante. Also in: Devil May Cry: Dante's Origin. “Devil May Cry 5” (2019) The final battle against Vergil was the DMC franchise reclaiming its crown in the realm of action games.
There’s a musical shortcut for making the player feel truly epic during a final boss fight: bring back the main theme. For a series that’s usually rife with infectious melodies, Breath of the Wild’s minimalistic score has more in common with Steve Reich than previous Zelda OSTs.
Apr 21, 2015 · These battles require suitably complex and epic boss-battle music to elevate the action and make them even more memorable. Here are 10 of the best boss-battle themes of all time. 10: Ballad of Lil’ Slugger – Super Meat Boy
