Your Opinion About Music Integration

fabricioz said:
About the technical details, I can speak a little since I am a game composer. Adaptive music is not a easy trend, it requires lots of experience to fully implement it well. And also, it requires all the music to be arranged in a certain way. In a budget game like this, I find it very unlikely the team would like to spend time on it. Also, the music in previous games were very characteristic, so they simply decided to keep it the way it was, playing safe.
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That may be true and all, and I am no game composer but I have done 10 min/hour loops of songs and its just a case of finding a perfect loop point to do so ... Some tracks such as the bailu wild theme is almost impossible to loop due to the track arrangment... But some tracks have no excuse what so ever. Niaowu theme? Wood cutting theme? Lucky hit theme? These all can be looped perfectly. In fact I myself will loop the wood cutting theme and upload it to youtube for fellow fans of the track.
 
fabricioz said:
About the technical details, I can speak a little since I am a game composer. Adaptive music is not a easy trend, it requires lots of experience to fully implement it well. And also, it requires all the music to be arranged in a certain way. In a budget game like this, I find it very unlikely the team would like to spend time on it. Also, the music in previous games were very characteristic, so they simply decided to keep it the way it was, playing safe.
Click to expand...

I agree with your points about the difficulties of composing adaptive music, but I wouldn't say Shenmue is using an adaptive music system. There are discrete pieces of music in distinct locations and I agree with @JoshTehKing20 where a lot of issues with S3's music can be fixed through editing or finding proper loop points. Even music that used to loop in Shenmue 1 is not properly looping in Shenmue 3 (like my beautiful, beautiful theme song!)
 
My only problem is that sometimes, the music feels out of place. Like, you had a theme from a previous game reappear in a shop when it doesn't make sense. I also wished during calls, we'd get themes from older characters.
 
Yeah, the tracks themselves are brilliant, as expected. And even the sound quality is really good (I expected less if they really are recordings from around 1999).

The only (but pretty big) problems are with their placement and, specially, the sound programming, with an absence of loops, some rough transitions, and some "blank" areas with no music at all.
 
In between all the recycling of old music, it is still striking that pretty much nothing is from Shenmue. Besides new versions for the QTE machines there were only like 1 or 2 tracks with direct roots to the first game and I can sadly not remember what they were. Even the Tomato Mart has the Shenmue II version.

It kinda does make more sense that Shenmue II music is used since that is China and III is China but it is still strange how they refrained from using any music from 1 for some store or scene. Have a feeling this is beyond decissions and has some technical reason, like they either weren't allowed access to the old masterings the first game or they simply don't exist anymore.

Oh and as for the digital OST, wich I believe is going to be the same as the CDs they'll eventually send us. It has it's fair share of problems aswell. Not enough on it, some great big stuff missing, too much recycling and then they give it a spot for the main Niaowu theme and you all know how much worth that is...
 
Tomato Convenience Store said:
I agree with your points about the difficulties of composing adaptive music, but I wouldn't say Shenmue is using an adaptive music system. There are discrete pieces of music in distinct locations and I agree with @JoshTehKing20 where a lot of issues with S3's music can be fixed through editing or finding proper loop points. Even music that used to loop in Shenmue 1 is not properly looping in Shenmue 3 (like my beautiful, beautiful theme song!)
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Yeah exactly ... And it's just the fact the freaking music just doesn't loop at all - I swear to god it makes me think that's the reason they didn't have the music on during the demos.

Also if you go back to Ali's shenmue interview video which was during one of the kickstarter updates, the calm wood chopping music is in that video and guess what? IT'S LOOPED CORRECTLY. It's like wtf?

It just comes down to simple laziness in my opinion. I have never seen an instance of music not looping in like 20+ years of playing video games. And I really don't like being so negative, but I am so passionate about Shenmue's music it pains me to see it treated this way. :(

EDIT: Also anybody else notice how the Excite QTE music doesn't play at all??
 
It's like somebody deleted all music from the game before the release and they asked a junior developer to quickly fix that.

Please YSNET fix music in this game. Please.
 
Inside the stores, if you talk to the vendor, the music volume is lowered to put the dialogue forward. But the game keeps the volume low when you browse the item window, that's a waste.

Since the game has no loading, we don't hear the store music enough so a fix would be nice.
 
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