NOTE: “Music to My Ears” is a recurring installment based on Chris’s (not so) secret obsession: the music of video games. His Tales of Graces review will be up next week.

In my review for Street Fighter x Tekken, I mentioned how Street Fighter II was one of the big introductions to the world of video game music for me. Ryu’s stage music in particular was one of the driving forces in doing things like getting homework done. And since computers were not a mainstream thing when I was 8 (not to mention mp3 players, iTunes and YouTube), the only way to listen to it was to toss in the cartridge, head to the Sound Test menu and let it rip.

Those foundations laid the groundwork for other tunes that I loved as a kid, like the Castle theme from Super Mario World or Mute City from F-Zero. But the next big landmark was in high school, when I finally got to play what some would call the best RPG of all-time.

Chrono Trigger gets a lot of praise from a multitude of gamers, and rightfully so. One of the main reasons is its score, put together mainly by Yasunori Mitsuda. Though Mitsuda has worked on a lot of popular games (such as Mario Party and Xenogears), this is probably his best-known work. He also got an assist from legendary Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu, who worked on a handful of songs after Mitsuda suffered problems with his health and a hard drive crash that lost dozens of nearly finished tracks.

The result was a soundtrack that perfectly fit a game centered on time travel.

I was working at my high school on a summer vacation when a friend showed me how to play the game on a computer with the help of an emulator. We didn’t have a ton of time then, but just by getting to the point where you save Marle in 600 AD, I was hooked. I was able to borrow a cartridge from another friend a few months later, and history was made.

I was super high tech in 2000; I finally had my own computer and it featured a 100 MB hard drive. Yes, MB. So downloading the soundtrack myself wasn’t really an option. (Napster was just getting huge then, but individual songs were too big to fit on a floppy disk, let alone three discs’ worth.) Luckily, another friend at school was able to rip the soundtrack for me, and — again, high tech — I turned those into cassette tapes for my Walkman. I would usually start at the same point to get me going for my morning bike ride: track 13 on disc one, the theme from Guardia Castle. I guess I’ve always been a creature of habit.

Chrono Trigger excels because in my view, there aren’t really any standout tracks — it’s just a solid effort from top to bottom. I’d imagine you could put together a list of several different people’s top 5 songs from the game, and no two lists would be alike. That’s not to say that there aren’t a few common favorites, like Magus Confronted or Schala’s Theme, but my favorites are a little less common.

Here’s a few tracks that will either bring you down memory lane or introduce you to a soundtrack that you’ve been missing out on:

Battle With Magus

This is pretty much the culmination of the first half of the game, with the perfect amount of buildup. Any time I hear this track, I immediately picture Magus waving his hands around to ruin my day with Dark Matter.

World Revolution

The penultimate battle of the game is actually my favorite fight, and this track is part of the reason. An added bonus: It features a brief callback to the main title theme, “Chrono Trigger.”

Tyran Castle

This is the music from a dungeon in the prehistoric era (although it’s used again later on elsewhere), and it’s also an example of one of the tracks Uematsu chipped in with. Uematsu has a knack for putting together songs with an intro that has little to do with the rest of the track (see: “Dark Saint” from Lost Odyssey), and the :45 mark of this song is one of those abrupt changes.

Manoria Cathedral

This song originally appears in a church in 600 AD and makes a couple of appearances later as well. I’ve always been a sucker for strong harmonies, and this evocative song is like cruise control for harmony.

Singing Mountain (unreleased)

Perhaps my favorite song off the whole thing is Singing Mountain, a track that never appeared in the original game. It’s listed right after Battle With Magus on the soundtrack, and finally found a home in the DS remake of the game when it was used for one of the bonus dungeons. It’s a hauntingly beautiful piece.

Music to My Ears covers soundtracks or individual songs from video games on a recurring basis, which is basically whenever Chris gets around to writing it. You can view all posts in the series by clicking here.