Video game music can fall into a few different categories.

Sometimes it’s ambient, settling into the background and only poking its head out at important moments. You know, like Skyrim. Sometimes it’s the focal point, because the game is about music or because it’s a huge deal that you hear a track. You know, like Rock Band or Rhythm Thief.

Sometimes you achieve a perfect balance, and the music serves to enhance was is already an awesome moment.

Take Tales of the Abyss, for example. Once your party battles its way through the team portion of the Arena (no small task), you find yourself face to face with other characters from an assortment of past Tales games. This is supposed to be an exhibition, a surprise battle after you’ve conquered the scheduled opponents. What it turns out to be is one of the most difficult fights in the entire series.

Let’s break this down. It’s four against four in a game where you usually have a numbers advantage in boss fights. This party has a balanced construction: Reid, a swordsman who chases your party relentlessly; Nanaly, a badass archer who can fight up close or from afar; Philia, a mage with strong AOE spells; and Mint, a healer. What’s worse, Mint has the ability to revive a dead party member once. So if you try to focus down one character and it isn’t Mint, your efforts essentially go to waste.

While all of this is happening and chaos envelops the battlefield, a medley of earlier Tales battle themes is rocking in the background. It’s neat — it covers each game that the cameo characters are from. That’s cool.

But then things take a turn.

Just when you think you’ve won the battle, and just when you’re getting over being angry about Mint reviving someone unexpectedly, you find out you’re wrong. When you get Reid critically low on health, he abruptly chains an attack into his mystic arte, Aurora Wall. The attack can be devastating, but here’s the real problem: it revives any other dead party member. So if you happened to employ a strategy where you picked off the ranged characters first, you could be looking at three characters back from the dead.

And as the realization of what you’re up against kicks in and you begin to despair, the music changes to a more epic theme: a remix of Eternal Mind from Tales of Eternia. The video below is that music. Enjoy.

Tales of the Abyss — Eternal Mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHjnA0ktLaM

Music to My Ears covers soundtracks or individual songs from video games. You can view all posts in the series by clicking here.