Re: Final Fantasy Dissidia Keeping The Peace Midi

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Savage Doherty

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Jul 14, 2024, 12:42:09 AM7/14/24

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The Incredibles video game has a level with music that sounds directly like it came out of a James Bond movie, but when you enter an elevator, the Bond music stops for about ten seconds and is replaced by elevator music.
In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, you are given the arduous task of rescuing Sophia from the Atlantean prison and the single nearly-invincible Nazi soldier guarding her. The solution is to power up an ancient guard robot, which stomps the Nazi to death before malfunctioning and shattering into useless rubble. And it does this to the lively tones of a marching band!
Actually, the song is "Koniggratzer Marsch", which was in the Last Crusade during the scene where Indy gets Hitler's autograph. The placement of the song here is more of an Ironic Echo, since the Nazi General is being killed to the song that he once marched to.
Jones in the Fast Lane: The newspaper always makes a serious and grim sound when it pops up, even if the news are positive, like "Housing market looks good".
Karnov has what might be the most cheerful Game Over music of all time, which will just make its difficulty all the more frustrating.
Kick Man has the traditional circus music "Entry of the Gladiators" play when you lose a life.
Killer7 features a finale in which we are shown flashbacks of brutal murders while someone faintly whistles "Greensleeves" in the background. (Note, however, that "Greensleeves" and "What Child is This?" have the same melody; the latter would fit quite nicely.) Then there's "Rave On", an incredibly fast techno number, which plays... on a completely empty staircase as you head for the level's boss. No enemies, no background, just a brown staircase on a black void. That takes maybe ten seconds to traverse. The song itself is five minutes long and gets really good around the last minute.
The "ballet of death" trailer for Killzone 2 is scenes of death and destruction scored to "The Flower Duet".
Kingdom Hearts II: in the Final Mix version of the game during the difficult battle with Roxas, a Boss Remix of his theme song accompanied by the piano plays. It lies in stark contrast to the game's typical agitated battle music.
358/2 Days brings in the battle with Xion's One-Winged Angel form, which is also a melancholic Boss Remix of the character's theme
An example that doesn't have to do with mood, but "This is Halloween" still is the background music... in Christmas Town.
This is changed in the Final Mix version to include new themes composed just for Christmas Town.
And in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], try listening to The Nutcracker while beating the crap out of (or getting the crap beat out of you by) Dream Eaters.
In Kirby's Return to Dream Land, the second Final Boss theme is a Boss Remix Medley. Included in the songs remixed is the series theme song, the incredibly cheerful Green Greens. It has a dark spin on it, so it sounds fine if you've never heard the original theme, but it sounds very odd for fans of the series who've heard many cheerful renditions of the song before.
It happens agains in Kirby: Triple Deluxe, the third Final Boss theme remixed Green Greens.
And it happens yet again in Kirby Star Allies, where the 4th phase theme for the Final Boss remixes Green Greens.
In The Last of Us, when Joel carries Ellie out of the Firefly hospital, the ridiculously beautiful and tragic song "All Gone (no escape)" starts playing the while the Fireflies are opening fire at Joel.
The Left Behind DLC also features Ellie and Riley running for their lives from Infected through an abandoned mall while Etta James' "I Got You, Babe" plays over the speakers.
In The Last Remnant, the Game Over music is a fanfare that sounds like you won the battle rather than lose.
The Last Story has a standout example when fighting one tricky Duel Boss - a fun surf-rock theme plays instead of the game's usual fantasy fare. It becomes notably less so should you take advantage of the music to repeatedly shoot Prank Bananas at the boss.
Left 4 Dead 2:
At one point during "The Parish" the survivors activate a parade float to use it as a makeshift platform to get to other side of a gap. Upon doing this, "The Saints Will Never Come", a cheery instrumental rendition of "When The Saints Come Marching In", plays from the float while the survivors fight off waves of zombies because the music alerted the horde.
Some missions feature jukeboxes at some points. Players can invoke the trope by activating it and starting some zombie killing with some of the upbeat tunes featured in them.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC has an incredibly upbeat Latin jazz battle theme called "Sophisticated Fight", get used to it, you'll be hearing it constantly.
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has an upbeat rock song for its credits theme. The game ends on the country being taken over by terrorists who have revealed unforseen superweapons, and are being backed by the Ancient Conspiracy Oroboros, and The Reveal that they've being led by one of your classmates, who proceeds to curb-stomp the main character, forcing him to flee while the rest of the party is trapped with no hope of escape. So it's kind of unfitting...
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has a fishing hole where you can catch fish. The music playing is from Kakariko Village, which is calm and peaceful. When a fish is biting on your line, the music suddenly shifts to the generic battle theme heard when fighting enemies. Not quite fitting for a climactic pull in fishing.
In The Legend of Zelda game Hyrule Warriors:
Before a battle starts, the battle music can be customized to a tune other than the normal one. Setting the Bazaar theme to play makes the battle a considerably different experience.
A few Adventure Mode battles take place at Ganon's Tower, the desolate wasteland version of Hyrule Field, but play the triumphant main theme remix usually heard on the lush, green Hyrule Field. The same thing occurs in the last scenario of Linkle's Tale, although the skies have cleared up and the start-of-scenario pan gives the name "Hyrule Field".
Life Is Strange:
After completing Episode 4 of the first season, the idyllic sunset in the main menu is replaced by a massive tornado and violent thunderstorm. The peaceful guitar music in the background, however, does not change.
In Episode 5, If Max asks Mr. Jefferson to put on some music as a last request before he kills her, he will agree and turn on his sound system, treating Max to Jeff Meegan's "Crazy Like Me" as he prepares a lethal dose of drugs to inject into her.
A flashback sequence in Life Is Strange: True Colors has Alex invoke this by donning a pair of headphones and listening to Dido's "Thank You" to drown out the sound of her father and brother arguing.
LISA: The Painful uses "Ode to the Oblivious" as the music for the character select screen during Russian Roulette. Because peppy, arcade-style music totally fits with sending characters to their potential deaths, right?
Likewise, "My Lord, My Wally" is a slow, sedate piece of music, running somewhat at odds with the challenging and nightmarish Wally whose theme it is.
LittleBigPlanet:
The song "Volver a Commenzar" by Cafe Tacuba is used for "Reception", a wedding-themed level in the story mode. However, the context of the song is about a rich man on his deathbed wanting to go back in time to fix his mistakes, before deciding that all the material things would be meaningless when he dies, so he might as well give them away before he dies. It's by no means fitting for a wedding.
The community levels are prone to have this trope invoked by the players, thanks to Level Editor and Music Sequencer.
Alright, everybody who played Live A Live: rise your hand if you tought an almost joyous and solemn orchestral piece was appropriate for the Armageddon ending.
The opening of Mad Rat Dead has the protagonist getting vivisected in full view of the player as they answer a series of questions. The song that accompanies this gory imagery is the track MAD RAT, ALIVE?, an upbeat tune that also serves as the game's tutorial track.
The battle music in the Mario & Luigi games is usually fast-paced and energetic, but in Partners in Time the final battle theme is a slow, somewhat melancholy theme.
Speaking of that series, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story only had, barring the Giant Bowser fights and the Final Boss, one boss theme, for EVERY BOSS. You don't get a different theme for Alpha/Beta Kretin, which kidnapped Peach earlier and is coming back for revenge, the fight between the Bros. and Bowser, the Shroobs under Bowser's Castle, which is even more egregious because it's optional, and major late game bosses, most notable the Dark Star and Dark Fawful. The Nintendo 3DS remake at least gave the latter two spoiler examples their own boss themes, but the other bosses listed are still stuck with the standard one (as well as having it now play during the tutorial fight against Bowser at the beginning of the game).
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 features epic battles between uber-powerful warriors and friggin' superheroes, yet it's scored with a bizarre mix of elevator muzak and lounge tunes that would be out of place in pretty much any setting that isn't an elevator or a lounge. The absurd dissonance here is about on par with using zydeco music in Silent Hill, and even better: you can neither turn it off nor adjust the volume. Oh, it's gonna take you for a ride, all right...
That is true... until you make a custom Dreamcast ISO of the game with custom music on it.
And the Xbox Live Arcade / PlayStation Network Updated Re-release allows custom soundtracks too.
The sequel to the above game, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 did a good job of making Doctor Doom's theme suit the idea of him being a more intelligent and sinister villain than most hammy superfoes... except it's so slow and melodic that it's actually very soothing. You could drift off to sleep to the theme of the most dangerous supervillain that ever lived.
Taskmaster's theme, although not as bad, sounds oddly heroic for a mercenary that's neutral at best. This has lead to comment thread jokes about how 'he copied it from a superhero's theme after listening to it once.'
The aptly titled "An End Once and For All" that plays over the ending cutscenes of Mass Effect 3 is a classic example of this. You get to watch all sorts of explosions, deaths, and heartwrenching shots of your squadmates as a beautiful, quiet piano plays over the scene, while most of the audio is muted. It's utterly heartbreaking, especially with the Extended Cut DLC.
In a similar vein, you have the music in the opening cutscene Leaving Earth: A soft piano/orchestral piece, which plays while you watch hundreds of enormous mechanical Eldritch Abominations lay waste to Vancouver.
The Matrix: Path of Neo unlike the movies epic music, the final boss music in Path of Neo is comparable to the music in a cheesy, 1950's alien invasion movie with it's electric screeching and 'bee-op' style. It's an invoked trope, because serious music really wouldn't have fit the changed ending.
Mega Man 3 has incredibly cheerful music at one point which sounds more fitted to the credits of a Golden Ending than a Game Over screen. Also notable is that this game is very hard, meaning you'll hear this song a lot.
Also, the Updated Re-release of 3 on Complete Works and Anniversary Collection with Navi Mode enabled features arranged music for some of the levels. Notably, Top Man's level theme gets replaced with a remix of the intro stage from Mega Man 7. While it's still great music, it doesn't really fit the aesthetic of Top Man's stage, and seems to be more fitting for Needle Man's stage.
When Midna is in critical condition and is about to die a third of the way through The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a Simple Score of Sadness called Midna's Lament plays as you race to get her to Zelda. It's a melancholic piano rendition of the game's main theme that highlights the urgency of the situation and how Midna has begun to care about Link more than herself...and it is constantly interrupted by standard enemy Battle Theme Music in both the original and the HD remake.
Another commercial example: The commercial for Mercenaries 2 has a lighthearted, upbeat song playing through all the havoc and destruction going on in the background... which, while its tone is perhaps against the game's subject matter, including the lyrics (listen here) the song as a whole is very fitting for the game.
"Born To Be Free", Stage 1 music of Metal Black. An upbeat, hopeful tune played over the landscape of an Earth utterly devastated by aliens draining the planet's resources to near-exhaustion and infested with not only re-animated remains of Earth's military forces that fell during the invasion but also organisms of the said alien occupiers.
Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has interactive soundtrack dissonance. Snake has an iPod loaded with orchestral pieces, some old-style light jazz/blues, and "Oishii Two-han Seikatsu", an utterly vapid, super-perky J-pop piece absolutely ideal for brutal gunfights. You're even encouraged to, since Snake's Psyche slowly restores when he listens to it.
If you listen to "Oishii Two-Han Seikatsu" while fighting one of the beautiful female bosses, they'll do a little dance routine for you, and then immediately return to walking towards you sexy-creepily. Bear in mind that the soundtrack during these sequences is usually a sound-effect mangle of women and babies laughing/snarling/crying/screaming.
Used in cutscenes, the very opening scene involves a brutal, Saving Private Ryan-esque scene of war carnage, set to the hauntingly beautiful 'Love Theme'.
Oh, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker!:
The AI Weapons (with the exception of Peace Walker itself) sing a haunting "Daisy Bell"-like tune in their VOCALOID-generated voices. During their boss fights, you have to learn to predict their attacks by listening to the little musical phrases that they sing (for instance, just before Chrysalis fires her missiles, she sings two long notes of equal length that rise a semitone).
"Love Deterrence", a peppy J-pop song about a Teacher/Student Romance sung by Nana Mizuki which becomes final boss battle music, gaining a strong nuclear war subtext in the process.
Dr Strangelove loves the song "Sing" by The Carpenters, and plays it to Big Boss while she tortures him for the first time (possibly in homage to the use of "Stuck In The Middle With You" Reservoir Dogs).
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, like the fourth installment, also has interactive soundtrack dissonance. Snake has a Walkman loaded with some 80's songs. Granted, there are a few rock songs that fit the war setting like "The Final Countdown" or "Rebel Yell", but then there are a few songs that are a bit too soft. Nothing says tactical espionage quite like sneaking into a base and killing the guards to the tune of Spandau Ballet's "True" or Hall & Oates' "Maneater".
A-ha's "Take on me", while still a bit jarring, downplays this quite a bit. After all, it wouldn't exactly be the first time their music appeared in a spy thriller that takes place in Afghanistan.
The "Arnhem Knights" level in Medal of Honor: Frontline is a heated battle in the streets and ruins of Arnhem set to slow, melancholy Dutch Cherubic Choir music. Actually somewhat justified, as the Allies are losing the battle.
The "Rough Landing" level has similar choral music, which evokes images of serene countryside, but said countryside is in the middle of a war zone.
In the Super NES version of Mickey Mania, the Stage Clear music is played at the Game Over screen.
Minecraft has a rotating selection of calm, soothing background music that plays whether you're just calmly gathering materials, building projects, tunneling through dark caves filled with monsters, or about to die to an exploding Creeper.
In Monster Party, a jolly game over music plays while the background consists of skeletons in a pool of blood.
Mother:
EarthBound Beginnings does this as well, also during the final boss: You defeat the primary antagonist, Gigue/Giygas, by singing him a lullaby.
Also from EarthBound Beginnings, Ninten and Ana have a dance on Mt. Itoi, but the song itself is very melancholy.
Mother 3: During the final boss fight, the battle music starts off with a heavy bass line with some creepy distortion, but as the battle goes on, it fades into a soft leitmotif of the Love Theme, while Claus's attacks get weaker and he starts to regain control of his emotions.
Another example from Mother 3: In Chapter 1 of the game, Flint goes berserk after hearing of his wife's death, injuring two of the town folk with a two by four, while a lovely piano song plays in the background.
The True Final Bosses of Mushihime Sama and the Expansion Pack to its sequel, Mushihime-sama Futari Black Label, have soothing, almost-ending-theme-like music.
Mushroom Kingdom Fusion in general has quite a bit of this, with about half the levels usually some kind of metal soundtrack even if what's going on screen doesn't match at all. It's most noticeable with the standard Mario bosses being fought to a tune from Gradius (or the Koopalings and their 'epic' boss music remix) or the fight with Caliope the Clown in Toyland complete with the same standard boss tune.
Similarly, Super Mario Fusion Revival uses music (most of it comes from the Korean MMORPG Ragnarok Online) that is very, very dramatic when played in levels of the first world, the Mushroom Kingdom, a world consisting of purely Mario-themed levels. The Raiden III boss theme does not fit most of the World 1 bosses, being some of the most dramatic boss music in history (especially when played during a fight against the Koopalings in a standard Mario style battle). Similarly the Fortress music (from Ragnarok Online) is ridiculously dramatic for a Mario styled fortress level. Like Mushroom Kingdom Fusion, worlds past the first take place in more serious locales, such as the real world Earth, a hellish dimension, a fantasy-themed world, and a sci-fi world. Unlike MKF, however, Super Mario Fusion Revival uses a universal soundtrack, so while this trope is played straight in World 1, it is averted in worlds past that and the music fits many of the levels in those worlds.
In Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm 2, the music for the final intense, pulse pounding, mind blowing battle against Pain is...an incredibly slow, melancholic combination of bell chimes and violins.
The New Order Last Days Of Europe:
Both the Second Night of the Long Knives and June of Deceit superevents (stemming from the same incident, marking either success or failure) begin with a relaxing waltz before a man with a rough German voice starts ranting; both events involve attempted coups, aggressive purges, and plenty of death.
The more downbeat British Reunification superevents delight in this. Margaret Thatcher's got "Rule Britannia" playing with downplayed triumph while a manhunt (complete with helicopter) is carried out in the background, under Reg Birch "The Red Flag" starts getting increasingly wavery as Britain has a Tiananmen Square moment, and David Stirling's reunification sounds outright cheery with "Soldiers of the Queen" playing loud and proud, right until the military starts unleashing full-auto on a screaming crowd while the march continues playing like nothing's wrong.
The first time you hear this Boss Remix of the Song of the Ancients in NieR, it's a moment involving The Power of Friendship. The second time you hear it, you're being forced to brutally kill two of your friends right after they've dropped the bombshell that your actions have DOOMED THE HUMAN RACE TO EXTINCTION. It suddenly sounds a lot less upbeat.
And then After you kill one of said friends, the background music of the second phase changes to the version heard in the game's Doomed Hometown, because the boss version is a duet and you just killed one of the singers. The last part of the boss against these two is set to a relaxing town theme.
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: This plays over the final puzzle. Said puzzle, in the original DS release, is sudoku.
Before fighting Travis in an epic Duel to the Death in No More Heroes, Dr. Peace sings a rousing karaoke song called "The Virgin Child Makes Her Wish." It sounds uplifting, but too uplifting to be sung before the start of a "two men go in, one comes out" kind of fight.
It sounds uplifting, but the song itself qualifies as Lyrical Dissonance. The song is about a young girl drowning herself after her mother died.