Has anyone played I Am Setsuna yet?

[Wolf Kanno]

The issue the composer has is that they are trying to stick to a minimalist style to work with the game's theme of melancholy, and while this works wonderfully for the story sections and parts of the world/dungeons, it doesn't necessarily translate well into everything. So in essense, they are working within an odd self-imposed restriction. Other than that though, I'm largely loving the OST.

The game has it's flaws but it's honestly hit all the right notes for me so far, and the world and setting work so much better for the "sacrificial pilgrimage" storyline than FFX and Tales of Symphonia, which both had some world/setting problems which ultimately undermined the plot and themes for me. Dropping the whole "evil religion that perpetuates the ritual" alone makes this game feel a bit fresh compared to those two. Course things may change since I think I'm only halfway through the game currently.

[Fynn]

You know that religion twist is coming

And yeah, minimalism rarely works for piano battle themes

[Wolf Kanno]

Trying to shoe-horn it in at this point would be quite the blunder considering half the world doesn't seem to believe in the ritual anymore. The game still hasn't exactly established how the Sacrifice actually "fixes" the problems considering that in addition to somehow making the monsters more docile it also seems to impede on their intelligence and evolution.

Despite the monsters looking absolutely adorable (one of the issue of basing all your designs on arctic creatures) the game has kind of done a really good job of keeping them a mysterious threat that is growing more dangerous as the story progresses. The game has an antagonist but little is known about him and his motives. It's shown that the Pilgrimage party has just as much problems dealing with other humans as it does the monster hordes, in fact barring a few events here and there, humans have proven to be the bigger threat since the setting has really painted them as a more brutal and hostile society willing to do anything to survive, which again, I feel feeds into the game's theme and story better than certain other titles...