Channelling my inner-Nobuo-Uematsu (music critique please)

[Diamond16]

Hey everyone,

I haven't been very present lately and part of the reason has been composing music for Onedollar's Oceanspirit Dennis game. One thing I've been trying to improve in my compositions is the production, and I think my recent acquisition of a better piano sample has helped immensely. There are three tunes, a town theme, battle theme, and credits/overture.  My main goal was to make them all sound like they were composed for the same game.  As you can probably also hear, Final Fantasy was a huge inspiration haha
Anyway, any feedback is greatly appreciated.

RPG Overture
Battle Theme
Town Theme

[kaput]

Hi

They all sound pretty good and certainly RPGish - I especially like the Town Theme as it's got that nice chill out element to it ie not too distracting. All in all very well composed.

My only criticism would be that the Battle Theme sounds a bit too chilled out in itself - it's on the mark but the drums for me are a bit too quiet and it just needs that extra oompf applied to it.

Very nice

[Diamond16]

Thanks for the feedback! I agree that I need to add more intensity, perhaps I need to experiment with a few more percussion instruments

[Problem]

I like the overture, but I think you've almost put too many ideas into that piece. So many motives, but most of them just played briefly and gone too soon.
The battle theme is a great composition overall. Maybe the snare drum could use some variation, it's quite repetitive. The whole piece might also sound too "relaxed" at the moment, but that really depends on the feeling of these battles in the game.
The town theme is a perfect background music and beautiful as it is. It sounds very "full", but again, that deends on the feeling of that location in the game.

The sound of these tracks is quite good, and very coherent. You can tell that they belong together. The individual instruments are well-balanced, but the heavy use of reverb makes them sound muddy in places. Especially the flutes sound quite artificial with too much reverb (or chorus?). I'd probably play with the reverb type and levels to get more clarity and definition.

Well done, keep it up!

[Diamond16]

Thanks for the feedback Problem! I agree with what you said about the battle theme, definitely need to play around with it a bit more.
Regarding the reverb, I'm using Sonatina Symphony Orchestra VST which is a free one where the reverb is preset so I am limited with what I can do. It may be time for me to upgrade to some 'real' strings

[Anian]

In RPG overture, at about 0:41 the flute goes a bit too high in pitch for my taste, but I don't really mind that it has many things in it, that keeps it interesting, besides that, I'm guess it accompanies lots of images of a strange new world which makes it fit. And the Town theme has a strange, I'm guessing that's the mentioned, reverb, especially strong 0:20-0:30.
But that's really nitpicking. I like this, all 3 sound like it's from the same game and if the game is FF-like, then I think it'd fit nicely.

[Diamond16]

Thanks for the feedback, Anian.  Definitely going to look at investing some money into some better sounds for future pieces.

For those interested, here's a link to the game these pieces were written for:

The Search for Oceanspirit Dennis