The Souls series of video games – Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls I-III – are particularly known for their satisfying gameplay and crushing difficulty. Getting through even one of the games in the series involves a significant time commitment in order to pass bosses, enemies, and the traps that fill each level. In between this gameplay, however, are many touches of immersive world-building and distinct artistic style. This is primarily done visually through vistas, weather, and characters that the player runs into.

The music in the Souls series is also a part of the world-building, especially due to its sparing part of the gameplay. While most game series have some sort of ambient music playing even in the dull moments, Souls games save the music for truly dramatic and important areas and events such as bossfights, secret areas, and your main hubs which the player spends most of their time.

The composition of said music, however, also has its own character – if only in the first titles of the series – that helps set the uniquely bleak, intimidating, yet ultimately fascinating and triumphant feeling of a typical Souls game.

As an aside: part of the issue with the review of video game soundtracks, I think, is that the reviews are done by people with sometimes zero experience in the study or performance of music; as a result, biases of how they feel towards the gameplay dictate how they feel about the soundtrack. Many mediocre soundtracks are given acclaim simply because the reviewers love the game itself – take the compositions made for Fallout 3 and 4 as examples of this. This post, therefore, will attempt to look at these soundtracks from the perspective of a musician as well as a player of these games; my hope is it will be more analysis than review.

Since the compositions are almost exclusively attached to significant gameplay moments, there will be spoilers.

Demon’s Souls (composed by Shunsuke Kida)

The first game in the series of games, Demon’s Souls has no official lore or world connection to any of the Dark Souls games. This is because it was done when the developers, From Software, were creating the game under the publishing and purview of Sony themselves; whereas their remaining titles were created under a different publishing arrangement with Bandai Namco. As a result, this is also the only game in the series where they hired Shunsuke Kida to compose.

Shunsuke’s credentials prior to Demon’s Souls, curiously, are hard to find. For a composer that according to one source was born in the 60’s, no record being available is very confusing. Take their work on Demon’s Souls into account, however, and it’s easy to see that the composer is no amateur. Of the Souls series, the music in this first iteration was the most tonally appropriate, reflecting a great deal of training in music and practical experience.

The first piece played (not counting the pre-menu cinematic) is the character select music, which is a very effective prelude not totally unlike one by Bach. The instrumentation is predominantly electronic effects, including a particularly strong bass and ambient sounds. This – paired with the diminished, highly chromatic harmony and pounding arpeggi, as well as the suspensions in higher voices – give the game an eerie tone; the black ringing the menus and character select an abyss that the player must dive into.

Perhaps one of the greatest transformations in game is roughly 15 minutes later, with the reappearance of this theme as the player first enters The Nexus, their hub for the rest of the game. The effects and powerful chimes which first created a sense of foreboding and inevitability are now replaced with strings and harp; their lightness despite the dissonance acts as the resolution to the opening. The player crawled through the black abyss, and what they find on the other end is quite peculiar indeed…

The Nexus changes music once again later once the player is roughly halfway through the game (after killing 3/5 world bosses). The mysterious question the harp asks of “What to do now?” is then responded to with organ chords, layered again a la Bach (but his Toccata and Fugue in particular). What was once filled with a naive, anxious, curious optimism is now bleak and sombre. At this point, the player has died so often and killed so many that returning to the hub is no longer an act of pleasure, but of necessity.

The boss music of Demon’s Souls shares some common trends; in particular, there are trends toward sounds more brutal or more dissonant, whether the half-step moans of the pre-menu cinematic or the harsh and eventually tortured, chromatic string chords of the pre-game cinematic. The exception to this is the standout track of them all, the music to Maiden Astraea. This fight, at the final fight at the end of the “final” zone, is given a slight air of ambition with its fairly diatonic harmony. The constant plucks of a harpsichord sometimes accompanied with the clawing, desperate counterpoint of strings.

However, while these cinematics and Maiden Astraea are often loud in the hope to somewhat energize among the deaths and difficulty to follow, the boss music in Demon’s Souls is still often quite subdued and soft in volume compared to the game audio. When looking at the music of Dark Souls, the spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls, this is actually a fairly big difference: the Dark Souls music asks you to fear, to despair with its volume. However, Demon’s Souls asks you to be anxious, to be careful, to look out for danger. This difference between trepidation and terror is the crucial difference between DeS and DaS not just in a musical sense, but also across their entire game structures.

Dark Souls I & II (composed by Motoi Sakuraba)

Mentioned earlier, the shift between Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls was the shift between Sony partnership and Bandai Namco partnership. This required a shift in scenery, feel, and approach both in order to satisfy creative and corporate interests – it must be spiritual successor and not direct sequel.

It also meant access to something of Bandai Namco’s house composer, Motoi Sakuraba. While Shunsuke has little information, Motoi’s is bountiful: his work spans the classic Tales series of JRPG’s and the Star Ocean series. He even scored the soundtrack to Eternal Sonata, about the dying thoughts of Fredyrk Chopin. This career certainly gave him the right to work on Dark Souls, which would be the sequel to what by development time had become a modern classic.

Compared to Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls is a significantly darker game both in a thematic and a literal sense (in the case of the depths of Blighttown). The game was marketed under its promise of punishing difficulty, the idea of continual player death being a part of the storytelling and the world of Lordran. This is likely what led to Motoi’s music being similarly perilous as Kunsuke’s prior, but with a different approach.

Motoi’s prelude in the character select and creation is less Baroque and more Medieval, imbued with a freeness and mysticism that best reflects the lore of Dark Souls in particular, but his cinematic music is almost entirely comparable to that of Kunsuke’s. Of course this is very appropriate even considering the change in mood: the cinematic shows and tells of events far before the player. The great war and fire of the game itself is long gone, a decayed husk.

The first boss and its music, Asylum Demon, reflect what I mentioned earlier: the Dark Souls boss music is the same in composition as Demon’s Souls, but far louder and more energetic. The greater stakes of these fights, with an even more vulnerable player and even more menacing bosses, is reflected in the screaming of Gaping Dragon’s music and the high tessitura that continually rises throughout Ornstein & Smough’s music.

The soundtrack is not without respite however: the haunting, dying string chords of Firelink Shrine also embody a dying world, with insane and hopeless characters surrounding it. The music surrounding the “Daughter of Chaos” bonfire is peaceful, in its own horrifying form of peace. Even the deeply secret Ash Lake music, despite its primeval choir echoing centuries or millenias of power and strife, has its own sense of meditation in its relatively still diatonic and not altogether minor harmony. It’s highly commendable that Motoi was able to maintain the overall thematic intent of Kunsuke’s music even while adapting it for a still very different creation in every sense of its creation.

For Dark Souls II, however, this was sadly not the case.

Certainly the music of the firekeepers, Majula, and King Vendrick echoes the tendencies of Demon’s and Dark past: a mysterious power and an uneasy peace in the midst of darkness. The boss music, however, is without character in its samey-ness between different bosses, with little if any personality in Motoi’s or Shunsuke’s previous work. It’s a sad thing to see, as Motoi is clearly an industry veteran and one would expect more differentiation. Perhaps his generally unmoving work here is what lead to the recruitment of composer Yuka Kitamura.

Dark Souls III (composed by Yuka Kitamura)

Yuka Kitamura was brought on originally for parts of Dark Souls II and its DLC, followed by working on From Software’s diversionary Lovecraftian epic, Bloodborne; and then the soundtrack of Dark Souls III. Her greatest strength is her adherence and appreciation of the classical standards in form and content to even a fault: sometimes her motifs share many similarities to past composers from Mozart and Verdi to Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky.

In this respect, her work on Dark Souls III is somewhat controversial. Remember that for both Demon’s and Dark Souls, the music was focused upon the reinforcement of the games’ themes of tactical combat, sinful humans, and horrific monsters. In III, there is little focus on DeS and DS’s decay in a silent, entropic sense. Instead it is the extravagance of Pontiff Sulyvahn, flashy magics, and a bleeding sun in the sky. This break in tonal atmosphere is accompanied by music by Kitamura of traditional fantasy and opera. As a result the art and aesthetics are out of touch with the brutal gameplay, something that the previous entries tried to avoid in their holistic unity of the themes in mechanics and art.

This change in atmosphere is arguably the team wanting to move past Dark Souls and toward newer IPs. No doubt it was Bandai asking them for a trilogy and, given the controversial reception to Dark Souls II, they probably wanted to end on a high note of the series. This meant that the aesthetics, the story, the music; it all needed to be safe and amicable to series veterans in order to provide a satisfying finish.

In the end, the Souls series worked not purely because of the level designs or the high hit values. They worked for their fusion of the art and gameplay into total – artworks that have each dependent part feeding into each other. The nobility and sacrifice of knights like Garl Vinland, Ornstein, and Veldstadt are a result of their stories, their move-sets, and yes – their music.