10 Best JRPG Soundtracks Worth Listening to Right Now

I listen to game music pretty often, long after I finished delving into their worlds. While I'm working, and also while I'm doing anything that doesn't require my full attention.

Game soundtracks have a specific quality that a lot of other music doesn't; they're designed to accompany extended periods of focus without demanding your attention, and the best ones are also just genuinely great music regardless of context. These ten JRPGs OST are the ones that have stayed in rotation the longest.

10 Suikoden

Miki Higashino

Miki Higashino made a very specific creative decision when composing the Suikoden soundtrack: every region needed its own distinct sound, as if the music itself was reflecting the culture of wherever the hero had arrived. For a game of its era and budget, that is an ambitious choice, and she pulled it off completely. Moving from one area to the next doesn't just feel like a map transition – it feels like actually traveling somewhere different.

Her work on Suikoden II is widely considered even better, and it was her swan song at Konami before she left the company. I personally still go back to the first game's soundtrack more. Something about the original has a rawness to it that the sequel, as excellent as it is, smoothed out slightly. It is also worth knowing that she later collaborated with Yasunori Mitsuda on a soundtrack for Tsukiyo ni Saraba, which is a pairing that makes complete sense once you know it exists.

9 NieR Replicant/Gestalt

Keiichi Okabe, Kakeru Ishihama, Keigo Hoashi, Takafumi Nishimura

I've been singing since I was a child – and I spent years in choirs – and NieR's soundtrack is one of the few game soundtracks that genuinely moves me in that specific way. Around 90% of the themes are vocal-oriented, which is an extraordinary commitment for a video game score. The vocals were provided by Emi Evans, and what she created here is unlike anything else in the medium.

The lyrics are not in any real language. Evans developed what she called a "chaotic language" by blending English, French, Gaelic, Japanese, German, Welsh, Hungarian, and Latin, and then imagining how those words might have evolved thousands of years into the future. The goal was to invoke an emotion without the listener being able to parse the words consciously. It works – the music creates feelings that are harder to explain than most game music because the usual anchor of recognizable lyrics isn't there. The tone does all the work, and the tone is extraordinary.

8 SaGa Frontier 2

Masashi Hamauzu

Masashi Hamauzu is truly a great game composer. The SaGa Frontier 2 soundtrack is, to my mind, the clearest demonstration of why. The 76 tracks across three discs follow an eastern European aesthetic – the German-language track names are not an affectation, they're part of a deliberate cultural grounding – and Hamauzu fills the whole thing with the melancholic, airy, classical-adjacent quality that he does better than almost anyone.

He is often categorized as a predictable composer, which I think undersells how deliberately he plays with leitmotifs and then diverges from them into looser, more experimental territory. His work outside of games – his band Imeruat, the album Vielen Dank, his piano pieces performed by Benyamin Nuss – all follow the same thread. If SaGa Frontier 2 is your entry point to his work, you will find a lot waiting for you on the other side of it.

7 Chrono Cross

Yasunori Mitsuda

Chrono Cross is one of the most discussed JRPG soundtracks ever made, and decades on, I don't think it's been overrated. Yasunori Mitsuda composed a score that spans three discs and 67 tracks, and finding a weak entry in it is genuinely difficult. The variety is remarkable – Celtic-influenced folk music, jazz, ambient pieces, sweeping orchestral work – and it all coheres into something that feels like a complete world rather than a collection of tracks.

One of my personal favorites is "Guldove ~Home World~", which arrives moderately late in the game and has an intricate bridge section that always makes me think of the advanced magic sold in the Element Shop there. The doubled themes – "Another World" versions appearing before their "Home World" counterparts – are handled with real care. It's one of those soundtracks where even the versions of themes you've heard before feel like discoveries.

6 Octopath Traveler

Yasunori Nishiki

In interviews, Yasunori Nishiki described his goal for the Octopath Traveler soundtrack as finding the perfect blend of "nostalgic and new." He wrote the main theme three times, doubting his abilities to a point where he almost left the project.

The 86-track album succeeds because Nishiki composed with strong, memorable melodies as the foundation and treated orchestration as secondary to that. The character themes were the hardest for him – he wanted each one to leave a strong impression after a single hearing – and most of them do. His favourite is "Ophilia, the Cleric," which he felt expressed both her softness and her holiness simultaneously.

The boss themes, particularly "Decisive Battle I" and the Galdera material, have a ferocity that feels distinct from everything around them. The choice to use regional themes rather than character themes for the ending, so the finale worked for players who hadn't recruited everyone, is exactly the kind of thoughtful decision that elevates a soundtrack from good to memorable.

5 Final Fantasy X

Nobuo Uematsu, Masashi Hamauzu, Junya Nakano

Final Fantasy X was the first time Nobuo Uematsu shared composing duties on a mainline Final Fantasy game. Masashi Hamauzu and Junya Nakano were chosen specifically because their styles were different from Uematsu's while still being compatible with him. It shouldn't work as well as it does, and yet the three musical touches blend into something that sounds completely unified.

"Zanarkand" was written by Uematsu before development even began, originally for the recital of a flutist friend. He kept it in reserve because it felt too somber for immediate use, and then development of X started, and it found its home. That origin is hard not to think about when you hear it. The whole score carries that quality – pieces that feel like they existed somewhere before the game found them. I had enormous restraint not putting X-2 here for "Eternity: Memory of Lightwaves" alone, but overall, this is the stronger album, and I stand by that.

4 Kingdom Hearts

Yoko Shimomura

There are pieces of music associated with specific eras of life in a way that is almost unfair, and "Dearly Beloved" is one of them for a significant number of people who were children when the first Kingdom Hearts released. Yoko Shimomura composed the series' music with a stated intention of making players feel good while playing – she wanted the music to accompany the action without overwhelming it. The result is a soundtrack that sits in the background of your memory without you realizing how much it's accumulated there.

Hikaru Utada wrote and performed the two main theme songs for Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2 – "Hikari" and "Passion" in Japanese, "Simple and Clean" and "Sanctuary" for international releases – and both remain remarkable. Director Tetsuya Nomura had only Utada in mind from the beginning, citing her as an artist whose music could cross language barriers. He was right. Those songs are as tied to those games as anything Shimomura composed, and together they form a soundtrack identity that the series has maintained across decades.

3 Star Ocean: Till the End of Time

Motoi Sakuraba

Motoi Sakuraba composed the first volume of the Star Ocean: Till the End of Time soundtrack with a live orchestra, which gives it a weight and warmth that synthesiser-driven scores from the same era don't always manage. The second volume leans more heavily on synthesizers, which is a noticeable shift, but the first disc alone justifies the whole thing's place on this list.

The fun fact worth knowing: Sakuraba also composed the Dark Souls soundtrack. The two games could not be more different in tone, and yet there's something recognizable in the approach to atmosphere and emotional weight that connects them once you know. It's the kind of discovery that makes you go back and listen to both with different ears.

2 Lost Odyssey

Nobuo Uematsu

Lost Odyssey is one of the more overlooked JRPGs of its era, partly because it launched as an Xbox 360 exclusive, which kept it away from a significant portion of the audience who would have loved it. The opening – a spectacular CG cutscene that transitions seamlessly into gameplay – is one of the most impressive game intros I've encountered, and the soundtrack that accompanies the whole experience is among Uematsu's best post-Square work.

"A Sign of Hope" is the track that stays with people, and with good reason – it has been described as mixing poverty, despair, and just enough hope into a single piece, and that description is accurate. The soundtrack was later arranged for piano by Shiro Hamaguchi and performed by Benyamin Nuss, which is worth seeking out separately. Even if you cannot get hold of the game itself, the soundtrack alone is worth your time.

1 Triangle Strategy

Akira Senju

Triangle Strategy is a game with a genuinely excellent tactical combat system, a stunning HD-2D visual presentation, and a story that I will be diplomatic about. The narrative is predictable, exposition-heavy, armies teleport across the map without explanation, and choices that feel momentous ultimately change very little. The final choice is the only one that matters. None of that has anything to do with the soundtrack, which is essentially flawless.

Akira Senju holds a master's degree from the Tokyo University of the Arts, where his graduation piece was only the eighth ever purchased for the University's permanent collection. He has composed for film, television, animation, and opera. His work on Triangle Strategy sits comfortably alongside any of it. The score is lush, emotionally sophisticated, and dramatically satisfying in a way that occasionally outpaces the scenes it's scoring. It is, without question, the best thing about the game, and it is very good enough to listen to entirely on its own.