Memorable Music in Gaming #45

Genshin Impact has been one of my favorite games since it's release last year. To say I've sunk a good deal of time into it would be an understatement. At minimum, I tend to log in daily just to collect anything that might be waiting for me, but on the other end of the spectrum there have been some days where I've spent double digit hours cranking through new content.

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

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One of the areas I feel Genshin Impact has excelled is in its soundtrack - and I am apparently not alone. The developers shared this message out somewhat recently:

Dear Travelers,

Thanks to your support, Genshin Impact has won the "PlayStation®Partner Awards 2021 GRAND AWARD" and "PlayStation Game Music Award (1st Runner-Up)"! Thank you for coming alongside us through this journey.

That's a pretty cool honor and one that I believe was well-deserved.

There are a few takes on their traditional theme / loading song, and this is probably the one most people think about when they think of the Genshin Impact theme. I've certainly heard it a few (hundred) times or so by now, but I adore it and it only seems fitting to lead in on this article with it.

Stormterror is an imposing boss - especially the first time you fight him. It uses a camera perspective unlike anything else in the game to that point, introduces some new wrinkles to combat and has both epic visuals and music to go along with it.

There are numerous songs that have a driving sound to them, and this is one of them. It blends quieter harmonies with some more uplifting tones suitable for both wandering or combat (and often - both).

Perhaps the most recognizable song in all of Genshin Impact. It starts soft, picks up pace and while it remains an almost soothing melody, there are some tense underlying notes that hint at the potential dangers one might encounter while wandering the lands. If Genshin Impact continues its popularity over the next several years or so, this is probably the song most of us will think of when we remember the game.

While I believe that Photon of Fluctuation from a couple of videos ago might be Genshin Impact's most recognized song, for me this alternate version of the loading / theme song at night is my favorite. It has a haunting quality that at one point caused my wife to come in from the other room when it was playing. She normally ignores most of my games and their music (** more on that below though). However, this song brought her into my room and she stood there just watching the loading screen and listening to it. It is a soft spin on the familiar tune (in fairness, the theme has multiple variations throughout the Genshin Impact song list), and the moon over the clouds just makes it all a little more magical and mystical for me as well.

So there we have it - five of the dozens of fantastic songs from Genshin Impact that happen to be among my favorites.

** Completely unrelated to Genshin Impact, but amusing to me; My wife mostly ignores music in video games. I have to say mostly however, because of the Madden NFL games. My buddy Landon and I would play franchise mode for years, and in setting up our teams we spent a ton of time out in the menus trading, drafting, cutting, researching - building our teams. So basically it was hours of the same song playing over and over and over and... you get the idea.

Well, then one year, after games were finally put to discs and they had more storage, the Madden series started to play actual songs and had song lists. His wife and mine were very quick to suggest that feature probably came from a wife who was sick of the old single song repeating endlessly. These are quite possibly the only two times in my life that my wife has commented on the music in a video game, so I figured I'd share.

Article by: Nick