// KOTAKU — GAMING
Blue Dragon And 8 Other Completely Unhinged RPG Battle Themes You Need To Listen To
Earlier today, my partner came into the room and asked if I’d ever be interested in playing the 2007 Xbox 360 RPG Blue Dragon. This was sort of a weird question, even in our very gaming-centric household, but apparently the reason he asked is that the game is getting an unofficial PC port (as spotted by VGC).
That’s cool! It’s great that it won’t be stuck on the Xbox 360 anymore and will be accessible to more people. I politely declined to play Blue Dragon at this time (I am busy), but later today the game must have still been on his mind, because my partner sent me this:
That is, I kid you not, apparently the regular-ass battle music in Blue Dragon, a game composed by…Nobuo Uematsu? The Final Fantasy guy?!
Oh my God. This is great. You get like three measures of whatever guitar and then this guy just starts wailing out of tune. And it has lyrics that invoke a ridiculous anime OP from the 90s or something. All while rocking out as hard as possible so that you never lose the momentum of battle. Hell yeah!
I love RPGs, and I love an RPG that’s not afraid to do stuff with its music that’s unconventional. A boss theme that’s calm and soothing rather than intense, a field theme that’s unexpectedly sad, lyrics, rare or specialized instruments, I love it all.
It’s Friday, so in the spirit of Blue Dragon, let’s celebrate its arrival on PC by listening to some other totally unhinged, wacky, or out there regular RPG battle themes together. I will try to stick to regular battle themes, ones for normal ol’ enemies, because if I busted out the boss battles, we’d be here all day.
Let’s start with an oldie but goodie: Pepper Steak (or, if you run with the typo, Peper Steak). Oh, sorry, you think this one is disturbing? Yeah, it’s meant to be. OFF is an RPG about a baseball player “purifying” a messed-up world of blood and meat and plastic by murdering all the ghosts who live in it. Yes, really. Pepper Steak is probably its most infamous theme, with its weird, haunting swing and frequent dissonance and irregular rhythms. Alias Conrad Coldwood, the composer, was unable to return for the 2025 remake, so Toby Fox and Camelia stepped in to make themes for each different zone instead of one overarching Pepper Steak replacement. I have not a single bad word to say about anything Fox has ever composed, but I do think (and he seemed to agree in his statement about it) that it was always going to be impossible to replace Pepper Steak.
I haven’t personally played Shadow Hearts, but I guess this battle theme plays when you go to Japan? Anyway, someone has tried to explain the plot of this game to me a few times, and it hasn’t stuck, but dang if this isn’t an absolutely bonkers thing to have as your regular, normal battle theme for regular, normal enemies for a good chunk of the game.
Nintendo, when are you putting this on the Nintendo music app? This is just workout music. Which I guess is, like, appropriate for the game. But you didn’t have to go this hard.
I don’t need to explain why this is in here, right? This is just Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry. The Mother games are all music licensing hell, and I strongly suspect that similar issues in Mother 3 are why we’ll never get an official Western localization. I cannot believe they just put this classic into Earthbound and attached it to the hippie battles. Wild choice.