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I've always loved dissecting song lyrics, but doing that for videogame music always feels like a coin flip. I do find that, more than anywhere else, videogame music is absolutely rife with nonsense lines. Take this one from raid boss Sugar Riot in Final Fantasy 14: "Now we come to orange / Gotta rhyme something with orange / 'Cept that nothing rhymes with orange / Think that I'll just forget 'bout orange."
Welcome to Critical Hit (formerly known as Soundtrack Sunday), where I celebrate and lament all things videogame music, audio design, and the ways our favourite games make our ears tingle.
And finally, my personal candidate for worst videogame lyrics has to be the opening song for Dead Island with Who Do You Voodoo? I almost have to commend just how closely the song toes the line between terrible and hilariously good. Seriously, I don't know any other song that could have gotten away with lyrics like: "Handful of fingertips, toss 'em up like confetti / Stable of corpse bitches, I'm a pimp of the dead." Very much a product of its time, I fear.
That doesn't mean all videogame vocal music sounds like it was written with a heavy dose of teen angst, of course. Portal's Still Alive is by far one of my favourite tracks ever penned for a game—written from the perspective of GLaDOS as she writes her assessment report. It plays as the credits roll with lines like: "Now these points of data make a beautiful line / And we're out of beta, we're releasing on time / So I'm glad I got burned, think of all the things we learned / For the people who are still alive."
It's the perfect blend of Portal's slightly dark humour without veering into total cringe or silliness, while also giving players a glimpse into the sadistic robot's actual fate.
The Metal Gear series surely deserves a special mention here, with the crown jewel being Norihiko Hibino's main theme for MGS3: Snake Eater, sung by Cynthia Harrell. A soaring orchestral number that apes Bond themes, it both features some of the most ludicrous lyrics in the world and turns out to have a deeper meaning than you first think: it's laugh-out-loud daft at points, but also somehow ends up being a deeply meaningful part of the game. It's amazing that Harrell was able to sing this stuff without laughing: "Someday you go through the rain / Someday you feed on a tree frog / This ordeal, the trial to survive / For the day we see new life."
Then there's Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which boasts a soundtrack that's like Judas Priest and My Chemical Romance had a beautiful emo baby: "Being tracked by a starving beast / Hungry for its daily feast / A predator on the verge of death / Close to its last breath! / Getting close to its last breath! / Rules of nature!"
I'm also a huge fan of Nier: Automata's Weight of the World—another end credits song—which people theorise to actually be from different characters' perspectives depending on which language you listen to it in. As someone who regularly bumps the English version, I adore the chorus: "Cause we're gonna shout it loud / Even if our words seem meaningless / It's like I'm carrying the weight of the world." It's incredibly befitting of the journey 2B undertakes throughout the game, and the best culmination of that game's gripping narrative you could ask for.
But what about you? Is there a videogame lyric that's proper stuck with you—either for being powerful and impactful, or for being so utterly ridiculous that you have to wonder what was going through the writer's head when they penned it? Be sure to drop a comment below with the lyric and which game it's from.
