Horizon Zero Dawn - Aloy's Theme / Drums in The Sun-Ring | Reacting To Video Game Music!

[@icecreamorc]

Imo Horizon Zero dawn has a really fun story and world, that was a lot of fun to unravel the lore of. I know a lot of folks are mixed but I'm a fan.

[@princeofhyrule2205]

I found the games to be incredibly fun

[@shinyy187]

Nice to see you checking out Horizon’s music, this is my second favorite series next to Xenoblade.

[@mrandmrsduquette1904]

You sir, are an individual of superior taste.

[@icecreamorc]

Ayyyye good tastes.

[@jstymie]

I grew up on JRPGs and like plenty of people, Uematsu is my favorite musician, and a lot of my favorite music comes from the series we've seen a lot of on here (FF, Chrono, Xeno, Mana, etc). I figured rather than trying to scrape through my favorites for something that hadn't been requested yet, I'd go with something very different from what you normally get requested. You mentioned imagery like panic, a dire situation, and fire -- and you nailed it. This involved arena combat as the sun rises in a kingdom obsessed with sun / fire imagery. This is Aloy backed into a dangerous corner, but also being fierce and not giving up. Happy holidays, man.

[@Nickachuuuuu]

You are right about Aloy's theme. Its motif comes back in her training montage music (Years of Training, worth checking out), it's used in 'call to action' scenes and sometimes in the climax of story-related combat music, et cetera. So yeah, I'd say her character theme and the main theme are kind of one and the same.

[@Maxbeedo2]

"Post-post-apocalyptic cave woman fighting giant robot dinosaurs" is still a hell of a sales pitch. It is "A-loy" btw (Ay-loy?), not Ah-loy or Uh-loy. HZD was my 2017 GOTY, even over Y0 and Nier:Automata, because of how good of a sci-fi story it had. At the time I also considered it the prettiest game I had ever played, and it won several technical achievement awards and was nominated for Game Awards GOTY. It's also widely joked about how its two game releases were awkwardly placed next to juggernauts like Zelda: Breath of the Wild (HZD came out 3 days before) and Elden Ring (Horizon Forbidden West came out a week before). I rarely think of the music, as the action and visuals were often overwhelming, so this is cool to revisit.

[@SilverGrouwlABYSS]

It’s so great to see you react to the music for this game. I feel it’s very underrated despite the mixed reception on the game itself. I absolutely love both games myself and am excited to hopefully see more music from both games 😄

[@ALeafOnTheWind42]

I love Horizon. It has a brilliant story. To be honest, I don't remember much of the music besides Aloy's Theme or songs using the same motif (also, Aloy has a long "A". When you were second guessing your pronunciation, it was the one you didn't say). Even though I suspect you won't play it I won't say much about the story, but the game mostly has you hunting machines in the form of common animals as you uncover the history of how the world got into the state it's in. I don't play many AAA games, but Horizon is one that I love

[@NotLanny]

Man, you would LOVE "Built to Kill" and "Guardian of the Deep" from the sequel, Horizon Forbidden West. And you said you wished Aloy's theme was longer. The version of the same theme from Forbidden West is a lot longer and also has a completely new feel to it.

[@MorganMeryl]

@NotLanny I don't have any money to request, but it would be great if he did "Coiled Strike" and the Lovisa version of "In the Flood" from the end credits.

[@KaelinaLovesLomaris]

A lot of the music in Horizon is subtle during gameplay, providing atmosphere and tension without directly drawing attention. But there are definitely some pieces that will take your breath away. I love the music in this series.

[@KaelinaLovesLomaris]

Circle Percussion is the group that performed Drums In the Sun-Ring

[@PlanCeee]

The Sun-Ring is sort of a tribal roman coliseum type place in case you were wondering

[@vascojdb]

This comes at a great time! Ive played Zero Dawn last year and currently Forbidden West is the game Im playing, I should be done by the end of the year.

[@KyleRego]

Merry Christmas Jesse, your videos are appreciatef

[@Tarrot]

My Horizon story: I live in Taiwan as an English Teacher. During COVID when they lifted restrictions, I was able to go back to America to visit my family after 2ish years, and bought a PS5 that came bundled with Horizon: Forbidden West. Coming back to Taiwan, I had to quarantine for a week to make sure I didn't bring outside COVID strains into Taiwan, so between teaching online, all I had to do was play Forbidden West on the PS5. The very day that I got out of quarantine, I got COVID from a co-worker and had to go right back into quarantine for another week, again, with Forbidden West as my game for that week. Anyways, real good open-world style game in terms of questing/exploring, I didn't care for the combat personally but I'll get the next Horizon day one if its on the system. Visually the game's amazing, especially the enemy designs. I can't really recall any tracks from the game, but that's more because the game is about ambient mood setting music, which you generally don't get requested. BTW, AAA refers to how expensive it is to make a game, generally 100+ million to make.

[@Greekanese31]

That is not what AAA means. AAA is a borrowed term from the credit industry referring to the safest bonds to invest in. AAA bonds were safe bets that were the most likely to achieve financial success. Now how does that translate to the games industry? In the games industry, the safe bets are the games produced by the major platform holders (Nintendo, Steam, Sony, and Microsoft) as well as all the largest publishers (Capcom, Square Enix, EA, Ubisoft). This is because they have the most resources put behind them (in terms of skilled labor in the form of development and quality assurance, as well as decent capital investment) and tend to be the highest grossing games. These entities produce AAA games even if the budget is not over $100+ million.

[@Tarrot]

@@Greekanese31 The thing is, you'll have game developers like Square Enix, and their games get classified as AAA or AA depending on their budget. Octopath Traveller was AA even though it was clearly a SE game. So I don't believe its tied to the game studios.

[@KaelinaLovesLomaris]

“Just reverb and death” is a great description of Drums In the Sun-Ring 😂

[@StinkyBuster]

First time ive heard god of war music described this way. That main theme especially is iconic

[@DevilHunterJax]

So to answer your question about boss fights, the game doesn't have boss fights per-se. There's some parts of the game where you have to specifically fight some of the tougher robots and one such moment is actually when this second piece of music you listened to plays. Instead of boss fights, the game's open world is filled with various points that different robots populate. There's a wide range of robots you can fight and hunt with the smaller robots being much easier to take down and weaker than some of the absolutely huge robots like the Thunderjaw which is much harder to fight but also more rewarding when you do take it down and loot it, with every robot you fight requiring different tactics and ammunition from your weapons using things like fire and ice arrows to exploit the weaknesses of the robots. Those bigger bots tend to be the closest the game gets to an actual boss fight really. Also, Horizon: Zero Dawn is the first game in the series and Forbidden West is the sequel ^.^ And of course, Merry Christmas to ya :D

[@nachot6592]

Horizon was THE AAA franchise from Sony for the PS4 generation.

[@iselwyr5411]

I really hope he listens to Meridian's theme. Most beautiful song in the game

[@seboulol]

"Aloy's Theme" is sweet, but "The Good News" top everything else in this soundtrack in my opinion.

[@princeofhyrule2205]

Hearing you describe the drums song as a song being representative of fire is really interesting. It makes me feel line HoYo Music missed an opportunity in Natlan and have a heavy percussive. That song would have fit very well for Natlan’s children of echos region. Would have muc preferred it over the DJ style music for the Children of Echos

[@EsporHB]

Could have sworn I also requested it, but probably with my ADHD head I just planned on requesting it. Anyway, thanks to the actual requesters

[@JessesAuditorium]

You did! I missed it cause of a misspelling on my end. Will add to the description. (Yours is from HFW, is it different?)

[@EsporHB]

@JessesAuditorium since I forgot I had to look it up again and while it is very recognizable it is also very different. I did right in asking for fw and would keep that request up actually

[@princeofhyrule2205]

Horizon is really fun. Btw, Aloy is with a hard ‘A’ sound rather than the softer ‘ah’ sound. So not “ah-loy.”

[@EksemTheMagnificent]

What is that background music? I know it from somewhere but can't figure out where.

[@JessesAuditorium]

The Legend of Dragoon - Hoax