Don't Believe Everything You Read!

Content originally posted on October 22, 2020. 

Been playing a ton of 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim recently, and with that I’ve also been listening to the game’s soundtrack. If there’s anything I’d recommend from it, it’s the battle themes! They help get me hyped and focused during the week when I’m doing work.

13 Sentinels’s soundtrack was produced by Basiscape, a company founded and lead by video game composer Hitoshi Sakimoto. If you’re not familiar with his name, you might be aware of the games he’s helped produce music for….namely Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII.

With that tidbit of info, I had the impression there was a deeper connection between the music of 13 Sentinels and Final Fantasy Tactics based on how their battle themes were named. The battle themes of 13 Sentinels are mainly named after amino acids and monosaccharides, and I read awhile back that the battle themes of Final Fantasy Tactics were named after medicines. I thought “Wow, pretty crazy! Maybe the two games gave Sakimoto a similar vibe, so he went with these interesting naming schemes??”

….then I found out only 3-4 of Tactics’s battle themes were named after medical-esque terms 😪 guess it’s a reminder for me not to believe everything I read.

Regardless, both games are huge epic tales that have a shared lineage in the RPG genre. They also maybe aren’t as popular as they should be 😅 For me, it’s gonna be interesting to see whether 13 Sentinels ends up building a legacy like Final Fantasy Tactics’s over time.