OK, this one is weird. 
I enjoy videogames, although I’m not very good at them. I don’t want to have to learn lots of complicated stuff in order to play. If learning is required, I’d rather apply it to something a bit more important. That’s why I gave up on Final Fantasy X; I couldn’t be bothered to learn how to play three-dimensional water-polo, with complicated rules, just for a game.
Some years ago I saw the original Soul Calibur game on the Sega Dreamcast, and I was mesmerised. It’s a 3D fighting game: oriental swords, axes and nunchuks rather than fists or guns, and characters ranging from hulking monsters, to ninjas, to anime-style Japanese schoolgirl heroines. (And then there’s Voldo, of course.) Gorgeous graphics, good A.I., playable at various levels from mindless “button-mashing” to intricate 10-click combination moves. I bought a Dreamcast just to play Soul Calibur. Eventually my Dreamcast died, Sega got out of the console business, and I put it all behind me.
Recently Sega released Soul Calibur II on all the major consoles, and I bought a PlayStation 2 just to play it. (OK, I do play a few other games, but 90% of the time it’s SC2.) Visually, it’s gorgeous. Playability is perhaps a little inferior to the original, but there are some nice new modes to explore.
But one of the aspects that really grabbed me was the music. (Yes, this really is a CD of the week entry!) It borrows familar themes from the original Soul Calibur, but there’s a lot of wonderful new music. Eventually I bought a Japanese import of the soundtrack on eBay.
So what kind of music is it? It’s a glorious pastiche: an amalgam of all kinds of musical styles, from John Williams-style triumphal marches to dark atmospheric passages that might have escaped from the Twilight Zone, to pastoral tone-poems. At times it’s a bit reminiscent of Sibelius’ Karelia Suite. And it draws upon musical styles (or, more often, cliches) from all around the world – flamenco from Spain (oddly the theme for a French swordsman), swirling music from an Ottoman bazaar, and characteristic pieces from China, Korea, and Japan. And the major themes are presented in many different arrangements, from full orchestra to delicate piano-violin duets.
It must be odd doing the music for a videogame. It has to stand up to incessant repetition (so the CD contains lots of relatively short passages that can be assembled in various ways), and it has to reinforce the gameplay, so consistency is important. Hardly anyone will actually listen to it, of course. And the rest of the project is so expensive that the budget for the music is pretty good; no need to skimp. Combine with a Japanese attention to detail (and, it must be said, a complete lack of musical inhibition or conventional ideas of taste), and the result is extraordinary.
And why did I choose this for my CD of the week? I have a CD changer in my car, which uses a 6-CD cartridge. I realized yesterday that the Soul Calibur II double CD has been in the cartridge for the last four months. Other CDs have come and gone, but SC2 became my own soundtrack. Odd, that.