Hey look, another post about this game! But this time, we’re focusing on one little part of it: The music. I briefly hinted at it when I wrote about Legendary, but the music is probably the game’s most shining moment. Which is me kinda lowering my standards here, since we’re talking about something as average as Legendary. Though it had been nearly a decade since I last played the game, the music is the one thing I remember from it besides the literal soul sucking and that time where I fell through the elevator at the end of the game.
For a little context: I like film and game scores, especially when it’s stuff that is mostly forgotten. It’s become one of those things I tend to collect because it’s neat to listen to scores to mostly forgotten films like Paycheck or the TV score for the 2000s reality show The Mole. That also applies to video game scores. Since Legendary was released around the time where companies were going “Oh yeah, we can do soundtracks for our video game,” a lot of games got soundtracks. And of all the games to get a soundtrack, this was one of them.
Composed by Jack Grillo (the audio director at Spark Unlimited at the time, who’s since moved on to Crystal Dynamics, working on audio for the Tomb Raider games) and Ricardo Hernandez (presumably a drummer friend of Grillo’s, his name is hard to find info on him easily), this soundtrack was released in September 2008 on most digital storefronts, and also got a physical release on Melee Sound Design Records, Hernandez’s self-published label.
So what does it sound like? It’s mostly chugging guitars and heavy drum hits. After “Prologue,” which is mostly a monologue with occasional guitar playing throughout, “Flashpoint” is the first proper song on here, which plays while in the game’s main menu. It starts with a suspenseful guitar intro, before the drums kick in and layers of guitars are blended into this fairly intense menu music, which is probably the best way to get you pumped up to play the game.
It’s also really interesting how there’s voice lines from the game featured. “Prologue” and “Epilogue” are literally featured from the game itself at those particular sections, which is expected, though they are truncated from the actual dialogue. featured However, the way it’s framed makes the album as trying to tell its own story, outside of the game. “It’s Just Business” is framed like Deckard just got severely wounded and about to get killed by LeFey, but in the actual game he says this line from a hijacked video line before a squad of baddies come to murder Deckard and Vivian in a subway. I’ll chalk this up to creative liberty with the material featured, but honestly I could’ve done without the random dialogue bits featured here.
The other main thing is that it’s fairly repetitive in a lot of cases. “Flashpoint” and “The Tower” had the same general tempo and beat playing throughout, with a different guitar riff here and there. Same with “Enemy of My Enemy” and “Is Anybody There?”. If you’re expecting a broad range of sound here, you’re listening in the wrong place here. The similarities between several tracks sometimes makes them really hard to distinguish one part of the soundtrack from another.
There are some favorites of mine in spite of the repetition. “Minotaur!” has a very chuggy bass-like rhythm that segues nicely into the guitar, even if it’s basically playing the same lick. “Bullets and Blood” has some a neat little percussion beat that plays before the rest of the band plays, and it’s a nice followup to the previous track in terms of intensity.
A few tracks are fairly more subtle on the drums, with little more than occasional guitar, like “Prologue,” “Full Moon,” “Barf Pinata,” and “Epilogue”. These are incredibly dull and uninteresting to listen to more than once, honestly. Taking out one of the best parts of the overall soundtrack – the drums – has you end up with music that just sounds little more than a person noodling on a guitar for a minute and a half. Which I understand, you need a bit of ambient sound to shake things up a bit, but it doesn’t really work well together, at least in this soundtrack form.
The worst part about all this is that there’s a myriad of songs featured in the game that are omitted in the soundtrack. There’s a section in the game where you have to babysit a soldier as he sets up the EMP device, and that track has a surprisingly good rhythm, and it’s not in here, which is a bummer. I would’ve honestly traded some of the similar sounding tracks for ones that show an overall diverse amount of the game’s sound.
I hope someone rips the game’s audio and makes a complete, unofficial soundtrack. Which has happened: In Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, there’s this wonderful track Amon Tobin used for the Bank level, and it’s not on the official soundtrack he released, but eventually someone ripped the game audio and now you can just listen to that track in its full unedited glory. So uh… anyone know how to rip Unreal Engine 3 audio?
Is the soundtrack good? I hesitate to say yes. A lot of it is meandering guitar playing mixed with punchy drum-playing and voice clips from the game. But in the case of Legendary, which is a straightforward first-person shootybang, that kind of sound is really all it needs. So yeah, I’d say it’s somewhat good. I can’t imagine this being scored like Turning Point: Fall of Liberty was – a dramatic score from Michael Giacchino which is probably one of his worst game scores, next to maybe his score for Call of Duty – so they made the right call here.
Admittedly, I love anything with intense percussion that’s prominent in the mix. When done correctly, it can bring an amazing intensity to an already action-packed game. A good example is Simon Viklund’s scores for Payday: The Heist and Payday 2. Grillo and Hernandez successfully pulled that same kind of intensity off here in Legendary. A shame the game itself is a real bust.
If you wanna give it a listen, it’s on the usual streaming services like Spotify, and YouTube Music. You can also buy the soundtrack digitally on Amazon, which I don’t recommend doing unless you really like this game. As for me, I’d rather own a physical copy, as the whole score reminds me of folks making their own homemade tapes to sell on the street or at local shows. It’s got that kind of scrappiness to it that I like.
I wonder what other C-tier seventh generation games got official soundtracks. I know there’s several of them. The big question is if they’re any good.
