Press Play or Press Mute? Ranking Video Game Soundtracks From 'Instant Playlist' to 'Who Hurt You, Composer?'
Here's a hot take nobody's actually disputing: a great video game soundtrack can make a mid game feel legendary. Conversely, a bad one can make you question every life choice that led you to that couch. Music in games isn't just background noise — it's emotional infrastructure. It tells you when to panic, when to feel sad, and when to absolutely go feral on a final boss. The stakes are high. The tier list is higher.
Welcome to the SW Tier List definitive OST power rankings. Buckle up, adjust your headphones, and pour one out for every game that handed a composer a budget of forty-seven dollars and a dream.
S-Tier: 'This Slaps So Hard It Should Be Illegal'
Persona 5 — Let's just get this out of the way immediately. Persona 5's soundtrack doesn't walk into the room — it kicks the door down, orders everyone a coffee, and starts doing backflips. Shoji Meguro composed something so stylistically cohesive that even the battle music sounds like it belongs on a curated Spotify playlist your coolest friend made. "Last Surprise" alone has probably been playing in someone's head every single day since 2017. This is what peak OST performance looks like.
Halo: Combat Evolved — The Gregorian chant that opens Halo's main theme is so powerful it made millions of American teenagers feel like ancient space warriors. Marty O'Donnell built a sonic universe that matched the scale of the game perfectly. It's cinematic, it's epic, and it absolutely should not work as well as it does. And yet.
Undertale — Toby Fox composed the entire Undertale OST himself, which is either inspiring or deeply humiliating for every team of professional composers working with fifty times the budget. "Megalovania" is now culturally embedded in the internet's DNA. Resistance is futile.
A-Tier: 'Certified Banger, No Notes'
Doom Eternal — Mick Gordon's industrial metal assault is basically a second gameplay mechanic. The music doesn't just accompany the demon-slaying — it actively encourages you to rip and tear harder. Your brain on Doom Eternal's OST is a different brain. A more dangerous brain.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild — A controversial pick for some because it leans minimalist — soft piano notes, ambient tones, sparse arrangements. But that restraint is the entire point. The silence between notes makes Hyrule feel enormous and lonely in the best possible way. Understated genius is still genius.
Chrono Trigger — Yasunori Mitsuda composed this while reportedly working himself into a stomach ulcer, which is an absolutely unhinged level of dedication that the final product completely justifies. Every single track fits its moment like a bespoke suit. Time travel has never sounded this good.
B-Tier: 'Solid Work, Mostly Stays Out of the Way'
This is where competent but unmemorable soundtracks live. Think most mid-2000s open-world games — functional, inoffensive, occasionally pleasant. Red Dead Redemption 2 edges toward A-tier in its best moments but spends a lot of time being "nice acoustic guitar sounds" without quite crossing into iconic. God of War (2018) is similarly excellent in boss fights and emotionally resonant in quieter scenes, but doesn't quite have that one track you're humming in the grocery store.
B-tier isn't a diss. It's a solid GPA. These games used their music responsibly.
C-Tier: 'Bro, Did You Just Forget to Hire a Composer?'
We've all been there. You're playing a game that's actually pretty decent — good mechanics, interesting story — and then the music is just... there. Generic. Forgettable. The audio equivalent of beige wallpaper.
A lot of early-era licensed sports games belong here. Also, a suspicious number of mid-tier action games from the Xbox 360 era that seemed to confuse "gritty" with "three guitar chords looping for six hours." You know who you are.
D-Tier: 'Please, I Am Begging You to Stop'
This is where things get personal. D-tier soundtracks don't just fail — they actively make the experience worse. They're the musical equivalent of someone explaining a joke while you're still laughing at it.
Ride to Hell: Retribution — A game so legendarily bad that its OST somehow matched the vibe perfectly, which is almost impressive in a cursed way. Generic biker rock that sounds like it was licensed from a royalty-free site called "BrutalRiffs.com." The game deserved exactly this soundtrack, which is its own kind of poetry.
Various mobile game ports that slapped their PC/console OSTs with heavy compression also live here. You know that feeling when you can hear the audio file being too small? That.
F-Tier: 'The Composer Was Never Seen Again'
F-tier is reserved for soundtracks that are not just bad but actively disorienting — music that makes you question whether the developers actually played their own game with sound on.
We won't name specific names here (legal team, we see you), but if you've ever played a budget horror game where the "scary" music sounds like someone sat on a keyboard and then ran it through a 2003 Windows Media Player visualizer, you've met F-tier. These soundtracks are their own kind of achievement. It takes effort to be this wrong.
The Wildcard Category: 'Carried a Mid Game on Its Back and Deserves a Medal'
Shoutout to the real heroes — soundtracks that were so good they made people forget how mediocre the actual game was. Nier: Automata deserves a special mention here. The gameplay is excellent, sure, but the OST by Keiichi Okabe is so emotionally devastating that players were crying before they even understood what was happening narratively. The music did the heavy lifting and then some.
Jet Set Radio also belongs in this conversation. The soundtrack was so ahead of its time that the game almost became secondary to the experience of just vibing in its world. That's a rare power.
Final Verdict
At the end of the day, a video game OST is either a secret weapon or an unforced error. The best composers understand that their job is to make you feel the game — the tension, the triumph, the heartbreak — without you consciously noticing the music is doing all that work. When it lands, it's magic. When it doesn't, you're reaching for the mute button before the first loading screen finishes.
The tier list doesn't lie. The music either slaps or it straps you to a chair and plays itself at maximum volume against your will. There is no in-between that matters.
Drop your own hottest OST takes in the comments. We'll be here, ready to debate.
