Mass Effect Motif

There is a lot to be said about the soundtrack of games. I've been playing the Mass Effect series a lot lately, doing many run-throughs to play with different versions of Shepard. There are three games in the series and your actions and interactions ripple forward from one to the next.

I ran into an article on the music of Mass Effect 3 by Kirk Hamilton on Kotaku that put something in focus that had been floating just under the surface of consciousness. The first game, Mass Effect, had menu screen theme music that just goes into your brain and stays there. For most people, it is "the Mass Effect theme".

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For Mass Effect 2, the composer decided to go in a darker direction, to fit the story. The Mass Effect 3 composer also adjusted the tone of the soundtrack to fit the story, but he used the Mass Effect theme when Shepard was having an emotional interaction. He also found a way to slip the theme in under radar to have a powerful, but sneaky, effect on players. I'll leave it to Kirk Hamilton to illustrate and explain.

The ME3 soundtrack overall is great, in my opinion. Click through the poster for a playlist of the whole thing.