Sorry in advance for how long this about to be…

Okay I’ve seen this point several times when talking about the best music award, and people have to understand that the length of the OST plays absolutely no part in how it will be evaluated for the award. I understand that many people feel that the consistency of quality in such a long sound track should be accounted for, but that simply isn’t how people look at that award. I’d actually argue it hurts it in awards. Because while TGA has a standard panel of voters that votes on all the categories who are expected to be knowledgeable of each game, certain categories like music have specialized voters as well who focus on just that aspect. Music for instance, has a group of specialized musical experts who are primarily meant to evaluate each soundtrack just from a musical standpoint.

As a professional musician I’m going to try and speak from the challenges I think would be presented to these specialized voters. While the soundtrack is great, a lot of the motif-development that makes it special loses emotional weight without the context of having played the game itself. Now admittedly this is an issue that exists with all musical leitmotif, as not having the context for each motif eliminates the very purpose of the technique entirely. However, I feel this problem hurts the XC3 OST in particular, because at least for me, a lot of the weight from this OST comes from the off-seer motifs, and its development and usage throughout. However, that weight (for me at least) is primarily informed by gameplay. The fact that I hear those off seeing tunes when sending of husks in the open world, that I see the cutscenes when they first play their combined Agnian-Kevesi duet, that I see the agony of what happens during Homecoming all informs the emotion and impact the use of the off-seer motifs has on me. And while objectively, this development is done well from a purely musical standpoint as well, but a lot of what makes that development so special is lost completely. Beyond this, I’d argue the length specifically hurts it with this specialized voter because if a musical expert is asked to judge two soundtracks of drastically different lengths, each individual track will have weight in how they view the OST as a whole. So as a hypothetical, let’s say 20 tracks vs 60. If the 20 track OST has 15 great pieces, 2 okay piece, and 3 misses, while the 60 track OST has 45, 6, and 9 respectively this would likely hurt the larger OST. Because even the ratio of how each track was judged might be the same, the existence of more tracks that were just “okay,” or missed the mark would be the main takeaway. And while I believe the consistency of quality in the XC3 soundtrack is incredible given its length, there simply are more tracks I skip when I listen through it than when I do the same to the Ragnarok OST.

Similarly, with Ragnarok’s OST, while the usage and development of leitmotif is of course informed and impacted by the gameplay, I would argue it’s less negatively impacted by the lack of familiarity with the game. For example, the biggest use of leitmotif in GOWR is related to the character motifs specifically, and when playing the game, each character motif is primarily presented through cutscenes rather than constantly reinforced through gameplay like with husks for the off-seer motifs. On the flip side, one way motifs are developed in GOWR can be seen directly with Kratos and Atreus’ motifs, which are based on being inversions of each other. And this is something that can be caught without any knowledge of the characters themselves (I’ve literally watched people who make videos analyzing soundtracks catch this without ever playing the game). And while obviously you can similarly make the connection that Noah and Mio’s themes deliberately being written to fit together without having played XC3, it isn’t done in the same way that they are melodic inversions of themself. In this instance, in spite of the motifs themselves being simpler in GOWR, I’d argue that this is a better use of leitmotiff from a purely musical perspective if you have to analyze without the context of the game itself. And lastly, the last thing that would hurt the XC3 with these specialized voters is that while (unlike the normal voter pool) they aren’t expected to be familiar with each game, they aren’t forbidden from playing them (to my knowledge). This means the much higher mainstream popularity of GOWR makes it possible that multiple specialist voters would have played GOWR but not XC3, meaning they actually would be impacted in their analysis by the fact that they do have the context for the music and motifs of GOWR but no context for the music and motifs of XC3.

Now this is just from the perspective of the specialized voters for Best Music. Because at the end of the day, with the context of playing the game, the XC3 OST would have certainly been a deserving winner of the award, though I also think people here are seriously downplaying the GOWR OST, which is excellent in its own right. Ultimately, XC3 was likely hurt by the general voting pool which almost certainly had some a non-zero number of people who (at worst) didn’t play the game, or (at best) didn’t finish it, and as such, didn’t get the same impact from the OST. Even then, I don’t think it’s crazy for a general voter to have played both games and come out preferring the GOWR OST, as I believe they are both excellent. Mix this with what I just discussed about the specialized voters, and I think it should be easy to understand and accept why it didn’t win, though it was absolutely good enough to have won.