The Music Makes The Game

Sort of what I love about Jesper Kyd is the versatility he had. In some ways I rather feel that he is a big part of the series' original vision purely by his input as composer. And I don't just mean, to knock the new games (which I honestly think are pretty good) like "Oh, the loss of Jesper Kyd is the loss of the franchise," or something like that. I mean the games are almost musical themselves in how the world is built to fit, and I think the direction of that must have been a big player in what built the spirit that the game still has to this day.

The moonless streets of Hong Kong, the gilded hallways that you quietly haunt in the Hotel Gellért, the shadows between the harbor lights of Rotterdam, the weird grey-blue inhumanity of Ort-Meyer's machinations and the people searching for their own humanity in the lab's 'refuse bin', the great horns that blare in the light of the lord at Gontranno, the high-tension and high-stakes Cold War style infiltrations in St. Petersburg, the fanstastical ninja hornets' nest of Katsuyama-Jo where you are somehow undetected and at the peak of your career, the sun that burns on the barrel of the anti-material rifle as it zeroes in on the Afghan rebel leader, and Contracts... oh, that whole game, the noir synth feel to the entire thing. Horror in the slaughterhouse with an air like the texture of rotten silverskin, and the snowy ghostliness of drifting across the ice of Kamchatka, the unlit corners where 47 lurks beneath the red-blue siren lights of Paris - mirroring his escape from the sanitarium years earlier. And in Blood Money, the increasing feeling of loneliness as he goes through the seas of empty faces in the parties he attends and venues he pays visit to... the prescribed uncaring from Pine Cone, the soup of drunks at Mardi Gras, the eyes wide shut in Havilland's estate, the nights that grow darker under the humid Mississippi sky, and culminating with Vegas - where bright lights and opulence blind everyone save for the determined assassin who we have followed through every dark corner of the world across four games.

Now think of each of these and remember, and tell me that what made those games what they were at their best would be the same without the soundtrack. I think you will find it difficult at best.