Welcome to the twenty-eight Music Highlights post!

The theme of this month is all games. Every single song in this Music Highlights is all soundtracks to games. Due to the types of games I'm most familiar with, however, it's mostly mobile games. High-production-value ones, anyway. Especially mobile games hailing from East Asia invest quite a bit in their songs.

Now, let's talk about music!

#1: Up To The Cloud

This is the most mainstream name in this post. Owl City made a theme song for Neural Cloud, a mobile game hailing from the developers of Girls' Frontline. A collaboration with an artist as storied as Owl City (whose knowledge I have is the Fireflies meme, unfortunately) is definitely a surprising but welcome one.

#2: Stronghold Land Eater

Yes. it's the game with ass. SHIFT UP hired Cosmograph (who has a track record in making game soundtracks, mind you) as the sound director for NIKKE, and it shows. This game has no right to have a soundtrack this cool. It's not just Cosmograph either; this is one of the few games that has Feryquitous on board as a composer for some tracks too!

#3: ÅMARA

This is probably one of the most aesthetically pleasing rhythm game boss songs I've ever saw or heard in a while. Just a few months back, they also did the same too. I looped this particular song so many times by now. The utilization of Miku and KAITO are both impeccable, and for a rhythm game boss song, it has a mysterious and haunting quality to it.

#4: Undefeatable

WARNING: This is a boss fight soundtrack for Sonic Frontiers, so spoilers are to be expected.

I was already very interested in Sonic Frontiers before, thanks to several rhythm game composers on board composing for the game. Then, I found out this soundtrack. This goes hard, and this isn't even the full song yet. This is also first boss of the game, not the final boss. Let's just say, I got my curiosity, now it has my full attention. Well, that depends if I have leftover money to spend for Frontiers, though.

#5: X. THE FLOWER

Ending this post on a slightly more somber note, this is a soundtrack to the mobile game Memento Mori. This game feels more like a soundtrack album rather than a whole game, evidenced by its idle game-type gameplay, and this particular song being released a full year before the game was actually released. This is my favorite song out of the countless songs in Memento Mori, and this is a game with lots of songs sung by well-known artists! I think it's because of the combination of the song being slightly somber, a vibe that I can't get enough of, and Yui Ogura, who voiced... Rosmontis. Her soft voice is a vibe. Just one request: give us composer credits, please!

That's about it for this month's Music Highlights, see you next time (hopefully next month)!