7 Best PS Vita Soundtracks

Sound Shapes is a side-scrolling platform game with a musical focus, designed by Jessica Mak and Shaw-Han Liem. The coins you collect are what make the music, so a level sounds fuller the further you get. Each album in the game was a close collaboration between a musician and a visual artist. Deadmau5 contributed songs and sound material, and Beck wrote three new songs for it. One of them, Cities, won Best Song in a Game at the 2012 Video Game Awards.

Those Beck songs are still exclusive to the game, which gives Vita owners a small bragging right. Vita fans still name it as a favourite soundtrack years later. With no album of its own on record, collectors add nothing to its score, and that keeps it at the bottom of the list.

Danganronpa came out on the PSP in Japan in 2010, and English players first got it on the Vita in 2014. It is a murder mystery set in a school where the only way out is to kill another student and get away with it. In the class trials you fire Truth Bullets, pieces of evidence, at the other students' arguments. Masafumi Takada composed the soundtrack, and IGN praised the game's writing and soundtrack.

The music has the same pop-meets-horror attitude as the rest of the game, with pink blood and all. Fans of the series rate the soundtrack very highly and keep coming back to its tracks. Its original album came out in Japan in 2011, but it did not turn up in the collector counts, so it sits sixth.

Dancing All Night is a rhythm game in which the characters of Persona 4 dance to music from the Persona series, both original and rearranged songs. Notes fly out from the centre of the screen, and you hit the matching button as each one reaches its target. Shoji Meguro supervised and directed the soundtrack, with original compositions by Ryota Kozuka. Free Dance mode lets you replay any song you have unlocked at any difficulty.

For a lot of people this is the second half of the Golden soundtrack. Fans of Golden's music name the two together and call this one more of the same, with fresh remixes. About 150 collectors own its album, a small number next to the games above it, which is why it sits fifth.

Kohei Tanaka composed the music for Gravity Rush and worked on the project from an early stage. Rather than sticking to a single genre, he mixed styles to match the floating city of Hekseville and the way Kat falls through it. Some tracks were approved quickly, while others needed several retakes. He also worried that the looping background tracks could wear players out, and worked to keep them fresh. The ending theme, Douse Shinundakara, is his too.

Players who loved it say the music fits the game perfectly and gives it real feeling. One fan bought the soundtrack and said, "It just adds so much atmosphere and charm to the game!" More players named it than Hotline Miami 2, but only about 60 collectors own its album, so it lands fourth.

Wrong Number was meant to be downloadable content for the first game, but it grew longer than the original and became a full sequel. It came out on 10 March 2015 for the Vita and five other platforms, with the console versions made by Abstraction Games. The first game had made its musicians famous, so many more artists sent in tracks hoping to get into this one. Carpenter Brut's Roller Mobster plays in the Death Wish chapter. Critics who disagreed about the levels and the ending still praised the soundtrack.

Fans almost always name it in the same breath as the first game. Collectors love it nearly as much: about 1,860 own the album and more than 3,200 want it. That pushes it past Gravity Rush into third.

Hotline Miami was made in nine months by Dennaton Games, the two-person team of Jonatan Söderström and Dennis Wedin. Several artists contributed to the soundtrack, which mixes electronic, techno, vaporwave and synthwave. Abstraction Games ported it to the Vita, and it came out in North America on 25 July 2013. Early reviews singled out the soundtrack, and the game helped make synthwave popular.

The pounding music is half the reason the game feels the way it does. Fans say the music kept them playing and made the whole game work. Collectors agree: nearly 3,000 own the album and about 4,200 want it, the biggest numbers of any album on this list. Only one game was named by more players.

Persona 4 Golden is the enhanced version of Persona 4, released for the PS Vita in 2012. It follows a teenager who moves from the city to the small country town of Inaba for a year and gets caught up in a murder mystery. Shoji Meguro composed most of the music, with vocals by Shihoko Hirata. Sung battle themes are rare in RPGs, and here they are what everybody hums afterwards. Critics praised its music along with its story and characters.

Persona 4 Golden is the soundtrack Vita fans pick first, often without a second thought. More players named it than any other game here. About 1,250 collectors own the album and nearly 580 want it, so it does well with record buyers too, and that is enough to make it number 1.