12 Best PS3 Soundtracks

Bethesda brought in Jeremy Soule to compose the music for Skyrim, and he had already scored Morrowind and Oblivion before it. The main theme, "Dragonborn", was recorded with a choir of over 30 people singing in the fictional dragon language. Todd Howard pictured it as the Elder Scrolls theme sung by a choir of barbarians. Soule recorded the 30-man choir and layered three separate recordings on top of each other until it sounded like 90 voices.

Players put the Skyrim soundtrack with the best on the system, even the ones who were busy recommending something else. By July 2026 the game had sold 65 million copies, so a frightening number of people have that theme stuck somewhere in their heads. If you only know it as a meme, hear it with the volume up once.

Criterion Games made this Most Wanted, and it is the only game on the list built on licensed songs. Like the Need for Speed games before it, it plays a variety of licensed music, mostly electronic, from Skrillex's dubstep to Deadmau5's techno, with alternative rock and rap like "Bonkers" by Dizzee Rascal in the mix. There are also two remixes of songs by The Who from Who's Next. Parked cars even play songs from Criterion's previous game, Burnout Crash!, over their stereos.

Players say the soundtrack has held up as well as the graphics, and remember it as one of the best sets of music a racing game has had in years. It also won Best Driving Game at the 2012 Spike Video Game Awards, which is a nice extra.

Ni no Kuni began life as a DS game in Japan, and the PS3 version grew far bigger. Studio Ghibli produced the animated scenes, and the original score was co-composed by Joe Hisaishi. Level-5's Akihiro Hino felt the PS3 version let the music accompany the imagery in a way that was not possible on the DS. It reached Western players in January 2013.

Critics were taken with it. GamesRadar called the soundtrack "breathtaking", and Eurogamer called the music "a lush and romantic treat", though it found the battle music repetitive. Players who recommend it bring up the orchestral score and the Ghibli look in the same breath. It plays like a cartoon you can walk around in, and it sounds like one you would pay to see in a cinema.

Revengeance started at Kojima Productions and was finished by PlatinumGames, and the music is as loud as the swordplay. Director Kenji Saito pitched heavy and fast music with lyrics, which was not how Metal Gear usually sounded. Jamie Christopherson composed the score, and he also wrote thirteen vocal songs for it, sung by artists including John Bush. An album of the vocal tracks with 29 songs came out on February 20, 2013.

Critics praised the soundtrack along with the cutting and the boss fights, and the boss fights are one of the game's strongest points partly because of how they use the music. Players agree. They say the soundtrack is amazing and that it gets more intense whenever the action does. You will be humming a boss theme about a robot war while you do the dishes.

Final Fantasy XIII was the first main Final Fantasy game with no music at all by series composer Nobuo Uematsu. Masashi Hamauzu wrote the soundtrack, after co-composing Final Fantasy X, and parts of it were played with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. Uematsu was first announced for the main theme, but that job went to Hamauzu once Uematsu signed on for Final Fantasy XIV. Outside Japan, the original theme song was swapped for "My Hands" by Leona Lewis.

The main album came out on four CDs in 2010 and sold 16,000 copies on its first day. The game itself still starts arguments. Even players who call it divisive agree that the soundtrack is one of the things it got right, and some say the music slaps. Hamauzu's battle themes are the reason to stay through the long corridors.

Austin Wintory composed and orchestrated Journey, after working with Thatgamecompany on Flow. He wrote the core of the main theme before he reached his car after his first meeting with Jenova Chen, and he recorded the main cello theme that night. The music responds to what you do, building a single theme across the game's emotional arc. Even the note your character sings stays in tune with the background music.

The score was nominated for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media at the 2013 Grammy Awards. Players call it amazing and perfect, and they say Journey is worth playing all in one go so you hear the whole thing build. It is short. That is the point.

Wipeout HD came out on the PlayStation Network in September 2008, with tracks from Wipeout Pure and Wipeout Pulse rebuilt in 1080p at 60 frames per second. Critics praised its techno soundtrack, which many of them called a hallmark of the series. One reviewer liked how the music was filtered out each time you took a jump, so you feel the drop. The Fury expansion added six new music tracks, and players could import their own playlists into the game.

You could swap the music out, and players still love the original PS3 soundtrack. They call it awesome and say the game has sick visuals and music to match. That says a lot about the tracklist.

Rayman Origins was the fourth main Rayman game and the first since Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc in 2003. Critics praised its graphical style and its sense of humor, and it is one of the best-looking 2D games on the system. Sales were sluggish at the start, but it sold well in the end, and a sequel, Rayman Legends, followed on the PS3 in 2013.

Players who recommend it keep coming back to the music. They call the soundtrack fantastic, and they point out how closely the music fits the game's sounds. It is a cheerful kind of chaos, and the songs are in on the joke. Few platformers make getting lost in a level sound this much fun.

Lollipop Chainsaw came from Goichi Suda, better known as Suda51, working with filmmaker James Gunn. Its bosses are the Dark Purveyors, zombies who each stand for a kind of music, starting with Zed and his punk rock and ending with the rock and roll of Lewis Legend. Jimmy Urine of the electro-punk band Mindless Self Indulgence composed the music for the boss fights, and Akira Yamaoka worked on the score too. You can even spend medals on unlockable music.

Western critics found the gameplay repetitive. Players do not much care. They call it a blast with a great soundtrack, and they love how each boss is built around its own music. A cheerleader with a chainsaw fighting a punk rock zombie should not work this well, and somehow it does.

Shoji Meguro, the series sound director, wrote and produced the score, and he gave it strong acid jazz elements. He had full creative freedom and made about 80% of the tracks over roughly three years. He thought of the whole score as a single continuous work. Seven songs are sung in English by Lyn, a jazz and soul singer, and it was her first performance in a video game. The hardest part, she said, was the rap in the opening theme.

It came out for PS3 and PS4 in Japan on September 15, 2016 and worldwide on April 4, 2017. Critics praised the music along with almost everything else. Players call the soundtrack a banger, and rave about it as one of the best things in the game.

Eternal Sonata takes place in the dream of Frédéric Chopin, the Polish pianist and composer, as he is dying of tuberculosis at the age of 39. The story is divided into eight chapters, each represented by one of Chopin's compositions. Pianist Stanislav Bunin plays the Chopin pieces, and Motoi Sakuraba composed and arranged the original music around them. Even the characters are named after musical terms.

The music runs through the play too. The battle system focuses on musical elements, and you can collect Score Pieces to play along with people you meet, who rank the result. Players call the music soothing and gorgeous, and fans of classical music say it was made with them in mind.

Nier was directed by Drakengard creator Yoko Taro, and its music came from Monaca, the studio founded by Keiichi Okabe. Yoko Taro's main request was that Okabe use a lot of vocal works. The soundtrack is largely melancholy acoustic pieces sung by Emi Evans, a singer from England living in Tokyo. She invented the words herself, in made-up versions of real languages, imagining what they would sound like after 1,000 years of drifting.

Reviewers praised the story and the soundtrack and were mixed on the rest, and the original sold 500,000 copies before it became a cult classic. Players praise its music more than twice as often as the next game on this list. They put it with the best soundtracks in any game, and one says "I listen to the soundtrack daily".