11 Best PSP Soundtracks

Gods Eater Burst is a monster hunting game with a lot of anime attitude. Namco Bandai gave the scoring of its answer to Monster Hunter to Go Shiina, who had not carried a full soundtrack on his own since Tales of Legendia. The music goes for a sci-fi feel, and one music review said it showed his ability to shape a truly great score overall. That is a lot of praise for a handheld action game that plenty of people never touched. It deserves a listen even if you never plan to hunt a single monster.

Many who played the game and heard its album found the results breathtaking. If you only know Shiina from smaller jobs, this is the place to hear what he does with a whole score to himself. No album turned up on the collector side, so it closes the list.

In a rhythm game the soundtrack is the whole game, so this one had to be good. DJ Max Portable takes most of its songs from DJMax Online, and the soundtrack is mostly experimental electronic music, with drum and bass and rhythm and blues along the way. It is a big mixtape more than a score, and you play along with every song in it.

Reviewers praise its infectious and diverse tunes, which never upset the flow of play, and thumping beats on a nice pair of headphones. Nobody plays it for the story, and that is fine. It is on the list because the music is what you remember afterwards, and few handheld games leave that much of a beat in your head. No album of it is on record.

Wipeout has always been about electronic music at speed, and the PSP version kept that. Wipeout Pulse has sixteen licensed tracks from electronica artists, Kraftwerk among them. A game about hovering ships at silly speeds needs a soundtrack that keeps up, and this one does.

One review calls the series the pinnacle of gaming soundtracks, with tracks here from panic-inducingly intense to buttery smooth, and another says the soundtrack is the real star. Put it on while you are on a train and the whole trip feels faster, which is about the best thing a racing soundtrack can do. Licensed songs left no album of their own, so collectors add nothing.

Castlevania has some of the best music in games, so a new version has a lot to live up to. The Dracula X Chronicles remakes Rondo of Blood, a 1993 game that had never come out outside Japan, and it rearranges and remasters the original soundtrack. It keeps the gothic rock energy that made the old tunes stick, with a cleaner and fuller sound that suits the small speakers well.

One critic praised the rearranged score, and there are plenty of unlockable tracks on top. That means you can swap in the older versions and hear how much the arrangements changed. The Japanese album has a rating of 3.67 from six collectors, which is a small crowd but a happy one.

Type-0 is a darker Final Fantasy about a class of young soldiers, and its music matches. It came out in Japan in 2011. Takeharu Ishimoto, who had scored Crisis Core and The World Ends with You, wrote the entire score, combining his hard rock with striking cues for orchestra and chorus, and gave it a dark and heavy feel.

Reviewers held the music up to the high standard of the visuals, and that is a tall order for a game that looked this good on a PSP. Guitars and choirs share the same tracks without fighting each other. The album has 43 owners, so there is a small but loyal group who bought it, and the dark mood is the reason they keep it.

Trails in the Sky began on Windows in Japan, and the PSP version was the one Xseed Games brought to North America in 2011, after years spent translating its huge script. English players waited a long time for it, and the music was part of why the wait felt worth it.

One music reviewer called Falcom's work on it possibly the finest RPG soundtrack the studio ever produced. Other reviews agree in fewer words: a fantastic soundtrack. Collectors back it too, with 99 owning the album. Falcom has made a lot of memorable scores over the years, so that is a big claim, and it is the main reason this one sits so high for a game many English players found late.

LocoRoco is a game where you tilt the world to roll blobs around, and the music is part of the toy. Nobuyuki Shimizu and Kemmei Adachi composed LocoRoco, and the music gains more voices as you collect more LocoRoco, each one singing a part. Some compare it to Katamari Damacy for its children singing and zany arrangements, and its music helped the game win several awards in 2006.

One music review calls it one of the most creative and pleasurable game soundtracks ever. It is hard to stay in a bad mood while it plays, and nothing else on the console sounds like it. It has the most owners of any album on this list, 276 of them.

The PSP launched with Ridge Racer, and the music had to show off what the little machine could do. It gathered content from earlier games in the series, and Hiroshi Okubo put together a large team of composers, many of whom had worked on those games. Tons of classic tunes are remixed, and they sound good on the PSP's speakers with or without headphones.

One review heard smooth jazz and mellow techno, and another wished for copies to play on the drive to work. Together they sum up the mood: fast and shiny, yet relaxed at the same time. The Ridge Racers Direct Audio album has 121 collectors who want it, so people are still hunting for it, which says a lot about how well these tunes have aged.

Silent Hill music is its own genre by now, and Origins keeps the line going. Series veteran Akira Yamaoka scored Origins, an eerie and heart-pumping soundtrack for a creepy game. Reviewers call it an excellent score, and one says it sounds perfect with headphones. That makes sense, since a lot of the fear in this series comes from what you hear in the dark.

Few players mention it when they talk about PSP music, but collectors want it more than any other album here: 274 of them have it on their wantlist. It is the soundtrack that people go looking for after the game is over, and that kind of pull is rare.

In Patapon you lead a tribe of eyeball warriors by beating drum commands on the face buttons, so the music is also the controls. Kemmei Adachi, who also worked on LocoRoco, built its music from African instruments. Reviewers praised the music along with the art style, and one called the sound easily the strongest part of the game.

The beats are simple enough to drum along with and catchy enough that hearing them over and over never gets tiresome, one review said. You will find yourself tapping the rhythm long after you turn the console off, and that is a rare thing for a game to manage. Players bring it up when they talk about PSP music, which lifts it to second.

Kingdom Hearts needs a big score, and the PSP got one. Yoko Shimomura scored Birth by Sleep, in what one review called arguably her best work in the series. Another was impressed by the scale and maturity of some tracks, with all the epic wonder and emotion of a Final Fantasy.

Players named it more often than any other game on this list, and its album, shared with 358/2 Days, has 89 owners and 114 more who want it. Critics called the music superb. It is a handheld game that sounds like a console blockbuster, which is what the PSP was always meant to do, and this is the clearest case of it on the list.