Tom Salta came back for the sequel and somehow made something even more distinctive. Red Steel 2's soundtrack fuses Wild West guitar with Eastern instruments like shakuhachi and pipa, and the combination sounds like a genre that should have always existed.
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Steve Ouimette's guitar work on "Kusagari Blues" is filthy in the best way, bending notes against Chinese percussion hits. "Canyon Melody" opens up into these wide, cinematic desert spaces with harmonica lines that feel genuinely lonely.
"Vultures' Prayer" sits in this tense, circling energy like something watching you from above. The whole score treats its samurai-cowboy premise completely seriously. If you skipped the Wii era entirely, this soundtrack alone is worth the archaeological dig.