Sakuraba squeezed an absurd amount of intensity out of the DS sound chip for Tales of Hearts. Thundering Hegira hits you right away with this urgent, layered composition that has no right sounding this full on handheld hardware.
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The Spirune themes carry this ethereal quality, especially Spirune Like a Flower, which is fragile and gorgeous in a way that DS audio rarely achieves. Battle tracks like Hoist the Soma and Pinch After Pinch have that frantic Sakuraba signature where the time signatures keep shifting under you.
Incarose the Sorcerer is genuinely menacing. The Spirmaze Sorrow arrangement does something interesting where the melody feels like it's dissolving as you listen. If you wrote off DS-era Tales games, Hearts has a score that punches way above its hardware.