Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within help

[darthkiwi]

Yeah, there's music or ambient sounds in most major scenes. Even Schloss Ritter has music. The only ones without that are the standard conversations like with Ubergrau or Herr Huber. Hell, your conversation with Von Zell is silent until you get to a particularly delicate conversation option, at which point I was surprised by the dark, threatening music coming in, so it was made more effective by the silence. I honestly think that, if they used more music, it would just push it over the "melodrama" line.

I agree the pacing could be better; I suppose they wanted it to be an interactive movie, so whenever *anything* happens they have to show a cutscene of it happening. Just having an item disappear, and having Gabriel say "I took the item" wouldn't accord with that. But I personally think that adds to the impression of a believable world. Because the characters would have to physically act out your solutions to puzzles, I knew that all my actions would have to be consistent with the real world - which, annoyingly, is not always true in adventure games.

I agree that they could have been punchier, though. If a film shows a character writing a letter they'll show them writing for maybe a second and then cut to something else. The audience knows the letter has been written, and we can move on quickly. And I also think they went overboard on the long, lingering closeups after each conversation branch had ended. I sometimes realised how weirdly stilted the conversations were: they were all basically "Ah! Tell me about this thing!" "Okay. Here's all I know." "Hmm. Thanks. [Pause] OH!! And I totally need to know about this too." "Well, okay." "Ah, I see. [Pause] Ah! So if that's true, maybe this is true?" "Well, yes." "Ah. [Pause] Right, that's all." Maybe if they'd edited the conversations more tightly they would have felt more like actual conversations.

I have to say, though, I actually felt a lot closer to the characters in GK2 than in GK1, simply because they were flesh and blood actors rather than drawn sprites. A part of me wonders whether FMV would work better if it were tried nowadays: with improved anti-aliasing and transparency for sprite edges and maybe the ability to control sprites more procedurally, I'm sure it'd turn out even better than this.

[Lambonius]

Yeah, there is music in SOME of the cutscenes, and SOME of the conversations, but still, much of the game is noticeably lacking in musical backing--I stand by that.  I noticed it right from the beginning and KEPT noticing it throughout the game.  Most of the actual playtime is silent as well.  There's that one screen in Munich with the musicians, and some of the late-game areas had music as you walked around, but if you compare this game to KQ5, KQ6, even GK1, there is just no contest.  Those games have musical backing on pretty much every screen and in every major scene, and you don't even necessarily notice it all the time, but it adds to the mood so much even during normal gameplay.  A consistent, backing soundtrack is something that you almost don't notice until it's gone, and I definitely noticed its absence here.  Oy.  There is music in some of the transitional cutscenes (like Grace leaving the castle), and music in some of the more dramatic moments of conversations, but very little elsewhere.  In a lot of the little scenes, the lack of music only draws attention to the amateur quality of the video--you hear all the cracks and shuffles and pops of a badly shot home-movie.  Totally immersion breaking, in my opinion.

And I'm not sure about this "ravishingly beautiful" soundtrack, either.  Most of the musical bits I noticed were cookie cutter archetypal movie themes, like the low strings which try to give the game a generic "horror" theme in certain key areas.  I haven't yet heard anything that sticks in my mind as anything other than completely forgettable.

Of course, I also haven't yet played the opera scene.  So maybe that will make me eat my words, but then, it still wouldn't change the lack of music elsewhere in the game.  

Also, I'm not talking about ambient sounds, though frankly, I don't really feel like there were enough of THOSE either.

[Cez]

I'll concede that there's not much environmental music. They go from 10 seconds pieces or less that pop in and out intermediately(although is very easy to see why because it would be constantly interrupted by a video), and conversations do not normally have music to them, but you are using a very wrong example of "YOU NEED MUSIC TO ENHANCE THE DRAMA" because the way it's used is in the Film's way of using music: very Incidentally. The stingers are there in the conversations where they need to be, the music suddenly comes in when needed (for example, Leber remembers the case of the woman in the woods), it's not a track that plays in the background while the whole conversation happens, it's dynamic how music goes in and out, which makes it work better when it suddenly comes in, because, that's exactly what enhances the drama, they use it to enunciate the important moments in conversations. And other than that, there's music everywhere: When Gabriel sends the letter to Grace, when you buy sausages, when you enter Ubergrau's office the first time, it's all there and it's all very incidental.

Again, it's the film approach. It accompanies the actions in an incidental music sort of way rather than inundate them with constant music, which, for this kind of story, works a lot better.

As for the quality of the soundtrack, the better GK soundtrack is from 3 (THIS is a main theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUSSa8aHAMk). But this has some great pieces including all of Grace's pieces all the way up to the her theme played during the catfight scene. The spectacular main theme as heard in the prologue grabbed me as soon as I heard it the first time. The rendition of the GK theme in the intro is beautiful. Von Glower's theme is spectacular, and better in just piano. The action theme from the wolf hunt, which is a rendition of GK1's Wolfgang's theme is amazing and so is the thrilling music from Grace's wolf chase dream. Ludwig music is good and of course, the opera, the opera!