Soundtrack Dissonance / Video Games

Why is this music so very happy?
It doesn't fit Dr. Wily at all,
It makes the tower sound like a theme park,
It doesn't make any sense.

— Roahm Mythril regarding the music for Wily Tower: Stage 2 in Mega Man: The Wily Wars

Soundtrack Dissonance in Video Games.

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#-D

• When Dick Gumshoe bursts into the room for a Big Damn Heroes moment in Ace Attorney Investigations, his theme music plays. While this makes sense, since he's become the focus of the scene, his theme song is a not-particularly-exciting piano and guitar piece that makes it feel a little less epic.
  • Likewise, Shih-Nah/Calisto Yew's reveal is an intense dramatic moment, but the mood is rather ruined by her theme song being a happy, bubbly piece of jazz.
  • Yet another Investigations moment. In the fourth case, it's a bit jarring that heroic "Great Revival" theme is heralded by the arrival of Manfred von Karma.
  • Dual Destinies has Bobby Fulbright's theme, an incredibly upbeat jazz song, still plays when he's on the stand in the final case, and you've all but figured out he's actually a murderous international spy known as "The Phantom", and the real Fulbright is long dead. It actually starts to sound really unsettling.
• Because the Sega Genesis version of Action 52 reuses its music quite a bit, this happens every now and then. For example, this was used in a racing game, this ended up being used in a shooting gallery-type game and this ended up being used for a game based on Jack and the Beanstalk.
• Alone in the Dark:
  • The second game keeps a light, upbeat track for most the game, even when Elizabeth is summoning black magic.
  • The third game uses bouncy banjo music (albeit with a more appropriate dark tune playing alongside it) for most of it.
• In Animal Crossing for GameCube, the music that plays from 2:00 AM to 2:59 AM is dissonant and upbeat compared to the quieter, more subdued songs that play during the rest of the early morning.
• ANNIE: Last Hope have a level where you fight hordes and hordes of zombies, in the middle of a square filled with dead civilians, while an unattended loudspeaker plays Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" in the background. It's very likely intentional to emphasize on the game's horror atmosphere.
• Art Of Rally is about rally racing in bright, colorful, and sunny environments... with dark (although energetic) synthwave as the soundtrack.
• Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel:
  • The final boss battle is accompanied by a generally soft, peaceful choral/orchestral number whose composer says represents rebirth. This is appropriate, considering that's the goal of said final boss(es). It helps that the lyrics are in Hymnos, and thus verses like "I will never forgive even the slightest mistake / Let's praise so the sinners can be judged" go generally uncomprehended.
  • EXEC_VIENA/., one of the most cheery and upbeat songs in existence. Its purpose is to create a path up to the satellite Sol Marta while destroying a third of the floating continent because otherwise there would not be enough power to create the pathway up. The general game atmosphere doesn't help, what with everyone's mood in the game essentially being "YES, THEY'RE FINALLY DOING IT!!", even some of the people who were forced to move out because they have lived their entire lives on the part of the continent that's about to fall in.
• Mission twelve of Asura's Wrath features a wonderful sequence of Asura transforming into his berserk state after watching The Girl die and destroying an entire fleet of enemy ships, all the while In Your Belief is playing in the background while Asura screams in absolute rage and sadness.
• This trailer for Atomic Heart features footage of the protagonist exploring various creepy abandoned places while fighting mutants and killer robots, set to some oddly jaunty Russian folk music.
• "Sweet Georgia Brown" is used during the Duel Boss in Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. Also the background is inexplicably switched to a basketball court (It Makes Sense in Context given that "Sweet Georgia Brown" is the Harlem Globetrotters' theme.)
  • While it could slightly fit, the first phase of the final boss fight is set to the game's theme song, which is a remix of the Space Jam theme. It Makes Sense in Context.
• An example of this done to great effect is the final battle of Baten Kaitos Origins. This is the music that plays.
• Batman: Arkham City: As the end credits roll, the Joker sings a sickly, sad rendition of The Platters' "Only You (And You Alone)" — here, for Batman. It actually sadly explains their relationship quite well.
  • It doesn't end there. After the Joker's had his Swan-song, the credits continue to roll to some extremely disturbing ambient track (begins at 4:29) which sounds like wind blowing lightly, some infernal humming noise, and periodically uprising high pitched string noises. It is the exclamation point to how dark the game turned out to be and how things aren't getting any better from here on out and the worst for Batman has only begun.
• Batman: Arkham Knight uses "I've Got You Under My Skin" by Frank Sinatra while Joker's corpse is being cremated.
• LEGO Batman plays with this when in the Arkham Asylum Hub World, with the background music teetering between a peaceful waltz and deep, brooding tones while the inmates run around and beat the crap out of each other. It also happens to be the same music played in Batman (1989) when The Joker kills Carl Grissom, and later when he and Vicki Vale are dancing.
• Battlefield 4 starts off with a song called "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler,^note a song about vampires in love which is the first song you hear... while you and your squad are trapped in a sinking car. It's also lampshaded, as the first line of dialogue you hear in the game is Pac noting that he doesn't want to die to that song.
• Battlefield 1: The intro Storm of Steel plays the song Dream a Little Dream of Me in the opening scenes while American and German soldiers slaughter each other in a hellish warzone.
• Bayonetta: Not a huge surprise, since the game does NOT take itself seriously. Still, in a setting where Angels are kind of jerks their musical accompaniment sounds quite benign. Most angel tracks are Cherubic Choirs and gentle One Woman Wails, no Ominous Pipe Organ in sight, and only bosses get outright Ominous Enochian Chanting. Hell, even the most violent-sounding boss loops feature 10-30 second interludes sound like something you'd actually hear in a church.
• In Bejeweled, the whole game is playing cheerful and calm music while you are busy blowing stuff up with exploding gems.
  • Averted in Bejeweled Blitz for iOS version, it has a fast paced music which suits the speedy and explosive atmosphere.
• Bio Metal for the SNES had two soundtracks by region — the Japanese version and the North American/European version. The Japanese soundtrack is generally considered to better fit the rather dark mood of the game, while the English soundtrack is much-hated by the shmup community because the 2 Unlimited music used spoils the mood.
• BioShock, a game set in a horrific undersea dystopia, features a lot of dissonant music from the 1940s and 1950s playing in the background at certain points. Don't be surprised to find yourself in a shoot-out with some splicers while a song like "Beyond the Sea" (which was used in one excellent commercial for the game) or even "How Much is That Doggy in the Window?" plays in the background.
  • The fans like doing this too.
  • Even more memorably, at around the halfway point in the game there is a combat sequence where Mad Artist Sander Cohen sics a whole bunch of splicers on the player at once. His choice of background music? "Waltz of the Flowers" by Tchaikovsky.
  • The complete soundtrack listing is here. Points for the most ironic song (considering the theme of the game) has to be "The Best Things in Life" by The Ink Spots. Another particularly creepy one is "God Bless the Child" by Billy Holiday, especially since it's played the first time you get the choice to harvest or free a Little Sister. If there's any game where this trope is a significant part of the experience, BioShock is it.
• Blast Corps for the Nintendo 64 had an ill-placed theme, to quote composer Graeme Norgate, "Oh, Jesus. One of my tracks for Blast Corps on the N64. It was when the space shuttle took off. It was completely inappropriate. I still cringe every time I hear it."
• From BlazBlue, there's this. Bang Shishigami attempts to use Fu-Rin-Kazan and the accompanying Hironobu Kageyama track "Beat a Nail With Your Hammer" plays... only for Nu-13 to use her Astral Finish and kill him. The music keeps playing. Humiliation beyond belief.
• One trailer for Borderlands 2 has "Wimoweh" playing as the main cast are laying carnage to bandits, Hyperion, and all of Pandora's ecosystem.
  • In game there is Sawtooth Cauldron, which the ambient music could ranging from unnerving to sad. However the place houses some of the funniest quests in the game.
• Breath of Fire IV has a soundtrack consisting of medieval age European or Asian music themes, depending on which continent the player is on. Then we have Ershin's theme that's very techno-ish, and Kahn's theme which is like 50's beach rock and acts as his Leitmotif and boss fight music.
• The music in boss battles in Bubble Memories, a Non-Linear Sequel to Bubble Bobble (and possibly also in other games in that series) just doesn't fit the severity of the situation. It's not "doom-y" enough.
• Buck Bumble, a somewhat obscure bee-themed Cute 'em Up for N64. The music? Drum-and-bass, of course!
• Burnout Paradise features the ability to select various classical pieces as part of the in-game soundtrack. Nothing quite like smashed vehicles pirouetting through the air to Vivaldi's Four Seasons or Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
• An advertisement for Call of Duty: Black Ops is set to "Gimme Shelter" by The Rolling Stones. Said song is a famous protest song written during The Vietnam War, and the Call of Duty series has often been accused of being pro-war. This creates a confusing message, to say the least...
  • In the game proper, the first mission has Mason and his squad fighting their way through Cuban law enforcement and then piling into a car to make their getaway, with this tune playing on the car's radio.
• Call of Duty 4 includes a cheat mode called "Ragtime Warfare" which speeds up the game, makes the video sepiatoned, and adds Ragtime Piano music. It's especially jarring in the disturbing levels "Aftermath" and "All Ghillied Up".
• Castle Crashers sorta did this, while fighting an extremely hard boss (the Conehead Groom) it plays a modified version of "Here Comes the Bride".
• Castlevania:
  • Castlevania: Rondo of Blood has a Brutal Bonus Level with some of the worst jumps, frustrating bats, medusa heads, all the most devious combinations of enemies and jumps, as well as loads of bottomless pits. The music? A really peppy pop style track that perfectly embodies the early 90s (when this game was released).
  • Most of Castlevania, especially early ones, are filled with upbeat and cheerful music, despite that one of the main themes of the game is horror.
  • Eventually averted in Lords of Shadow, replacing the pops with dark, poignant choral and orchestral works that fit the mood of the game precisely.
• That One Boss Miguel from Chrono Cross is the guy that will make sure you get to see how pretty the Game Over screen is. It also features one of the most relaxing battle themes ever.
• Parodied in Chrono Trigger. When Dalton fires up the newly stolen and upgraded Epoch to attack the party, the BGM that starts playing is, of all things, the theme of the main character, Crono. Even Dalton notices the music is off and tells his mooks to play something more dramatic in a moment of Breaking the Fourth Wall.
  • A more subtle example occurs when you fight Spekkio. The later forms of Spekkio are some of the toughest opponents in the game, but the music used during the battle continues to be the jolly, cheery, light-hearted "Delightful Spekkio".
• Depending on the background music playing at the time, this can also apply to Sid Meier's Civilization series. It's unsettling watching your army slaughter an entire race while pleasant classical music plays in the background.
• Episode 1 of Code 7 has the horrific lab. Main character Alex can see a single room filled with humans on their map that their partner Zoya can't enter as it is locked. Logging into the microphone of that room reveals that they are listening to some sort of Salsa music.
• Unlicensed Columns clone Magic Jewelry on the NES has this for the entire soundtrack, with 8-bit renditions of (among others) All Kinds of Everything, Greensleeves and The Godfather theme.
• Command & Conquer: Generals has a rather intense music the entire time, even when you just start the game and you're in charge of a bulldozer and a command center ^note a military building with a large antenna array and a bulldozer bay to the left. No, awesomeness does not belong in telling your troops to set up camp.
  • Then there's the ominous, foreboding and outright sinister 9th Chinese in-game soundtrack as opposed to the fast classical Chinese mixed with marching songs usually played. Given the ending of the expansion however, it's possibly intended.
• Covert Front features an opening scene where a Spinning Paper and eerie monochrome photos introduce the player to the Alternate History World War I — all while soothing waltz music plays.
• When Jun hopped from Konami to Capcom to make songs for the CROSS×BEATS series, she didn't stop making cute and happy songs with surprisingly difficult charts. "HONEY♡SUNRISE" in particular is no less cheerful than any of her other usual songs, yet its Master chart, at level 88, is the highest-rated chart on the default songlist!
• In Cuphead, we have Cagney Carnation's battle theme called "Floral Fury", which appropriately spices up the battle with adrenaline-pumping fast Latin/samba music; a pretty fine tune to go along with getting yourself drugged and/or killed by a psychopathic flower.
• Any Bemani (like DanceDanceRevolution and beatmania) game has songs that don't fit in with the theme of the game, mainly the crossovers from one game to another. Osamu Kubota and Hirofumi Sasaki songs are the biggest offenders mainly. Of course, everyone has went to a nightclub and heard the DJ play a piano etude or a slow, Japanese instrumental.
  • Pop'n Music has any number of songs that contradict the series' light-hearted, cartoony tone; everything from death metal, to moody-sounding trance, to a "nightmare carousel" song, among others. Additionally, some of the characters do not fit their respective songs; a librarian for Days, a "smirking kid on a skateboard" (to quote a review on GameFAQs) for a classical medley song in Beat'n Groovy, among other issues. Oh, and wanna know what song has a reputation as the hardest song in this series? This song!
  • As of the 21st installment, Pop'n Music Sunny Park, a new song has beat that song as the hardest song in the series: this one. Yes, that "Flora" character is supposed to be a personified flower.
  • Would you believe that KIMONO PRINCESS is a DanceDanceRevolution boss song?
• Danganronpa has Monokuma's theme, Monokuma's Lesson, which is such a strange and goofy theme for such a twisted monster.
• In Dark Chronicle, the final stage of the fight with Emperor Griffin has a version of Alexandria's Garden theme playing in the background.
• In Day of the Tentacle, Dwayne, a suicidal novelty item inventor who laments that none of his inventions have ever caught on, is found in a hotel room with an extremely peppy and serene instrumental tune playing on an endless loop. The music stops as soon as Bernard finds a way to get him to leave.
• The trailer for the first Dead Island exaggerates this; the only thing more emotionally destructive than watching a family get torn apart by zombies (including a little girl) is the unbelievably melancholy soundtrack.
• Dead Rising follows the adventures of Frank West, photojournalist, as he tries to single-handedly fend off a zombie apocalypse from inside a shopping mall. Its soundtrack consists almost entirely of blandly cheerful muzak wafting over the mall's sound system... except when you get into boss fights. That's when the dissonance fades and more appropriate music kicks off. Fighting a Monster Clown to the tune of muzak might make Your Head A-Splode.
• Deadly Premonition has a rather... limited number of tracks to play, and is rather bad at sticking to one mood. This results in scenes where, less than a minute after someone is murdered in the brutalest possible way right in front of the protagonist, a chipper guitar-and-whistling ditty starts to play as he makes a little joke.
  • In another sequence a doctor explains how a murder victim was killed as a track of pretty spooky, slow jazz plays in the background. At one point the doctor gets visibly excited and goes on a rambling monologue, and at the same time the music changes to a bombastic and upbeat piece of Cop Show-esque chase music.
  • There's a few instances of intentional Soundtrack Dissonance though. Most notably, the Original Raincoat Killer sequence near the end of the game, which features Amazing Freaking Grace.
• Overlaps with Ironic Nursery Tune when Dead Space uses "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" — most noticeable in this trailer, but it also pops up in the game proper, where it is — if possible — even more chilling.
  • Dead Space 2 uses "Ring Around the Rosie" in a similar manner. "Ring around the rosie/this evil thing, it knows me/lost ghosts surround me, I can't fall down..."
  • Dead Space also has an unusual, non-musical version of this, thanks to the automated systems of the ship you're on. After planting an emergency-beacon on an asteroid — possibly your last chance for survival — you are making your way through the dangerous environment of a half-derelict spaceship, while constantly alert for Necromorphs — and suddenly, the ship's comm-system pipes in merrily "Dinner will be served in the Mess Hall in one hour."
• Kenji Kawai's music may be the only genuinely good thing about Deep Fear, but the songs rarely seem to match the tone of the scene they're in.
• The PC version of Descent has this bouncy tunefor its Level 7 (the level with the first boss) music. Averted with the Macintosh version.
  • Ditto for the Titan Mine music.
  • The MIDI music for the boss levels in Descent II is this relaxed downtempo electronica track.
• In the third level of Solaris in Destroy All Humans! 2, all your hard work there pays off when you manage to cause the Soviets to revolt against their alien overlords, causing a giant battle between them inside to base, while "She Changes Like The Weathers" by Nic Armstrong And The Thieves plays in the background.
  • In the first game, during the massacre at the Santa Modesta pool party, the radio plays "So Nice" by Summer Samba. The same song also plays at the modern art exhibit in the second game, right before the KGB release Blisk spores.
  • Path of the Furon had the Paris massacre mission. What's more fitting to listen to while incinerating hundreds of the French than "Y.M.C.A." by the Village People.
• The Japanese and European opening of Digital Devil Saga have Sera singing "Life shine in the heaven" while the opening itself get a bit gory at time.
• In contrast to the somber Tragic Marionette and Sinful Rose's Fragrance that play of the Game Overs of the first two Disgaea games, Disgaea 3 has the Maritsu Evil Academy Entrance Applicant Recruiting CM Song: a tune so peppy and cheerful that most fans suspect that the game is making fun of them for dying.
• Normally, DoDonPachi sets the True Final Boss battle to ominous, high-speed music. But in DoDonPachi Resurrection's iPhone Mode? You get the rather upbeat number "Battle for the Last" by Hyadain.
  • On the subject of Cave shmups, Mushihime Sama has peaceful, enchanting music being played during the True Final Boss battles in both games, intended to numb out players' psyche amidst the hellish bullet rain and topping even the high-speed, ominous Zatsuza battle in DoDonPachi Daifukkatsu.
• Doki Doki Literature Club! starts out as a lighthearted Romance Game, or Affectionate Parody of one, with a soundtrack to match. After the Disguised Horror Story Genre Shift sets in, it still mostly uses the same soundtrack.
• Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest especially has a fantastic soundtrack with a powerful series of songs that are by turns, epic, haunting, intense, unsettling, and uplifting. Most of them wouldn't be out of place in an epic TV show or blockbuster movie, but instead they're used in a game where you play two monkeys fighting pirate-themed reptilians in a feud that stems from the reptiles' ongoing attempts to steal said monkey's bananas.
  • The Nintendo Hard bramble levels are backed with the most insanely relaxing music in the history of gaming. (This might be deliberate, as an attempt to keep the player from experiencing a psychotic episode.) Just have a listen.
    • The last bramble level was an exception. It was a race against an evil parrot that used intense music for a good portion of the level. However, the music still played during the rest of the level, and to make up for this brief period of fitting music, this was the last level before the epic battle to save DK. That means that if you go straight into the next area, ignoring the map screen's music, you go straight from the above song to a different song that the Japanese record industry doesn't want us spoiling the ultra-tense and driving "Crocodile Cacophony".
  • "Forest Interlude" is equally, if not even more relaxing than the above song. It shows up in a haunted forest.
  • Or what about when you go into a Bonus Level and that jazzy rendition of the Jungle Hijinx theme starts playing? Sure, it is for a bonus game, without the danger of being killed, but it sounds really funny (and quite relieving) when you've been navigating your way through a claustrophobic shipwreck.
  • The Donkey Kong Land series, being based on more limited hardware, naturally had to excise a few songs to stay within the Game Boy's space restraints. The second game in particular has several egregious examples: the claustrophobic "ship hold" music, for example, tends to show up on every stage related to a pirate ship in any way. Even the rigging stages, which are not claustrophobic in any sense of the word.
  • Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! has an incredibly moody, restrained soundtrack which contrasts very heavily with how silly and cartoony the rest of the game is (even compared to its predecessors). The contrast ends up giving it a rather creepy and unnatural vibe that pushes it squarely into Darker and Edgier territory. You think swimming around a coral reef as a literal giant baby feeding your goofy fish friend with even goofier clownfish (complete with CHOMP and BURP sound effects) sounds like silly, light hearted camp? Think again.
    • Boss Boogie is possibly the most menacing boss theme on the SNES. The bosses it plays over include a snowball fight against a Frosty the Snowman expy, and a giant barrel with a face that burps up smaller barrels.
    • When the game was ported to the GBA, the music was redone, including the trees track being replaced by this ditty. However, one of these levels involves a giant saw destroying the tree under you. To quote one of the YouTube comments:
    "This song does not suit a situation involving a rising bandsaw. It just doesn't." ^note It does, however, fit the situation for every other stage with that theme, which includes things like jumping spiders and monkeys throwing coconuts.
• For all its blatant violence, anti-religion and sexually-charged action, infamous Doom 2 WAD Grezzo 2 manages to pull off a fantastic example of this trope when you pick up a specific item. All enemies slow down to a crawl, you become invulnerable, and in the background an A Capella version of Bach's Air begins to play. It's time to cause as much mayhem as you possibly can.
• Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II both play pop songs during the credits.
  • To be fair to Dragon Age II, the credits song is Florence + the Machine "I'm Not Calling You a Liar" and the lyrics fit Anders pretty well, especially a romanced Anders.
• There is only one track of music to Dwarf Fortress, a relaxing guitar played by the game's creator ToadyOne. It plays as the goblins siege your fortress. It plays as the walls cave in on your Dwarves. It plays as they get dismembered by elephants. It plays as they go insane from not having shiny metal bars. It even plays as they dig too deep.

E-H

• Earth 2140 (which is, naturally, the prequel to Earth 2150) is set in a post-apocalyptic world covered in war, which is somewhat pictured in the first three tracks of the local Redbook soundtrack... Right after that, you get to hear a couple of calm jazzy songs, a flamenco-ish piece and, to top that, a really nature-friendly string-instrument melody with birds singing in background. Although, between that, you get to hear Earth 2140's theme tune and its' remix which somehow match the pace of what's going on the screen.
• A large part of Earthworm Jim's comedy relies on the use of lighthearted music during its many inappropriate and dark moments which is just the perfect icing on the surreal gummy worm cake. One hilarious example stands out in the first game. In the level What the Heck?, which takes place on Evil the Cat's home planet, the intro of Modest Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" starts playing, but suddenly changes to... elevator music accompanied by random screams in the background. "Oh, the humanity!" indeed.
  • The Psycrow race is humorously compared to a rodeo show with Jim riding his Pocket Rocket instead of a horse. The fight with Psycrow that may follow also sounds a bit too festive for the theme of an intergalactic criminal.
  • The game seems to think what better theme to accompany the hero's delving into the darkest corners of an evil scientist's laboratory and meeting various failed experiments that are so horrific that only their eyes are visible to the viewers, than an uplifting piano burlesque number of course?
  • The second game takes it to infinity and beyond with Puppy Love. The track is an amalgamation of Tarantella Napolitana and Funiculi Funicula so it brings thoughts about Italians enjoying life to the mind, while Psycrow is really the only who enjoys himself by attempting to defenstrate adorable, little, innocent puppies forcing Jim to frantically try to save them with a giant marshmallow over a foggy abandoned space station. About the only relation that one could conceive of is that the puppies are under threat of being turned into pizza.
• In Elite Beat Agents, one of the bonus levels was supposed to be a light-hearted Affectionate Parody of zombie movies. With the song Survivor playing instead of the more upbeat happy tunes in the rest of the game, you forget it's supposed to be a parody.
• In Endless Ocean Blue World, the music that plays when you're swimming in the Triton Village Ruins area of Ciceros Strait gives off a tense feeling. It's appropriate... the first time, when you first encounter a shark that isn't calmed by Pulsar shots. All the other times you go there, however, there is no danger, and still the music plays. (However, you can later buy a jukebox that overrides the music until you leave Nineball Island and return.)
• Fallout:
  • The original Fallout begins with a close-up on a TV flashing classic 1950s images and icons, while The Ink Spots' "Maybe" plays. Slowly, the "camera" pulls out to reveal the TV set is in the midst of a landscape utterly devastated by warfare.
    • To make it worse, "Maybe" is played again in the ending. Y'know, as the hero is exiled from Vault 13, and marches depressingly into the wastes. Alone.
  • Fallout 2 goes the same route; "A Kiss To Build A Dream On" by Louis Armstrong is played over a slightly humorous instructional video about leaving the Vaults and the tools they'll be using to build their new life, which ends with the people doing so... and running smack into the Enclave soldiers waiting for them at the entrance. The folks wave "hello" to the Enclave, and then the miniguns open fire.
  • Fallout 3 opens similarly, with "I Don't Want To Set the World on Fire" by the Inkspots playing on a bus radio while the camera pans slowly over the bus interior. The camera then zooms out from the bus, which is now shown to have been blown in half, and, while the song echoes faintly and ominously in the background, reveals the burnt-out ruins of Washington DC.
    • "I Don't Want To Set the World on Fire" was, appropriately, the first choice of music for the first Fallout, but had to be dropped due to confusion over the rights of the song. For many fans, seeing the teaser trailer for Fallout 3 is a pretty amusing taste of What Could Have Been.
  • For the second trailer to Fallout 3, the happy-go-lucky "Dear Hearts and Gentle People" was the music used. It played over images of the nuke-scarred wasteland and both mutants and people alike being blasted to pieces with shotguns, grenades and miniguns.
  • There is also a radio in the game, so you can listen to more cheerful tunes from The '40s and The '50s as you blow things apart and/or are blown apart.
    • There are radios in game as well as built into the player character. So while the ambient sound track is germane to the reality of a blighted world, if the player chooses not to play the recommended GNR Radio at all times, you can still hear cheery tracks like 'Let's Go Sunning' drift in during three-way firefights between super mutants, mercenaries and genocidal fascists.
    • The Enclave radio station plays Sousa marches and other patriotic American music, as a counter-point to walking around the wrecked hellscape of the former American capital.
    • In the last mission in Tranquility Lane the game plays relaxing, happy-go-lucky music that you would hear in a 50s sitcom set to your character going around and violently stabbing all of the residents of the town with a knife
    • Fallout 3 is a bit of a subversion, as well, since the radio is both under the player's control as well as being a larger plot device. Being replaced by a more fitting dark ambient soundtrack if you choose to not keep the radio on adds to this.
  • Soundtrack mods for Galaxy News Radio in Fallout 3 play this up even more. Bob Crosby's "Dear Hearts and Gentle People" starting up just as you get tossed out of Vault 101, anybody?
  • Fallout: New Vegas has this in its E3 reveal trailer: a montage of violent gunfights and sinfulness... to "Jingle Jangle Jingle", a song which is basically impossible to frown to.
  • Just like the aforementioned examples in 1 and 3, New Vegas begins in a similar way, with Frank Sinatra's "Blue Moon" playing over a long, slow pan across New Vegas and the Mojave. Included in the scene are an abandoned, empty casino, an NCR ranger blowing the head off a Fiend (with blood splattering the camera), members of Caesar's Legion setting up a camp, and a man digging a grave (as you soon learn, it's your grave). Pretty much the only connection between the song and what's being shown is that the moon is briefly shown on a poster in the casino and is visible in the outdoor scenes.
  • New Vegas itself has the same Radio-pick "problem", as you can pick up the Mojave station and blow giant scorpions apart while listening to cheery cowboy songs, tune in to the New Vegas radio and get in massive firefights while Frank Sinatra sings, or listen to Old World Blues's Mysterious Broadcast and let slow Jazz accompany you as you're assaulted by robot scorpions while a Mad Scientist yells at you.
  • New Vegas also has an odd example, in that the music is actually playing in-game and the cause of your ensuing predicament: In Dead Money, the only way to get the casino to open is to trigger the Gala event. As this was intended to be a time for celebration, it comes complete with this cheery tune played at full volume all across the villa. Yes, the same villa which was, and still is, crawling with Ghost People. Ghost People who hate loud noises. The subsequent rush to get to the Casino gates is widely recognized as one of the game's most difficult sequences, as well as one of the scariest.
  • The Fallout series as a whole can probably be seen as a great example of this: cheery 50's pop and post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
    • Quite possibly intentional in universe, either for Gallows Humor or some other way to cope with the environment.
    • Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is an odd exception to the rule; interjecting boss fights with metal instrumentals from bands like Slipknot, Chimaira and Killswitch Engage.
  • And Finally (most recently), the upcoming Amazon Series Fallout (2024) gets in on the action too. The teaser trailer features Nat King Cole's soothing love-song "I Don't Want to See Tomorrow". While the song is playing, the teaser shows several violent things happen, such as: the irradiated desert wasteland, bloody gunfights, disturbing creatures, a dog happily holding a severed hand in its mouth, a violent riot in a Vault (with a woman having a Fork jabbed into her eye), and several nuclear explosions destroying L.A.
• Far Cry:
  • Anytime you're in a vehicle in Far Cry 4, you hear the local radio station play songs as you drive around and either outrun or gun down the Royal Army. Most notably is in the prologue mission where you are desperately fleeing an intense warzone at De Pleur's mansion and You Me Bullets Love plays, and when driving a fuel truck to blow open a wall (a major turning point in the game for The Golden Path) and The Bombay Twist is in the cassette player (both are Bombay Royale songs).
  • Vehicles in Far Cry: New Dawn give the player the choice of two radio stations - one playing exclusively hardcore rap, the other 60s era pop songs. Depending on the circumstances and the player's tastes, this has the potential to leave them listening to the likes of "Duke of Earl" or "Daydream Believer" while fighting for their lives.
• Around half the soundtrack of Fate/stay night is played at odd times. You'll have the ultra dramatic battle music going on while Taiga is complaining about girls staying in your house, and when Ilya is brutally murdering you her theme song is playing. And her theme song is pretty much exactly what you'd expect the Token Mini-Moe's theme song to be in a visual novel like this.
  • During Shirou's battle with Archer, rather than having the amazing "Emiya" play in the background, they have this play instead. Rather than present the battle as epic and amazing, it is presented as tragic.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The final battle of the original version of Final Fantasy pits you against the Big Bad Chaos, and the background music is...the normal battle music.
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • Kefka's theme is a whimsical tune which you soon learn to equate with "something horrible is about to happen". To be more exact though Kefka's theme only STARTS with whimsy. After a minute or so, it suddenly becomes a bombastic, military march... then goes back to whimsy when it loops. At first it's silly, ("AHEM, there is SAND on my boots!") later it's obvious scary how well the music parallels how quickly and seamlessly he shifts from silly one-liner jokes to quite-serious declarations of worldly destruction.
    • The epic Dancing Mad final boss theme in has an unexpectedly peaceful segment during the third tier of the fight. It's a virtuoso organ piece that borrows from Kefka's own Leitmotif if you're listening close enough. It also shamelessly rips off "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" and draws on a distinct similarity to Handel's "Messiah", appropriately enough considering that the third stage has you fighting against a rather blatant case of Pietà Plagiarism.
  • The DS version of Final Fantasy IV has Whyt's training. It's kind of weird hearing Rydia's beautiful theme music playing over the solving of simple math problems.
  • Final Fantasy VII played Aerith's theme music over the Jenova LIFE boss battle to show Cloud's complete disconnection from the fight in light of Aerith's death. More subtly, it also showed the whole of Sector Seven being obliterated; we cut to President Shinra, who ordered the destruction, sitting in his office watching it all while listening to (ironically) "The Creation" by Joseph Haydn.
  • A more amusing instance was the serious boss music playing while you fought Palmer, who spent most of the battle dancing around or spanking himself.
  • In Final Fantasy IX Black Waltz 3 kills a group of black mages while Vivi looks on in horror; a soft, sad piano theme plays in the background. Yeah, it's a Tear Jerker.
  • Final Fantasy X:
    • Lulu's calm and melancholic theme song plays when you fight the soul of the summoner she failed to protect, who had morphed into a fiendish version of her Aeon.
    • In a similar example, the battle music in Zanarkand is the same bittersweet tune that plays out of battle.
    • For a much less emotional example, the Monster Arena always plays the standard battle theme...even when fighting against the Arena Creations, which are all Superbosses that have more powerful parameters and more HP than even the Final Boss. Even when you're fighting the last Creation, Nemesis.
  • Final Fantasy X-2 has the gentle and sad "Yuna's Ballad" play over the chapter-ending and intense battle against Dark Bahamut.
  • Dissidia Final Fantasy has bonus songs, one for each game, that are purchasable through the game's PP catalog. The bonus songs are all in their original game's style, so the ones for the first three games are 8-bit chiptunes, which is dissonance on its own. The bonus song for the original Final Fantasy, however, is an 8-bit track of the quiet, peaceful town theme. Just try taking your epic battles seriously while listening to this.
    • And in case that wasn't strange enough, Dissidia 012: Final Fantasy gives us the beautiful, romantic, and heartwarming Theme of Love from Final Fantasy IV as a battle theme... how does that even work?
  • Final Fantasy Record Keeper has this during the Festive Fantasy event: the battle theme is the Chocobo theme — the same one that plays when you're picking the daily dungeon.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2 has "Yakusoku no Basho" or "New World" playing during the ending sequence in an initially cheerful scene, and continuing while everything starts to go wrong and Serah dies.
  • Final Fantasy seems to have something going on with this, as it comes back in Final Fantasy XIV with the main theme, Answers. Only part of it qualifies however, and that's the part after the choir intro with the harp. From there until it comes back in with the choir and a pipe organ, it's a bit dissonant in that it sounds quite peaceful...when set to a scene of all-out war in the End of an Era cinematic. This is NOT a bad thing; in fact, it works quite well. MUCH later, it comes back in just as masterful a usage in the final battle with Bahamut (the form fought known as Bahamut Prime), the same Primal from that same cinematic that nearly obliterated the planet. It's a four-phase battle, and the harp portion begins and loops through the second phase. Once again, it works.
  • The 2006 trailer for Final Fantasy XV (originally Versus XIII) features an excruciatingly bloody battle juxtaposed with a soulful, operatic song. Watch it here: [1]
• Final Zone II has Momoko's theme, which only plays if you select her in the fourth stage. It feels out of place considering that said level is a jungle war zone.
• Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War has a song for fighting recruitable enemies — something that none of the other Fire Emblems have. It may be due to the fact that FE4's "Comrade Turned Enemy" is extremely cheery for the undertones that the song carries.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses brings us "Paths That Will Never Cross". It's one of the most traditionally Fire Emblem pieces in a game that doesn't sound like Fire Emblem. It's triumphant and heroic. And if it kicks in, you're in part two, and almost certainly about to kill someone who would have been your comrade in another path. There are precisely five cases in the whole game where this can kick in and *not* mean you're about to kill a could-have-been comerade. Two of those only apply if they were your comrade earlier this playthrough, two more are cases where you can, under the right conditions, let the enemy retreat and vanish. Only one indicates a classic Fire Emblem combat recruitment.
  • Also from Three Houses, we have "Those Who Sow Darkness" and "Shambhala", 2 pieces associated with a certain faction who's been manipulating events for their own benefit (a Fire Emblem staple trope). The theme itself is done in dubstep, making it out of place with the generally medieval setting. However, this makes a lot more sense when you consider that said faction are descendants of an Abusive Precursor race with advanced, nigh-futuristic techs.
• Five Nights at Freddy's: If you lose the game by running out of power, Freddy will appear while you're stranded in the dark and play a music-box version excerpt of "Votre toast, je peux vous le rendre" (better known as the "Toreador Song") from Carmen to the player. He then bites your head off.
• Frogger, seems indicative that this trope is Older Than the NES but in truth it turns out to be a subversion. Those deep enough into Japanogaphy will eventually figure out that the Frogger opening theme is the first verse of a Japanese children song called Inu No Omawarisan - 犬のおまわりさん, a song about a police dog trying to help a lost kitten. Now there may not not be any dogs or kittens, but like the kitten in the song, but the frogs are lost and need to get home, and if you count the player as being part of the game, they need help finding it; the player is that help, doing more or less what the police dog tried to do. So "Inu no Omawari-san" is a perfect fit for the soundtrack.
• FromSoftware:
  • Dark Souls does this with many of its bosses, but none moreso than the final boss fight. Rather than the epic blaring choir or chanting that most bosses have had, the last boss has a simple, sorrowful sounding piano melody that very much fits the character, but may feel a bit anticlimactic for one of the hardest games in recent memory.
  • Bloodborne does this again to Lullaby for Mergo, the exact same song played in Tiny Music Box is being played during the fight against Mergo's Wet Nurse, you're clubbing a nanny to death while hearing a lullaby. It makes sense however, as this song isn't made for humans, it's played for an Eldritch Abomination, rather than you. should you played it with your music box after clubbing the nanny to death. Mergo reacts with a smile. Yes, he/she was also listening to this with you all along.
    • Averted for The First Hunter. It is very fitting The Last Dance between the Hunter and Gehrman, The First Hunter.
  • The original theme song for Dragon's Dogma was "Into Free -Dangan-" by B'z. The music actually starts off appropriate, beginning as a Lonely Piano Piece, before suddenly kicking up in intensity and becoming a very up-tempo, modern J-rock song with Gratuitous English lyrics. The actual lyrics fit very well with the storyline of the game, but the style of music was all wrong for a medieval fantasy. The Dark Arisen stand alone expansion did away with the song, replacing it with a far more appropriate melody.
• A Gears of War commercial uses Gary Jules' cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" to this effect. While not a happy song, "Mad World" is an unusually reflective song, and Jules' version is particularly slow and moody, not the kind of song to evoke images of carnage involving alien monsters. A slightly extended version of the trailer is here
  • And then there is the ad for the sequel, with "How It Ends" by Devotchka.
    • The Gears of War 2 campaign does this with elevator music. The building in question however, has been toppled over, so you ride the elevator sideways as you watch the Locust rampage through the burning cityscape through the holes blown in the wall of your building.
    • "Unbelievable."
  • Gears of War 3 continues the trend with "Heron Blue" by Sun Kil Moon and the frankly bizarre choice of "Into Dust" by Mazzy Star, a minimally arranged ballad that's even more reflective than "Mad World".
    • Then there's the campaign where Gary Jules' version of "Mad World" makes a comeback when Dom drives a truck into a fuel tank filled with immulsion, killing himself along with most of the lambent attacking his friends in a massive chain of explosions and pyrotechnics.
• Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams invokes this constantly. While in the nightmarish landscapes, 8-bit chiptunes play, whereas in the cutesy and cheerful areas, heavy metal plays. This is a deliberate stylistic choice to illustrate Giana's unstable mental state.
• Several titles in the Gradius series have the first part of their final stages set to oddly-happy, almost holiday-like music.
  • Lampshaded in their own series of parodies of Gradius, Parodius. A game that not only parodies the Gradius games with strange enemies, but also with unfitting music playing almost all the time.
  • Another dissonant game over music occurs in Salamander / Life Force, which sounds like a Suspiciously Similar Song of "Unchained Melody". Gradius II has a Game Over tune that sounds like something you'd hear around Christmas time.
  • The music in the Cell Stage in Gradius V is rather new age-ish, while this is one of the more tense and dangerous levels of the game.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • In Grand Theft Auto 2, you'll find this Christian pop song in what should be a dark cyberpunk future, coupled with lyrics that preach the exact opposite of what a player would normally be doing in a GTA game.
  • Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories have Double Clef FM, which is a station that plays classical music & opera. Feels extremely strange listening to it, especially when shooting down gangs and the LCPD.
  • Do you enjoy running over pedestrians, slaughtering police officers, and destroying all the vehicles you come across with all over Vice City while listening to romantic music like "Tempted", "Never Too Much", "Wow" or "Africa"? Emotion 98.3 is the station for you.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there is at least one deliberate example: When you have to go to Liberty City to execute a hit in a restaurant that turns into an action packed gunfight, quiet classical music is playing in said restaurant.
    • Radio X contains 'Movin' On Up', a heartwarming and inspirational song that simply doesn't mesh with the drive-bys and manslaughter.
    • Radio Los Santos typically plays type 1 and 2 Gangsta Rap that suits the game perfectly. But then we have 'The Ghetto' and 'Hood Took Me Under', both of which are certainly not glorified takes on gangster culture.
    • In the original sixth-generation console releases of San Andreas, if CJ took his girlfriend on a bad date, "Killing In The Name" by Rage Against the Machine would accompany the resulting cutscene. In all subsequent re-releases, however, said song is removed from the game due to the license for it expiring, so the "good date" music plays in its place during bad dates. The result? Happy music playing over CJ's girlfriend berating and throwing food at him, clearly not enjoying their time together.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV's extensive library of songs can get kind of depressing depending on what's on the radio at the moment. For instance, they have 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins, which is gentle and sad, and a touching rap track by Russian hip-hop group Basta which is about a youngest son of the family apologizing to his mother in his verge of death asking her what his life is worth now. If you understand Russian, it takes some of the fun out of gleefully speeding around the city.
    • IV also has The Journey, which is a station that plays ambient music and the like. Feels weird driving on the sidewalk and using pedestrians as brakes to Jean-Michel Jarre.
    • Defied by Niko towards the end of the story, after he either kills Darko or spares his life. On the ride back, he turns the radio off so that he doesn't have to put up with ads, DJs, or dissonant music while he mulls over what just happened.
  • In Grand Theft Auto V, there's Too $hort's "So You Wanna Be a Gangsta" and MC Eiht's "Streiht-Up Menace" on West Coast Classics, "If You Leave Me Now" by Chicago & "What A Fool Believes" by the Doobie Brothers on Los Santos Rock Radio, and also in the enhanced version, there's "I Want It That Way" by Backstreet Boys on Non-Stop-Pop FM. A non-radio example occurs in "Unknowing the Truth," where the Epsilon program theme-a trippy-sounding ambient piece-continues to play even if you choose to fight the Epsilon Mooks.
    • A specific example of this trope is in effect during the beginning of the level Crystal Maze where Trevor Philips goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the O'Neil Brothers for stealing his competition. When he gets into his car to go drive to the O'Neil farm, "What A Fool Believes" by the Doobie Brothers plays and Trevor groans that the music is "all fucking wrong" before automatically switching channels to something more aggressive-sounding.
      Trevor: (after changing the channel) That's what I'm lookin' for!
• If you fail a license test in Gran Turismo 4, "Oh Yeah" by Yello plays.
• Towards the end of Guitar Hero III, you and your band are dragged down to Hell and must play a gig to free yourself from the devil’s contract. Songs in the set list include “One” by Metallica, “The Number of the Beast” by Iron Maiden, “Raining Blood” by Slayer, all of which fits the hellish aesthetic... but then there's the rather uplifting and definitely not hellish “Cliffs of Dover” by Eric Johnson.
• GunFu Fighter have several levels where the background song is The Blue Danube by Johann Strauss, set to you killing legions and legions of enemies in the foreground.
• There are actually a lot of moments in the original Halo trilogy that feature intense firefights with rather serene music.
  • Example: Elevator-jazz-style music during the indoor battles in Halo: Combat Evolved's "Assault on the Control Room". One of these musics is the "lost song" that wasn't featured on the OST.
  • The cutscene at the end of Halo 2's "Regret" where the temple is being destroyed by the Covenant fleet is accompanied by sad string music.
  • The ending of Halo 3, where Master Chief is presumed dead ("Were it so easy"), is set to Triumphant Reprises of the MC's and Arbiter's leitmotifs.
  • The Final Boss battle in 2 is set to "Destroyer's Invocation", the underwhelming ambient piece played during the intro of "The Arbiter".
• Heroine's Quest has a heavy, bombastic, and ominous tune heralding the entrance of... Ratatosk, a cute little squirrel threatening to steal from your nut cache.
• Hitman: Blood Money has "Ave Maria" as the main menu song. And on some maps, upbeat music is playing while you can happily slaughter your way through the innocent crowd. Ave Maria even returns at the very end of the game; revealed to have been the background video of the start menu, 47 awakens from his induced coma at his funeral, promptly murdering through the villain's mooks.
  • Ave Maria returns in Hitman: Absolution, when 47 murders Skurky in a church; since 47 guns down a villain at a funeral, it even doubles as a Call-Back.
  • "The Meat King's Party" in Hitman: Contracts has 47 finding a mutilated body while Paul Anka's "Put Your Head on My Shoulder" plays.

I-N

• The Incredibles video game has a level with music that sounds directly like it came out of a James Bond movie, but when you enter an elevator, the Bond music stops for about ten seconds and is replaced by elevator music.
• In Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, you are given the arduous task of rescuing Sophia from the Atlantean prison and the single nearly-invincible Nazi soldier guarding her. The solution is to power up an ancient guard robot, which stomps the Nazi to death before malfunctioning and shattering into useless rubble. And it does this to the lively tones of a marching band!
• Jet Force Gemini: A few strange examples:
  • During Walkway, a level with no music otherwise, the Rith Essa theme plays during the elevator ride back up to the surface, barely getting started before the 5 second ride is over.
  • The underground cave in Water Ruin is a short run down a corridor to a hidden ship part, with no combat taking place or mechanical elements on show, yet here the S.S. Anubis theme plays with its dramatic melody and soundscape evocative of the mechanical level it's usually heard in. These three cases would double as Long Song, Short Scene if it weren't for the fact that they are all heard in full (and more sensible contexts) earlier in the game.
  • During Asteroid, the unique and climactically urgent sounding theme is replaced by the theme of Eschebone for a single room - while Eschebone's theme becomes plenty dramatic as it goes on, you're unlikely to spend long enough in the room to reach that point, making it ill-fitting.
  • While every single boss fight sharing the same music fits just fine, the same can't be said of the upbeat Robot Mission theme, which plays as usual on the sixth one of the game, which is not only the final playable part of the game overall, but features Floyd flying towards his death.
• Jones in the Fast Lane: The newspaper always makes a serious and grim sound when it pops up, even if the news are positive, like "Housing market looks good".
• Karnov has what might be the most cheerful Game Over music of all time, which will just make its difficulty all the more frustrating.
• Kick Man has the traditional circus music "Entry of the Gladiators" play when you lose a life.
• Killer7 features a finale in which we are shown flashbacks of brutal murders while someone faintly whistles "Greensleeves" in the background. (Note, however, that "Greensleeves" and "What Child is This?" have the same melody; the latter would fit quite nicely.) Then there's "Rave On", an incredibly fast techno number, which plays... on a completely empty staircase as you head for the level's boss. No enemies, no background, just a brown staircase on a black void. That takes maybe ten seconds to traverse. The song itself is five minutes long and gets really good around the last minute.
• The "ballet of death" trailer for Killzone 2 is scenes of death and destruction scored to "The Flower Duet".
• Kingdom Hearts II: in the Final Mix version of the game during the difficult battle with Roxas, a Boss Remix of his theme song accompanied by the piano plays. It lies in stark contrast to the game's typical agitated battle music.
  • 358/2 Days brings in the battle with Xion's One-Winged Angel form, which is also a melancholic Boss Remix of the character's theme
  • An example that doesn't have to do with mood, but "This is Halloween" still is the background music... in Christmas Town.
    • This is changed in the Final Mix version to include new themes composed just for Christmas Town.
  • And in Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], try listening to The Nutcracker while beating the crap out of (or getting the crap beat out of you by) Dream Eaters.
• In Kirby's Return to Dream Land, the second Final Boss theme is a Boss Remix Medley. Included in the songs remixed is the series theme song, the incredibly cheerful Green Greens. It has a dark spin on it, so it sounds fine if you've never heard the original theme, but it sounds very odd for fans of the series who've heard many cheerful renditions of the song before.
• It happens agains in Kirby: Triple Deluxe, with the third Final Boss theme remixing Green Greens.
• It happens yet again in Kirby Star Allies, where the fourth phase theme for the Final Boss remixes Green Greens.
• In The Last of Us, when Joel carries Ellie out of the Firefly hospital, the ridiculously beautiful and tragic song "All Gone (no escape)" starts playing the while the Fireflies are opening fire at Joel.
  • The Left Behind DLC also features Ellie and Riley running for their lives from Infected through an abandoned mall while Etta James' "I Got You, Babe" plays over the speakers.
• In The Last Remnant, the Game Over music is a fanfare that sounds like you won the battle rather than lose.
• The Last Story has a standout example when fighting one tricky Duel Boss - a fun surf-rock theme plays instead of the game's usual fantasy fare. It becomes notably less so should you take advantage of the music to repeatedly shoot Prank Bananas at the boss.
• Left 4 Dead 2:
  • At one point during "The Parish" the survivors activate a parade float to use it as a makeshift platform to get to other side of a gap. Upon doing this, "The Saints Will Never Come", a cheery instrumental rendition of "When The Saints Come Marching In", plays from the float while the survivors fight off waves of zombies because the music alerted the horde.
  • Some missions feature jukeboxes at some points. Players can invoke the trope by activating it and starting some zombie killing with some of the upbeat tunes featured in them.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC has an incredibly upbeat Latin jazz battle theme called "Sophisticated Fight", get used to it, you'll be hearing it constantly.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel has an upbeat rock song for its credits theme. The game ends on the country being taken over by terrorists who have revealed unforseen superweapons, and are being backed by the Ancient Conspiracy Oroboros, and The Reveal that they've being led by one of your classmates, who proceeds to curb-stomp the main character, forcing him to flee while the rest of the party is trapped with no hope of escape. So it's kind of unfitting...
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has a fishing hole where you can catch fish. The music playing is from Kakariko Village, which is calm and peaceful. When a fish is biting on your line, the music suddenly shifts to the generic battle theme heard when fighting enemies. Not quite fitting for a climactic pull in fishing.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask:
  • The Termina counterparts of Koume and Kotake are sweet old ladies completely unconnected to the Gerudo who never do anything evil, yet they keep their sinister-sounding leitmotif from Ocarina of Time.
  • The 3DS remake of the game follows the example set by Ocarina of Time by adding a couple of fishing holes to the swamp and coast. This time, the music that plays when you're landing a fish is the "chase" theme. If that wasn't inappropriately intense enough for you, certain high-level fish that are extremely difficult to find and catch play the boss theme instead.
• In The Legend of Zelda game Hyrule Warriors:
  • Before a battle starts, the battle music can be customized to a tune other than the normal one. Setting the Bazaar theme to play makes the battle a considerably different experience.
  • A few Adventure Mode battles take place at Ganon's Tower, the desolate wasteland version of Hyrule Field, but play the triumphant main theme remix usually heard on the lush, green Hyrule Field. The same thing occurs in the last scenario of Linkle's Tale, although the skies have cleared up and the start-of-scenario pan gives the name "Hyrule Field".
• Life Is Strange:
  • After completing Episode 4 of the first season, the idyllic sunset in the main menu is replaced by a massive tornado and violent thunderstorm. The peaceful guitar music in the background, however, does not change.
    • In Episode 5, If Max asks Mr. Jefferson to put on some music as a last request before he kills her, he will agree and turn on his sound system, treating Max to Jeff Meegan's "Crazy Like Me" as he prepares a lethal dose of drugs to inject into her.
  • A flashback sequence in Life Is Strange: True Colors has Alex invoke this by donning a pair of headphones and listening to Dido's "Thank You" to drown out the sound of her father and brother arguing.
• LISA: The Painful uses "Ode to the Oblivious" as the music for the character select screen during Russian Roulette. Because peppy, arcade-style music totally fits with sending characters to their potential deaths, right?
  • Likewise, "My Lord, My Wally" is a slow, sedate piece of music, running somewhat at odds with the challenging and nightmarish Wally whose theme it is.
• LittleBigPlanet:
  • The song "Volver a Commenzar" by Cafe Tacuba is used for "Reception", a wedding-themed level in the story mode. However, the context of the song is about a rich man on his deathbed wanting to go back in time to fix his mistakes, before deciding that all the material things would be meaningless when he dies, so he might as well give them away before he dies. It's by no means fitting for a wedding.
  • The community levels are prone to have this trope invoked by the players, thanks to Level Editor and Music Sequencer.
• Alright, everybody who played Live A Live: rise your hand if you tought an almost joyous and solemn orchestral piece was appropriate for the Armageddon ending.
• The opening of Mad Rat Dead has the protagonist getting vivisected in full view of the player as they answer a series of questions. The song that accompanies this gory imagery is the track MAD RAT, ALIVE?, an upbeat tune that also serves as the game's tutorial track.
• The battle music in the Mario & Luigi games is usually fast-paced and energetic, but in Partners in Time the final battle theme is a slow, somewhat melancholy theme.
  • Speaking of that series, Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story only had, barring the Giant Bowser fights and the Final Boss, one boss theme, for EVERY BOSS. You don't get a different theme for Alpha/Beta Kretin, which kidnapped Peach earlier and is coming back for revenge, the fight between the Bros. and Bowser, the Shroobs under Bowser's Castle, which is even more egregious because it's optional, and major late game bosses, most notable the Dark Star and Dark Fawful. The Nintendo 3DS remake at least gave the latter two spoiler examples their own boss themes, but the other bosses listed are still stuck with the standard one (as well as having it now play during the tutorial fight against Bowser at the beginning of the game).
• Marvel vs. Capcom 2 features epic battles between uber-powerful warriors and friggin' superheroes, yet it's scored with a bizarre mix of elevator muzak and lounge tunes that would be out of place in pretty much any setting that isn't an elevator or a lounge. The absurd dissonance here is about on par with using zydeco music in Silent Hill, and even better: you can neither turn it off nor adjust the volume. Oh, it's gonna take you for a ride, all right...
  • That is true... until you make a custom Dreamcast ISO of the game with custom music on it.
  • And the Xbox Live Arcade / Play Station Network Updated Re-release allows custom soundtracks too.
• The sequel to the above game, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 did a good job of making Doctor Doom's theme suit the idea of him being a more intelligent and sinister villain than most hammy superfoes... except it's so slow and melodic that it's actually very soothing. You could drift off to sleep to the theme of the most dangerous supervillain that ever lived.
  • Taskmaster's theme, although not as bad, sounds oddly heroic for a mercenary that's neutral at best. This has lead to comment thread jokes about how 'he copied it from a superhero's theme after listening to it once.'
• The aptly titled "An End Once and For All" that plays over the ending cutscenes of Mass Effect 3 is a classic example of this. You get to watch all sorts of explosions, deaths, and heartwrenching shots of your squadmates as a beautiful, quiet piano plays over the scene, while most of the audio is muted. It's utterly heartbreaking, especially with the Extended Cut DLC.
  • In a similar vein, you have the music in the opening cutscene Leaving Earth: A soft piano/orchestral piece, which plays while you watch hundreds of enormous mechanical Eldritch Abominations lay waste to Vancouver.
• The Matrix: Path of Neo unlike the movies epic music, the final boss music in Path of Neo is comparable to the music in a cheesy, 1950's alien invasion movie with it's electric screeching and 'bee-op' style. It's an invoked trope, because serious music really wouldn't have fit the changed ending.
• Mega Man 3 has incredibly cheerful music at one point which sounds more fitted to the credits of a Golden Ending than a Game Over screen. Also notable is that this game is very hard, meaning you'll hear this song a lot.
  • Also, the Updated Re-release of 3 on Complete Works and Anniversary Collection with Navi Mode enabled features arranged music for some of the levels. Notably, Top Man's level theme gets replaced with a remix of the intro stage from Mega Man 7. While it's still great music, it doesn't really fit the aesthetic of Top Man's stage, and seems to be more fitting for Needle Man's stage.
• When Midna is in critical condition and is about to die a third of the way through The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, a Simple Score of Sadness called Midna's Lament plays as you race to get her to Zelda. It's a melancholic piano rendition of the game's main theme that highlights the urgency of the situation and how Midna has begun to care about Link more than herself...and it is constantly interrupted by standard enemy Battle Theme Music in both the original and the HD remake.
• Another commercial example: The commercial for Mercenaries 2 has a lighthearted, upbeat song playing through all the havoc and destruction going on in the background... which, while its tone is perhaps against the game's subject matter, including the lyrics (listen here) the song as a whole is very fitting for the game.
• "Born To Be Free", Stage 1 music of Metal Black. An upbeat, hopeful tune played over the landscape of an Earth utterly devastated by aliens draining the planet's resources to near-exhaustion and infested with not only re-animated remains of Earth's military forces that fell during the invasion but also organisms of the said alien occupiers.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has interactive soundtrack dissonance. Snake has an iPod loaded with orchestral pieces, some old-style light jazz/blues, and "Oishii Two-han Seikatsu", an utterly vapid, super-perky J-pop piece absolutely ideal for brutal gunfights. You're even encouraged to, since Snake's Psyche slowly restores when he listens to it.
  • If you listen to "Oishii Two-Han Seikatsu" while fighting one of the beautiful female bosses, they'll do a little dance routine for you, and then immediately return to walking towards you sexy-creepily. Bear in mind that the soundtrack during these sequences is usually a sound-effect mangle of women and babies laughing/snarling/crying/screaming.
  • Used in cutscenes, the very opening scene involves a brutal, Saving Private Ryan-esque scene of war carnage, set to the hauntingly beautiful 'Love Theme'.
  • Oh, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker!:
    • The AI Weapons (with the exception of Peace Walker itself) sing a haunting "Daisy Bell"-like tune in their VOCALOID-generated voices. During their boss fights, you have to learn to predict their attacks by listening to the little musical phrases that they sing (for instance, just before Chrysalis fires her missiles, she sings two long notes of equal length that rise a semitone).
    • "Love Deterrence", a peppy J-pop song about a Teacher/Student Romance sung by Nana Mizuki which becomes final boss battle music, gaining a strong nuclear war subtext in the process.
    • Dr Strangelove loves the song "Sing" by The Carpenters, and plays it to Big Boss while she tortures him for the first time (possibly in homage to the use of "Stuck In The Middle With You" Reservoir Dogs).
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, like the fourth installment, also has interactive soundtrack dissonance. Snake has a Walkman loaded with some 80's songs. Granted, there are a few rock songs that fit the war setting like "The Final Countdown" or "Rebel Yell", but then there are a few songs that are a bit too soft. Nothing says tactical espionage quite like sneaking into a base and killing the guards to the tune of Spandau Ballet's "True" or Hall & Oates' "Maneater".
    • A-ha's "Take on me", while still a bit jarring, downplays this quite a bit. After all, it wouldn't exactly be the first time their music appeared in a spy thriller that takes place in Afghanistan.
• The "Arnhem Knights" level in Medal of Honor: Frontline is a heated battle in the streets and ruins of Arnhem set to slow, melancholy Dutch Cherubic Choir music. Actually somewhat justified, as the Allies are losing the battle.
  • The "Rough Landing" level has similar choral music, which evokes images of serene countryside, but said countryside is in the middle of a war zone.
• In the Super NES version of Mickey Mania, the Stage Clear music is played at the Game Over screen.
• Minecraft has a rotating selection of calm, soothing background music that plays whether you're just calmly gathering materials, building projects, tunneling through dark caves filled with monsters, or about to die to an exploding Creeper.
• In Monster Party, a jolly game over music plays while the background consists of skeletons in a pool of blood.
• Mother:
  • EarthBound Beginnings does this as well, also during the final boss: You defeat the primary antagonist, Gigue/Giygas, by singing him a lullaby.
  • Also from EarthBound Beginnings, Ninten and Ana have a dance on Mt. Itoi, but the song itself is very melancholy.
  • Mother 3: During the final boss fight, the battle music starts off with a heavy bass line with some creepy distortion, but as the battle goes on, it fades into a soft leitmotif of the Love Theme, while Claus's attacks get weaker and he starts to regain control of his emotions.
  • Another example from Mother 3: In Chapter 1 of the game, Flint goes berserk after hearing of his wife's death, injuring two of the town folk with a two by four, while a lovely piano song plays in the background.
• The True Final Bosses of Mushihime Sama and the Expansion Pack to its sequel, Mushihime-sama Futari Black Label, have soothing, almost-ending-theme-like music.
• Mushroom Kingdom Fusion in general has quite a bit of this, with about half the levels usually some kind of metal soundtrack even if what's going on screen doesn't match at all. It's most noticeable with the standard Mario bosses being fought to a tune from Gradius (or the Koopalings and their 'epic' boss music remix) or the fight with Caliope the Clown in Toyland complete with the same standard boss tune.
  • Similarly, Super Mario Fusion Revival uses music (most of it comes from the Korean MMORPG Ragnarok Online) that is very, very dramatic when played in levels of the first world, the Mushroom Kingdom, a world consisting of purely Mario-themed levels. The Raiden III boss theme does not fit most of the World 1 bosses, being some of the most dramatic boss music in history (especially when played during a fight against the Koopalings in a standard Mario style battle). Similarly the Fortress music (from Ragnarok Online) is ridiculously dramatic for a Mario styled fortress level. Like Mushroom Kingdom Fusion, worlds past the first take place in more serious locales, such as the real world Earth, a hellish dimension, a fantasy-themed world, and a sci-fi world. Unlike MKF, however, Super Mario Fusion Revival uses a universal soundtrack, so while this trope is played straight in World 1, it is averted in worlds past that and the music fits many of the levels in those worlds.
• In Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm 2, the music for the final intense, pulse pounding, mind blowing battle against Pain is...an incredibly slow, melancholic combination of bell chimes and violins.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe:
  • Both the Second Night of the Long Knives and June of Deceit superevents (stemming from the same incident, marking either success or failure) begin with a relaxing waltz before a man with a rough German voice starts ranting; both events involve attempted coups, aggressive purges, and plenty of death.
  • The more downbeat British Reunification superevents delight in this. Margaret Thatcher's got "Rule Britannia" playing with downplayed triumph while a manhunt (complete with helicopter) is carried out in the background, under Reg Birch "The Red Flag" starts getting increasingly wavery as Britain has a Tiananmen Square moment, and David Stirling's reunification sounds outright cheery with "Soldiers of the Queen" playing loud and proud, right until the military starts unleashing full-auto on a screaming crowd while the march continues playing like nothing's wrong.
• The first time you hear this Boss Remix of the Song of the Ancients in NieR, it's a moment involving The Power of Friendship. The second time you hear it, you're being forced to brutally kill two of your friends right after they've dropped the bombshell that your actions have DOOMED THE HUMAN RACE TO EXTINCTION. It suddenly sounds a lot less upbeat.
  • And then After you kill one of said friends, the background music of the second phase changes to the version heard in the game's Doomed Hometown, because the boss version is a duet and you just killed one of the singers. The last part of the boss against these two is set to a relaxing town theme.
• Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: This plays over the final puzzle. Said puzzle, in the original DS release, is sudoku.
• Before fighting Travis in an epic Duel to the Death in No More Heroes, Dr. Peace sings a rousing karaoke song called "The Virgin Child Makes Her Wish." It sounds uplifting, but too uplifting to be sung before the start of a "two men go in, one comes out" kind of fight.
  • It sounds uplifting, but the song itself qualifies as Lyrical Dissonance. The song is about a young girl drowning herself after her mother died.

O-S

• OFF has two instances, both times with Batter fighting a boss with the usual quirky music. When the boss finally decided to get serious, the music instantly changes accordingly.
• The One Night at Flumpty's series is a fan of this:
  • In the second game, after Flumpty's jingle that vaguely explains the goal of the game, the background music is a peaceful and pleasant "classical-ish" song (as it's named on the soundtrack). At least until around the 3 AM mark, where the music fades away and you're left with silence and the occasional eerie ambient tone. For Hard-Boiled Mode, it plays the Toreador March instead.
  • In the third game:
    • For the final and most intense two hours of Flumpty Night, the music shifts from this intense and ominous ambience to this upbeat and jaunty tune titled "Eleggtroswing".
    • If you play the game on Hard-Boiled Mode, its choice for music is a beautifully calm cover of Schwanengesang D 957: No. 4 Ständchen, by Franz Schubert.
• The Oregon Trail II both subverts and plays this straight. The game music starts off cheery, but gets less hopeful and eventually Scare Chord filled the worse off your party's health gets. But if the sick member of your party passes away, THE MUSIC RESETS TO THE HAPPY MELODY IT WAS PLAYING WHEN EVERYONE WAS ALIVE!
• In Ori and the Blind Forest, Sorrow Pass, one of the most treacherous areas in the game, has a serene New Age soundtrack.
• Pac-Man World features several: this one plays when you're trying to outrun a giant moaning mummy's hand. Then there's this one, a Samba-esque tune in a level where the factory is falling apart and you're trying to outswim giant metal sharks.
  • The sequel features this theme. It's a rather cheery, Christmas-y theme used for one of the bosses. But that's just the start- the theme turns more sinister. Fitting, as you're dealing with the resident Stalker with a Crush. To quote the description (and comment that became the video description):
  "Pac-Man gets deadly snowballs thrown at him while Namco plays unfitting music! :D"
• Throughout Panel de Pon, the music remains pretty calm and happy to fit the mood, but if you manage to beat hard mode, you are confronted by the real Final boss. The music it plays during her battle and when she first appears sounds more like it should be in Final Fantasy, especially when in danger mode.
  • Tetris Attack also has the opening, but Bowser was given Thanatos's theme, so Cordelia's Theme remains unused.
  • Both games have, as a whole, an upbeat and happy soundtrack; the ending theme, while still happy-sounding, is very melancholy and nostalgic.
• Paper Mario: Color Splash:
  • When Mario recovers a Big Paint Star, it plays relaxing music over an object being restored. Usually, this is something good, such as the Violet Passage captain able to get back to shore after being stranded, or the gate in Sunglow Ridge regaining its colors and opening up. Get the purple Big Paint Star, and it'll fill in a sinkhole that a cafe-owning Toad is relaxing over, which he promptly falls into.
  • There's an upbeat folk-style tune called "Shy Guys, Circle Up!" that plays in the first level of the game, as a set of low-level Mooks prepare to steal some paint. This returns in Sunglow Ridge, another similarly low-level area. The next time you hear the song is in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, where the game's penultimate boss traps you and closes in on you, even doing the same dance.
• The original Persona usually used the electronica tune "Dead Line" for its boss fights. But when you fight Robo-Rat/Tesso... this is the theme. Even better, it's called "Child Abuse". Even better, it appears to be the one song they didn't change for the PSP remake!
• Persona 3 does it deliberately for "Operation: Babe Hunt". Junpei and his quest for chicks is set to "Deep Breath Deep Breath", an intense and dangerous theme that usually plays during Full Moon operations. The joke is that Junpei treats this, a relatively silly vacation scene, just as seriously as fighting for his life.
• Persona 4. Nothing was more jarring than going through a dramatic, dark part of the game just to hear the horribly upbeat high school tune. (The second one, that is; the others weren't bad.)
  • Even worse, the tune for you house, a calmly cheery and sweet piano tune, that plays when Dojima is in the hospital and Nanako is either kidnapped or may or may not be dying of a mysterious illness herself. Ouch.
  • Played for dramatic effect with the music for Naoto's dungeon, a soft piano piece that doesn't fit infiltrating a highly-fortified secret base at all. This is most likely to emphasise Naoto's hidden lonliness beneath her stoic facade. Gets even more dissonant in Persona 4: Arena Ultimax, where it's Shadow Naoto's battle theme.
• Pineapple On Pizza: As soon as the volcano's eruption takes its first victims and they start screaming, the music becomes even more upbeat than before.
• In P.N.03, the music for the Final Boss's first form is a driving Industrial Metal/Drum N Bass fusion track that unfortunately suffers from Long Song, Short Scene, while the second form's theme is a slow, lumbering orchestral piece that sounds more appropriate for the first phase of a battle.
• Pokémon Battle Revolution has the Courtyard Colosseum, the second-last colosseum of the game. The music for the stage itself is rather fitting, but the boss of the stage, Kruger, the game's That One Boss, has this as his theme.
• The original versions of Pokémon Gold and Silver had a likely unintentional example: the happy music from Pewter City plays in Cinnabar Island, which has been destroyed during the Time Skip that separates these games from Pokémon Red and Blue. This was possibly due to space limitations, as the cartridges were already stuffed with Kanto being a playable region again in the first place. The remakes corrected this, and have a slow, solemn rendition of Cinnabar's original theme play on the now-ravaged island.
• A subtle subversion from Pokémon Black 2 and White 2. The melancholy music plays during the flashback scene where the Nimbasa Musical theatre owner dances around with Hilda or Hilbert's musical props — which was left behind. You wonder why the serious music in a seemingly silly scene. It actually make sense when you later find out that Hilda/Hilbert left Unova at the end of the previous games to search for their long lost friend, and has not returned home ever since! And his/her mom have been waiting for their return, all this time!! The above points strongly imply that Hilda/Hilbert abandoned their musical career (and possibly lots of other things) in the process.
• At the end of Portal, the player is introduced to a devastated outside world after having escaped from a facility where she was subjected to psychological torture. The camera then moved to spare parts of the Big Bad GLaDOS, waiting to be reassembled. Then the game ends, and chipper, upbeat music starts playing. GLaDOS is singing about how she is "still alive" and will continue the very same experiments she just performed on the player. ...of course, as GLaDOS was an interesting and somewhat sympathetic character, some players are actually happy to see her survive, thus flipping the soundtrack back into appropriate-ness.
  • An upbeat version of Still Alive plays on every single radio in the facility, most noticeably in the relaxation vault at the very beginning and in the latter stage of the test chamber where the deadly turrets are introduced. Fighting for your very life while murderous turrets try to gun you down while chirping sweet platitudes is made even more disturbing with the radio playing its cheerful little tune in the next room over. Plus, this test chamber also features the first "Rat Man" den, where the hints that the Enrichment Center is not entirely what it seems start dropping.
  • Invoked and Played for Laughs in an early test chamber in Portal 2. A pre-recorded message includes smooth jazz "to help you remain tranquil in the face of almost certain death". It fades out after a few seconds, though.
• Prey (2006) tore a whole Native American reservation apart — the main character's Doomed Hometown — while "Don't Fear The Reaper" played on the jukebox in his grandfather's bar. (This might be a double-subversion. The song is about the acceptance of death as part of life — but the scene could hardly be called an example of "natural causes".)
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within falls into the same trap. Your first meeting with the Dahaka plays I Stand Alone by Godsmack, to get you pumped up for an epic fight. Instead, you're forced to avoid it by running for your life.
• Who has the most epic and fearsome battle theme in the Wii Punch-Out? Von Kaiser, the second weakest opponent in the game. Similarily, Super Macho Man has a comparably upbeat and silly theme despite being the second hardest opponent in the game.
• Quake II shipped with a hard-driving industrial metal soundtrack CD put together specifically for the game to put you in an ass-kicking mood. Without it, the game's dark areas, ultra-violence and horror themes really take over.
• In Railroad Tycoon 2, the soundtrack is limited to instrumental bluegrass music. It's not exactly appropriate when you're building railroads in the Russian Empire or 19th-century Japan.
• The final mission to Rainbow Six: Raven Shield is this, mopping up what's left of the Big Bad's forces. To whit, it begins with disarming a bomb planted on a grim reaper float as the sounds of the parade echo in the background. The battle then shifts to a bar filled with lounge music and upstairs laid back latin rythems.
  • Earlier in the game you are tasked with killing everything that moves in a mansion, with the classical piece "Ave Maria" playing in the background.
• Invoked with Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction at the end: after Clank suddenly is kidnapped by the Zoni, Ratchet looks to the sky in shock and sadness, and his compatriots stay silent in sympathy for the loss of his first, best and true friend, even the normally bumbling Captain Qwark and Rusty Pete. The camera slowly pulls away and up to the stars... cue heroic, uplifting victory music!
• Most of the soundtrack to RayCrisis is smooth techno-elevator jazz, even during boss battles.
  • Even more egregious; the track "Formless Living Bodies" played during the first Final Boss battle, which of course is That One Boss, is a chilled trip-hop track.
  • "Antithese" is an somber piano-laid orchestral track that plays during the Special Mode fight against the aforementioned Dis-Human.
• The original Rayman tends to play relaxing and downright pleasant music, even when you're fighting for your life or facing a boss. Since the game is so frigging hard, they might have been trying to keep you from smashing your Sony Playstation.
• Red Faction II commercial. "White Rabbit." FEEEEEED YOUR HEEEEEEAD! Not quite dissonant, because it feels pretty epic, actually, but come on. That's just insane. And awesome.
  • A commercial for Lost Odyssey used the same song. And it was glorious.
• In Remember11, Inubushi Keiko is an infamous spree killer, who murdered 12 patients inside a hospital and narrowly escaped a death sentence. Her Leitmotif? This little charming piece. Creepy as hell.
• What might be the scariest song in Resident Evil 2 actually plays in the SAFE ROOMS. Listen for yourself.
  • An even scarier tune plays in empty rooms in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.
  • Speaking of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, the credits theme does not quite match the sepia-toned shots of Raccoon City's destruction via nuke, especially considering the President's solemn speech that came before it.
• Resistance 2 had a lot of old love songs playing over the radios in the homes of people now encased in alien incubation sacs. Even worse was the final jazzy song in the ending credits, right after Nathan Hale is shot in the head because he turned into a chimera
• Return Of The Obra Dinn: The soundtrack is quite catchy, and can make discovering the grisly fates of the crew rather jaunty, all things considered. "The End", "Escape", and "The Doom" are roughly in line with what you'd expect given the content and reveals of those chapters — but when you get to the synthy bells of the upbeat sea shanty tune in "Soldiers of the Sea", that plays during the gruesome battle with the crab riders on the lower decks, the tone of the game takes a decided turn.
• Risk of Rain has more than a few, with a gentle, relaxing song that wouldn't be out of place for a wanderer looking at the night sky in a particularly difficult level swarming with Goddamned Bats, and the final level having a haunting, slightly sad, soft piece when you're facing hundreds and hundreds of the game's nastiest foes.
• Would you believe the title theme of the RoboCop video game for the Game Boy and C64 sounded like this? It was so incongruous that the Game Boy version was used in a surreal British TV commercial for home appliances.
• Rock Band Blitz can do this at times, since it ditches the concert setting for more of an arcade aesthetic. The sounds of pinballs and rockets can drown out softer, more somber songs like "Something in the Way" or "Moonlight Sonata."
• In the final chapter of Rule of Rose the music is an annoying, downright maddeningly cheerful tune that's in complete contrast with the fact how it rubs in that despite of all her efforts to be liked, everybody hates Jennifer's guts, and seemingly all the struggles in the game have been in vain. It doesn't help that it's implied that Mr. Hoffman is playing this music over the loudspeakers to cover the fact that he's molesting Clara in the sickroom.
  • In fact, most of the soundtrack is gorgeous orchestral pieces, which (together with the lovingly-rendered detail of the graphics) starkly contrast with the brutality, cruelty, pettiness and Trauma Conga Line that is the story.
• Saints Row has the EZZZ radio channel which, as implied, plays nothing but easy listening. Easy listening in the deliriously upbeat mode, not so much in the whale songs and drone mould. It certainly adds another level of lunacy to the already hyperbolic scenarios. Altogether now, 'Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-nananana (KABOOM!)/ na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, na-nananana (AIIEE!)
  • This continues into the sequel. There's also channels like The Mix 107.77 (80s music — stuff like Take On Me, The Final Countdown, and so on) and Klassic 102.4 (classical music, of course). Nothing quite like mowing down the gangs in Stilwater to the tune of Culture Club's "Karma Chameleon" (red gold and green... just like the three enemy gangs!) or Down Under by Men at Work... and then there's always buying a copy of Ride of the Valkyries at the Scratch That stores for the helicopter missions. Sadly, nobody seems to comment on the Boss' listening habits, except one incident with Pierce.
  • Saints Row: The Third keeps the tradition, but a couple of instances lock your music selection. One in the "Murderbrawl XXXI" mission, Joe Esposito's "You're the Best" starts playing when someone hands you a chainsaw to start mowing down crowds of masked luchadores. And in one of the missions of the Genkibowl DLC, you have to please Professor Genki while driving his Genkimobile, by running over pedestrians and burning them with the car's mounted flamethrowers... and while Professor Genki is riding with you, the radio gets locked into Klassic 102.4, so enjoy your carnage to the tune of Hallelujah.
  • 102.4 offers extra hilarity in Saints Row IV. Since the main villain hosts it, you can tune in while doing a Fraud mission and be regaled with the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, delivered in baritone, while bouncing down the road slamming your face into cars.
• The Shin Megami Tensei games for the SNES had a heavy dissonance when it came to the final boss battles. Nocturne's final boss battle themes against Kagutsuchi, an avatar of God, are techno.
• Every single Silent Hill game has this at least once. The most frequent user is definitely the second game, in which the opening cutscene alone has the beautiful "Theme of Laura" playing over scenes of madness, delusion, suicide, and incredibly suggestive images.
  • "Angels Thanatos" is an upbeat heavy metal tune, but is played during the credits of the "In Water" (suicide) ending in SH 2.
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has a scene where Harry is trapped in a car underwater, is apparently about to drown, and there are monsters swimming around outside. The solution is to turn on the radio, to the right station, which will start playing Michelle's voice, singing Willie Nelson's "Maybe I Didn't Love You."
  • Silent Hill: Downpour features a jarring, albeit thematically appropriate, use of Andy Williams' "Born Free". It's remarkable how disturbing that song becomes when you overlay it with static and echoes.
• Played for Laughs in The Simpsons Hit & Run with the track Vox Nerduli. It's easily the single most epic-sounding track in the game, and is clearly inspired by this fight from Amok Time. All you do during the mission though, is help Comic Book Guy race a rival nerd to an internet cafe so he can be the first to post a scathing review of a movie he didn't like.
• The Sims 3 has this happen now and again. A Sim can quite easily be animated as rocking out on the guitar, but actually playing a gentle and contemplative ballad.
• Deliberately invoked with Skullgirls — The light, happy, peaceful and soothing Maplecrest theme is also the character theme of Painwheel, a young innocent girl who's been tortured and mindraped into being a Living Weapon. Not only does the dissonance add to how disturbing Painwheel is as a fighter anyway, it also shows that under the experimentation and brainwashing Painwheel is still a terrified schoolgirl trapped powerlessly in her own body.
• Skullmonkeys has the level Castle de los Muertos, a level with a creepy red skyline and ominous black castle towers. Skullmonkeys poke out from the ground with spears and you can barely see Klaymen with how dark it is. The level theme? A polka song about Mexican food. Yeah, it's that kind of game.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog CD has mainly bouncy and upbeat songs for the Japanese and European soundtrack. The less popular American soundtrack, on the other hand, is the musical version of American Kirby Is Hardcore, as much of the music, particularly the boss, final boss and game over themes, sounds more appropriate for a shoot-'em-up than a Sonic game. Wacky Workbench's Bad Future is accompanied with a disco-like theme in the American version (the Japanese and European versions have something much more appropriately sinister), while its Good Future has more emphasis on work tools in the background despite the zone being turned into a toy land.
  • In Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island, the Final Fight theme on the Genesis version seems oddly relaxing for a final boss theme, and almost sounds more like ending credits music.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure's music is composed entirely of remixes of songs from Sonic 3 & Knuckles, making for 4 boss themes without the original Sonic 3 boss theme (after the Michael Jackson controversy led to it being cut from Knuckles). Act 1 boss is used for the Eggman fight in Gigantic Angel, Act 2 boss is the standard boss theme, final boss is used for the boss of Last Utopia, Doomsday Zone is used for the fight against Mecha Sonic, so for Chaotic Space there's... the extremely upbeat Sky Sanctuary theme.
  • Sonic Generations allows for one to select from music from all over the series' history. One can face some of the most intense bosses of Sonic's history with Green Hill zone's music in the background.
• This is done intentionally at multiple points throughout Spec Ops: The Line, courtesy of the Radioman broadcasting his playlist across the Dubai airwaves. One of the game's first unsettling moments is gunning down insurgents to the tune of Deep Purple's "Hush", a song that would sound cool in most other games, but clashes chillingly with the more serious context of this game's gunfights. Much later on, Walker's slaughter of the American soldiers guarding the Radioman is set to "Nowhere to Run" by Martha and the Vandellas; the lyrics are somewhat appropriate, but the mood of the song itself? Not so much.
• Spider-Man: Web of Shadows starts In Medias Res in the middle of a battle against Venom symbiotes in a ravaged New York, set to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
• In Spirit Hunter: NG, a crazed man chains up a group of people, kills one of them when they try to reason with him, and then coats a child in gasoline and sets them alight. Because this horrific scene is taking place in a department store, 'Jingle Bells' can be heard in the background, the dissonance just making it all the worse. The song continues after the flashback is over and Akira sets about investigating the burnt remains.
• In the initial U.S. Release of Spyro: Year of the Dragon, due to a glitch, the final boss battle is backed, not by a dramatic battle theme, but by the theme of the game's first hub world. The European version recycles a boss theme from earlier in the game, and the Greatest Hits re-release gives the battle its own proper battle theme, which is kept in the Reignited Trilogy.
• In Stalin vs. Martians, Reds with Rockets fight colorful cartoony aliens while techno music, Hong Kong pop and campy Glam Rock plays in the background. Then again, given its premise, it's doubtful if any soundtrack could be made for this game without falling into this trope.
• Star Wars: Jar Jar's Journey Adventure Book contains a song about the planet Tatooine, which is a cheerful little ditty that describes the planet as home to fun, sunshine, and strange creatures. This is at odds with the fact that Tatooine is considered a terrible planet to live on, with the residents having to harvest moisture in order to survive, and the planet is also rife with crime and slavery.
• Stubbs the Zombie twists this trope all around. The soundtrack consists of 50s tunes like "Earth Angel", "My Boyfriend's Back", "Mr. Sandman", "If I Only Had a Brain" and others, covered by modern alt bands. (Which are appropriate in the Raygun Gothic setting.) Played straight with such upbeat tunes playing while you eat peoples' brains and turn them into mindless zombie minions. Subverted in that, if you notice, all of the song titles could have alternate, ominous meanings in the context of the game. Further subverted in that the whole point of the game is to parody more serious zombie games & movies and the soundtrack helps make it all the more silly.
• Sunless Sea: Approach the Iron Republic, and you get this jolly Irish-esque song. Pretty nice, until you actually look at the descriptions and find out the Iron Republic is a World of Chaos extraordinaire, where Hell repealed the laws of men and nature and allowed all sorts of weirdness to happen for no particular reason other than amusement. It's a place where your ropes coming to life and biting you as you approach is a reliable sign you're getting closer, and any report you write has a chance of exploding in your admiral's face. Definitely not a nice place to settle down for a dockside party. Either the contrast is deliberate, or they even repealed the laws of Narrative so that kind of dissonance would pass.
• The ending credits theme for most video games is a triumphant or happy piece, or a medley of the various songs throughout the game. However, in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, the ending credits theme is instead played by a very sinister-sounding oom-pah band for some odd reason
• The Japanese soccer game for the Super Famicom/SNES Super Formation Soccer '94 has one of the most weirdest soundtracks choices for many of the national teams that appear in that game. The biggest offenders are the Mexican team, since, instead of using stereotypical Latin American music, the theme for Mexico sounds more like Japanese ethno-rock than Mexican music, the Bolivian team, who uses a wierd mix of Latin American music and Russian beats and England, whose theme is friggin' Punk music mixed with Dance!
  • A majority of Super Mario Bros. series games will actually have extremely cheerful, optimistic music playing over some of the most difficult levels in those games.
• The Super Mario World Game Mod Drama Mistery (the mispelling is part of the name) has this in a secret level, where a brutal massacre themed area has the incredibly illfitting Nyan cat theme playing in the background. It's rather jarring to be going through an area filled with murdered Toads with constant meow sounds in the background.
• Super Meat Boy has the Cotton Alley theme, the most cheery and upbeat song in a generally excellent soundtrack. The catch? The Cotton Alley is absurdly difficult in an already hard game - so you have a cheery song to go with controller-breaking frustration. Listen to it yourself. Just to rub in how cheerful this song is, it's titled "McLarty Party People".
  • It's so dissonant, some fans of the game say the song is about Meat Boy (and the players themselves!) becoming Bored with Insanity. Some fans say the song is mocking you (One commenter on Youtube quips "Hey, this is a girly level! But it's not a fucking joke!")
  • The 2015 soundtrack's rendition of Cotton Alley goes even further in this regard, with song so soft and cheery that they wouldn't sound out of place in a Barbie commercial.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • Super Smash Bros. Brawl has 314 songs to choose from, many of them perfectly fitting for jumping into the heat of battle and getting pumped up — with a few exceptions. It's always amusing to see the most villainous fighters duking it out to the strains of "Ai No Uta" in the background or to hear the chirpy, slow "Forest/Nature Area" song on the menacing, fast-paced Halberd stage.
  • The original game's commercial by KCL Productions is set to 'So Happy Together'. It also incorporates Mood Whiplash.
  • And of course, the game also has Stickerbush Symphony, and it's as maddeningly calming as ever, on what some consider the most frusturatingly difficult level to fight on because it scrolls upwards faster than some characters can jump! (It fits in perfectly with the Subspace stages that it plays with though).
  • Let's not even get started on the "My Heart Will Go On"-esque "Calling To The Night".
  • Sakurai enjoys playing with the trope, though. The above-mentioned "Ai No Uta" is actually about how Pikmin resolutely risk their lives for an alien, with no concern whether or not he loves them. And that's not even getting into "Mother 3 Love Theme", which might be the first song in video gaming to be used for this trope twice. And then there's "Snowman".....
  • Don't forget the fact that the Pokémon Center theme plays on one of the Pokémon stages. Think about it for a minute. A piece of music that normally plays in a place of healing, in a fighting game.
  • For fans of the Sonic the Hedgehog games, it's also rather jarring to hear the Scrap Brain Zone theme playing in a stage based on the Green Hill Zone.
    • Not as jarring as listening to the Sonic Adventure-and-beyond songs on Green Hill Zone, which would have been much more appropriate in a stage based on Sonic Adventure-and-beyond.
  • "Route 209", which is remixed to be even more upbeat and cheerful, can be played on the grueling stage of Spear Pillar, which has the legendaries of Pokémon Diamond and Pearl attacking you with huge beams and exploding platforms.
    • Similarly, "Road to Viridian City (From Pallet Town/Pewter City)", an adventurous and relaxing/leisurely travel song, may at times seem unfitting as background music during intense battles on the Pokémon Stadium 2 stage.
  • "Midna's Lament" is a bit strange to hear when you're in the middle of an over-the-top battle on the Bridge of Eldin.
  • The intro. It's a calm, if rather awesome, Latin song singing over Nintendo characters beating each other up. The lyrics fit a little better. Maybe.
  • Whose idea was it to put "Eight Melodies" into the second BGM mix for the Onett stage anyway?
  • For Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Sakurai has decided to take a different tack, due to seeing the effects of Soundtrack Dissonance firsthand. While in the game's planning stages, he watched a Smash Bros tournament, and was mortified when the final battle was scored to the placid, romantic "The Roost" track from Animal Crossing. Sakurai still admits it's a great song, but perhaps it breaks the mood too much. So he made two changes: first, any song from a relevant franchise can be played on any stage. And second, while he stays mostly hands-off in allowing his music team to choose whatever song they want and what arrangement they use, he asked that any new music for Ultimate have a sense of "immediacy", to better suit the battles. Browsing the sample tracks on the official website shows how well this is working. Although there's nothing stopping the player from deliberately making an entire Soundtrack Dissonance playlist for every stage. Want to play Super Mario Odyssey music on the Super Mario Bros. 2 stage? Go right ahead!
  • Possibly the greatest example of this is the addition of "Ring-a-Ding" from Style Savvy as a song. It's a cheery, upbeat pop tune that's absolutely hilarious to fight to. The best part is that, due to it being in the "Other" category of songs, it can play in the Find Mii stage, which is a dark and dreary castle location with a Mii locked up in a cage and an Eldritch Abomination as a stage boss.
  • As of the 8.1.0 update, players can play any of the current 986 tracks they want in the following stages: Battlefield, Big Battlefield, Small Battlefield and Final Destination. Saying that this increases the chances of Soundtrack Dissonance is simply not enough. Go ahead, try fighting in Final Destination while "Ring-a-Ding" or "Plaza/Title Theme" plays in the background.
  • While Sora's addition to the roster was much welcomed, the soundtrack selections he brought with him were more hit-or-miss, due to the fact that all of them came from Kingdom Hearts exclusively. This is a particular problem for spirit battles, because other than Kairi and Riku^*(and Riku still has this problem to a lesser extent due to not getting his own Leitmotif until Kingdom Hearts II), every other Kingdom Hearts spirit comes from a game after the first one, meaning iconic boss themes like "The 13th Struggle" (for Axel), "Vector to the Heavens" (Xion), and especially "The Other Promise" (Roxas), were left out of their owners' spirit battles and replaced with more generic choices (like "Destati" for Roxas, a song that he has never been associated with before Smash). One of the first things many Game Modders did after Sora's release was patch in the appropriate songs where they belonged.
• System Shock 2 has mall background muzak and announcements contrasting heavily with the infected humans trying to bludgeon you to death and moaning "kill me". And that's without mentioning the speech of the chipper and polite droids that want nothing more than to help you in any way they can — as long as it involves accidentally detonating in your vicinity.
  • The original Shock uses actual elevator music (perjorative sense) on the elevators. After a prolonged firefight (to a vaguely techno soundtrack) the hacker bursts into the elevator, collapses against the back wall, and pushes the button for the next level. Dooo de doo de dooo...

T-Z

• Taiko no Tatsujin has many, many songs that you'd expect to be the last songs to play a taiko drum to, with medleys/remixes of music from Xevious and Darius, just to name a couple examples.
• In the TaleSpin Licensed Game for the Sega Genesis, surprisingly cheery music plays in the Game Over screen, wherein Higher For Hire is bought out by Shere Khan. The thunder and lightning in the background certainly does not help matters.
• Tales of the Abyss has the final boss where Tear sings the Grand Fonic Hymn in the background. And the final boss is her own brother and Luke's swordmaster.
• Tales of Vesperia has the boss fight with Estelle. In the first phase, the standard battle theme plays. Then the game gives the biggest Player Punch in the second phase. The climactic battle theme is dropped in favor of the heart-wrenching The Full Moon and the Morning Star as the boss in question begs Yuri to kill her.
• One ending of The Talos Principle features a beautiful piano melody aptly titled "Heavenly Clouds" playing as the protagonist walks through a dark corridor leading to a sight of a dilapidated city.
• Team Fortress 2's "Meet The Pyro" video. As the Spy says, "One shudders to imagine what inhuman thoughts lie behind that mask... what dreams of chronic and sustained cruelty." ''Do you believe in magic, in a young girl's heart..."
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash Up TV Spot uses a peaceful song about the Turtles... While The Turtles, Shredder, April, Foot Soldiers, Casey, Utrominator, among other characters are kicking each others asses.
• In the Playstation port of Tekken 2, contrasting heavily with the Orchestra Hit Techno Battle arrangement used in the arcade version, the trancy remix of the Mid-Boss theme is surprisingly chilled-out for a fighting game tune, let alone a boss battle theme.
• In Tenchu: Stealth Assassins you take the role of a ninja sneaking about, slicing and sometimes decapitating random mooks to beautifully choereographed orchestral pieces. Just listen to Onikage's theme music, not something you'd expect from an undead demon from Hell, is it?
• Terraria:
  • The Hallow themes (above and underground) are Triumphant Reprises of their mundane counterparts, despite the Hallow being as much a Death World as the Corruption and Crimson, which got more-fitting Dark Reprises instead.
  • The Frost Moon is an event where you slaughter (or get slaughtered by) hordes of elves, living Christmas trees, Santa Mechs and frost spirits. The music playing during the event is a rock piece interluded with jingle bells and merry chimes. In a game where every boss or invasion has an ominous or frantic musical score, it's quite the change of pace.
• In Tetris: The Grand Master 3, if one player is playing Sakura mode, and the other player is playing any other mode, the Sakura music will override the non-Sakura player's music. This can lead to some interesting situations for Sakura's cheerful music, such as hearing it while in the last 300 levels of Shirase mode.
• The peaceful, subdued soundtrack of Thwaite, a homebrew Missile Command clone for NES, sounds like tunes that might be played in a laid-back social sim. It doesn't fit with the frantic Stuff Blowing Up action, emphasizing how abnormal the action is to the characters themselves.
• The unlicensed game Titenic is based on the smash hit film Titanic (1997), so at first it makes sense that the soundtrack consists of covers of the film's music. It makes less sense when you learn it's a Beat 'em Up, meaning you pummel the crap out of everyone on board to the tune of Nearer My God to Thee and My Heart Will Go On.
• Most of Tony Hawk Underground 2's soundtrack is comprised of rock or hip-hop songs of varying styles, but generally sounding as though they fit into Skater culture. Except for Frank Sinatra's That's Life, which seems like a very random choice.
  • Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire can also be found in the same title.
• Touhou Project boss themes are often very sedate and elaborate for a frantic Bullet Hell series. This is often done deliberately, not to make an artistic point, but because ZUN knows players will be hearing them a lot and didn't want them getting tired of it because the music was annoying.
  • In addition, how many players got owned by a Touhou Project boss because they were too busy listening to her pretty, pretty boss theme?
  • Special mention goes to Touhou Chireiden ~ Subterranean Animism, the game which involves you entering Hell^note Former Hell, since Word of God states that Hell was moved due to overpopulation and thus there are no souls of the damned there, so the light?heartedness is justified to a certain extent., has oddly upbeat music and arguably the most cheerful title theme in the series.
• At Ubisoft's E3 Conference Presentation in 2018 they showed a trailer for Trials Rising with The Blue Danube Waltz as background music while horrendous dirt-bike accidents are seen on screen.
• This amusing piece from Turok: Shadow of Oblivion.
  • Notice the title: it's a Suspiciously Similar Song of "The Girl from Ipanema".
• The "Snowy Roads" level in Twisted Metal: Black is a heated close-quarters battle, but the music is beatless, spooky, dark ambience with a One-Woman Wail. No Battle Theme Music here, strangely, except for the "final opponent" theme, which averts this trope.
  • The Holland level in TM 2 is a nowhere-to-hide fight to the death in a barnyard while happy 60's-style rock-n-roll music plays.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: BeBop Deluxe's commentary on "The Core of Things (Metal Mix)":
  Those drums were completely unnecessary! This was supposed to be a very tender moment!
• In Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune, after clearing Story Mode for the first time, you can, after selecting a chapter, pick whatever background music you want. As a result, you can, for example, play a "boss" song on the first stage.
  • Or try the reverse — pick an "ordinary", or even a "happy" track (eg "Driver's Delight" or "Upbeat Gas Junkie") on a Boss Stage (preferably one that doesn't have a Theme Music Powerup to override what you selected), or better yet on the level where you battle the R200 Club (which normally plays an ominious theme).
  • The cheerful result music plays when you finish a story or VS race, even if you lose. Though, it doesn't play if you fail a 10-Outrun stage or force-quit; Maximum Tune 3 has the result music play during those occasions as well.
• Kat and Ana's segment in WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$ has you playing cutesy Nature microgames with a serious samurai epic song in the background.
• In We Happy Few, the scene where Arthur escapes the Wellington Health Institute in the midst of an all-out brawl between Doctors and Plague Wastrels is set to a soft, sweet pop song about smiling and being happy.
• The videogame West of Loathing has some really awesome tunes... for a slapstick comedy game made by the makers of Kingdom of Loathing. It's all Played for Laughs, though.
• What Remains of Edith Finch: The sequence of the infant Gregory drowning in a bathtub is set to Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers".
• The DS version of The World Ends with You hardly has any dramatic music as boss music; only one song plays exclusively during boss battles. The boss battles that don't use that song use regular battle music instead. The final battle does, however, use its own remix of "Twister", the game's main theme. Averted in the Remix versions, which incorporate more remixes throughout the game, including for the boss battles.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1:
  • While the Sad Battle Music "Tragic Decision" is used only a handful of times during some of the most dramatic moments over the course of the story, it's used a fourth time for a deliberately jarring effect as the theme of the Superboss fought at the end of a long sidequest chain. The dissonance? The boss is a blatant Card-Carrying Villain and a member of the local Ridiculously Cute Critter race at that.
  • After the events at the Mechonis Core, you regain control in Colony 6. The town features Evolving Music that get more and more upbeat as the town is reconstructed, and if you've gathered enough materials and done enough quests for one of the highest two tiers you'll hear an extremely happy tune that doesn't fit the party's Darkest Hour at all.
  • Those introduced to the series from Super Smash Bros. or other sources may think "You Will Know Our Names" is the game's Theme Music Power-Up, and it certainly sounds the part. However, it's actually the theme of the notorious Unique Monsters, and the outcome of those battles is often anything but triumphant. However, the track does get used as a more traditional boss theme later on.
• Xenosaga III:
  • This music plays in the background during a very dramatic boss fight instead of the more traditional boss fight music.
  • In the same game, the background music during the Miltian Conflict, one of the bloodiest incidents in the series' backstory, is a heartbreakingly beautiful piano piece.
  • Also, the Song of Nephilim is an in-game phenomenon that actually causes this: while eerily beautiful, it causes susceptiple listeners to go (like Realians) Ax-Crazy, and also has the effect of summoning the Gnosis to wreak havoc. Whenever it plays, destruction and mayhem ensues, all to the tune of a haunting, melancholy female voice...
• Yoshi's Island DS has a mini-boss theme that sounds like it would be more at home in a grassy meadow type level. It has a very cutesy, upbeat theme that suggests the furthest thing from a boss fight.
  • Yoshi's Island DS in general is pretty bad about this. Nearly every track is cheery, upbeat, and full of xylophones, sounding like something from a preschooler's educational TV show. The levels that play them? Well, this plays in an auto-scrolling level full of Chomps and this plays in some of the Brutal Bonus Levels of the game, among other things.
• The Ys series does this all the time, with soundtracks consisting of hard rock, funk, electronic music, and world music in a standard fantasy setting. It's awesome.
  • "Defend! And Escape!" in Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim is a rather depressing piece, played during an intense Escort Mission with downright mournful strings and Drum N' Bass.
  • Naturally, the relaxing, downright triumphant downtempo synth-rock tune of "Quatera Woods" is played in a forest with Everything Trying to Kill You.
  • "Valley of Quicksand" from Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys is a funky Latin beach tune, played, of course, in a harsh quicksand pit-riddled desert.
  • From Ys Book I-II from the Turbo-CD, there's the Point of No Return, The Tower of Darm. It's so huge it takes up half the first game where the Big Bad dwels, so you buy your best gear, ready your potions, prepared for hell, only to be greeted by a jazzy, electronic rave tune...for a song called "Shadow of the Tower of Death", it's almost as if there's a joke at the player's expense. There's also "Palace of Destruction", which is suitably epic, but in this case a bit much, seeing how it sounds like a final boss theme for what's only the first dungeon in the game.
  • The elevator music-style PC Engine version of "Crimson Wings". The Super Famicom version of the song, which is much more upbeat, averts this trope.
• Zombie Claus has Jingle Bells playing throughout the house you're frantically searching for presents through while being pursued by the titular undead old elf.
• The first ZombiU trailer does this, with a hardy cover England's national anthem playing as you watch still scenes of zombies destroying London.

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