SentinelComanche, thanks for the feedback and great points.
This more recent
post with updated tracks might address some of your points.
You did bring up some good discussion topics though.
I think Denny Schneidemesser or Grégoire Lourme themselves would change their writing style if hired to write specifically for ZK.
Their music became synonymous/reified with ZK because of repetition, and not necessarily because it told the story of ZK or anything inherently Sci-Fi.
Put a slightly different way, if you never heard their music with ZK and had to guess the genre, I think you'd be hard pressed to answer. Hence their work is epic, but not necessarily futuristic or sometimes even appropriate for ZK.
The most egregious example of a nice composition horribly shoehorned in for the sake of variety is "
A Whole World on Paper", which seems more like a Chinese opera's backstage circa early industrial era vice robots duking it out.
For the title track, I wanted to be reserved. If everything is epic - nothing is. Menu music that screams epic from the get go tend to fall more in the cheap app camp you're talking about since they feel insecure about their content and need to artificially pump.
The realistic scenario for our main menu is you're either waiting in the lobby for the next game to start or jumping in to spectate within the first 2 minutes. You don't want horns blaring at you every single time you open the game, it gets old and annoying. The lobby is not epic, in fact, it's downright boring before the fight. That being said, the epic part of the song kicks in 2 minutes after a while, which feels more fitting. Subsequence tracks could be variations of combat themes that uses the taiko drums in tribal patterns (ie like Halo).
Games I took main menu music philosophy from: Spec Ops: The Line, Halo: CE, Starcraft: BW, Far Cry.
