What is the Valkyrie Profile Voice Mix album?

Valkyrie Profile's music had an unusual supply chain, documented in the developers' own 1998 and 1999 interviews. Motoi Sakuraba composed everything. Sound producer Hiroya Hatsushiba built a library of sampled sound patches and acted, in his words, as the bridge: Sakuraba composed using those sounds on professional equipment, and Hatsushiba converted the data so it would sing on the PlayStation. Designer Masaki Norimoto briefed the songs directly, and Hatsushiba recalled that with Sakuraba they were almost all hits, with almost nothing to reject. Sakuraba's own summary of the brief is the famous part: for all twenty five songs, the request said the same two words, stylish and dark. It is exactly what the finished score sounds like, progressive rock energy under a Norse funeral sky, from a composer whose background was a progressive rock keyboard trio called Deja Vu.

The game received three albums: the original soundtrack, an arrange album whose tracks Sakuraba chose himself, deliberately more subdued than the energetic soundtrack to balance it, and the Voice Mix. For the Voice Mix, Sakuraba combined arranged music from the score with the recorded voices of the game's characters, the einherjar and gods speaking inside the music itself. He later called it a defining album for him, in a certain sense, because he had never written anything like it.

He also left the cost on the record, in a 2002 interview looking back. Searching through more than a thousand lines of dialogue for the ones that would fit the music was, in his words, extremely trying, and so much of Valkyrie Profile's dialogue is dark that after working on it he would be kind of depressed, starting to have trouble sleeping. His closing advice to fans was simple: definitely check it out if you have the chance. The Library agrees, and notes that the album only exists in this form because one composer agreed to live inside his own game's saddest lines for weeks.