"It would be difficult to explain the music of Drag-on Dragoon in a single paragraph. I want you to imagine the following: on a morning without school or work, a carefully selected egg has been lying on the table since the previous night at room temperature. You lightly pluck the egg off of the table and crack it over a bowl filled with cooked koshihikari rice, adding a dash of katsuobushi, finely shaved on a wood block. To top it off, and here you need to be careful, you add a few drops of light-colored soy sauce. You take your time to lightly stir in these ingredients. Filtered amidst the grains of cooked rice, part of the egg cooks, and part remains raw. It must not be mixed in too thoroughly. If it is possible, it is best to leave two to three clumps of white rice completely untouched by the egg, sitting like clumps of marble. Combined with the raw egg, this rice, which is as hot as possible, will make the perfect temperature. We calmly debate the merits of our respective ingredients as all of this spreads inside your mouth and fills your empty stomach. Then, the song as we kill each other."
Welcome... to a world without song!
The tracks from Drakengard drone on for a long time as you and your buddy Caim mow people down, and over the course of the game devolve into more and more disorienting experiences. The carefully chosen classical phrases are chopped up, reversed, looped, halted and stuttered, sometimes so suddenly that it seems the output device itself is struggling.
In a twist about as surprising as finding lint in your pocket, sound director Nobuyoshi Sano was told to "please contract the music to an outsider" for Drakengard 2.
A list of the music sampled
Dvorak: Othello, Op. 93; Carnival Overture, Op. 92; Symphony No. 9 "From the New World"
Bartok: The Miraculous Mandarin
Debussy: La Mer
Mahler: Symphony No. 5
Mozart: Le Nozze Di Figaro
Tchaikovsky: The Swan Lake; Capriccio Italien; The Nutcracker Suite; 1812 Overture Solennelle; Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture
Respighi: Feste Romane
Wagner: Gotterdämmerung; Die Walküre; Tannhäuser
Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio Espagnol
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
Holst: The Planets
To the right is a playlist compiling some of them. (Abbreviated for time. Feel free to contact me if you happen to have them narrowed down further!)
There is also an album of chiptune arrangements, including tracks from DOD2 and Nier here. It's interesting to see how much of the chaos of the originals live on in them.