So I've been listening to these tunes you posted and now having heard them quite a few times I guess I could share some views.
You seem to have quite an identifiable style that all your songs are in... even though they vary (as usual), I could probably easily tell that "these songs were made by the same composer" if pretty much any of these two were played after each other. I'd also say the style is kinda, well, JRPG-y. At least in quite many songs.
Then, regarding this:
I know what you mean about the generic symphonic score... in a lot of triple A games these days there is an abundance of orchestral music that despite having very high quality samples (or in some cases live orchestras) and excellent production, it just feels like it lacks heart. There are so few cases these days where I can actually even remember the music, as compared with the NES/SNES days where the melodies were so catchy and memorable.
I also agree with this. Some of those old NES/SNES melodies are very memorable. However, your compositions don't really feel like they're there yet. I found these songs quite hard to grasp in a way that would have made me hum them afterwards or even when listening to the songs again. I'd say that if you want to make catchy melodies, you need to repeat elements a lot more and not stuff so much in a single song; this is how you make pretty much anything extremely catchy. More on this a bit later in this post.
Also, regarding your style, it seems quite limited right now. All your songs are pretty much slower-paced and the "feel" they have is kinda similar all the way through. When listening to music, I often find myself thinking about some of our games playing to the music, but I couldn't really think about this while listening to your songs. Though bigger part in this is probably the fact that the kind of music you make wouldn't really fit any of the projects we have in mind.
I know a lot of composers who have an amazing range in the styles of music they can produce, most of them Japanese. To be honest though, most of these are anime soundtrack composers - I don't really know all that many game composers, I can mostly name Nobuo Uematsu and some others whose names pop up ever so often in various places. But for example take the likes of Yasushi Ishii (Hellsing OST, Darker than Black S2 OST) or Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop, Darker than Black S1, Macross Frontier, Turn-A Gundam to name a few) or Tsuneo Imahori (Trigun, Hajime no Ippo, Gungrave) - these composers produce an amazing variety of music for the stuff they do. Take the most recent one, Darker than Black S2 for example. The music varies from aggressive rave to jazzy rock to moody and melodic piano tunes, all in the same soundtrack. It's quite amazing.
Then there's also composers who have very identifiable styles, like Yuki Kajiura. Though even though she has an identifiable style, she can also vary quite a lot - most importantly, she can make very moody slow tunes as well as fast-paced action themes. And whenever she teams up with a singer, everything she produces is pretty much amazing (see FictionJunction YUUKA or Kalafina songs for example).
But back to game composers, there's also one game composer who has pretty much perfected the art of making extremely catchy and amazing game music. He also happens to be Japanese and as indie as you can get. In other words, as you probably already guessed, ZUN, the man behind Touhou.
Touhou music is probably one of the ear-wormiest music on earth. How does he achieve it? Well, when you listen to his compositions, you can hear that he usually has about 3-4 "element" sections per song, which are varied as the song progresses, but there's usually one or two strong and followable main melodies going on at every section. After hearing a Touhou song once, you can usually hum it afterwards whenever you hear the song again or even hum them when you're not listening to them, since the main melodies are very catchy and stick to your mind. He's probably one of the most successful indie composers ever when considering the huge amount of fans of his works alone. And then there's also that 500 gigabytes worth of remixes and re-arrangements of his songs. You don't get that much of fanworks without doing something right.
<EDIT> One more thing I completely forgot about and probably one of the most important points: Peaks. Good songs will have points where they "peak" in terms of audio satisfactory, which is preceeded by build-up for this peak. Your compositions seem to lack this. Like said, your songs have some pretty complex stuff going on at times, and the tempo seems to remain quite slow throughout all songs. During songs, they don't seem to "grow" - in quite many cases, when a song ended, I thought "oh, it ended already? It hardly even managed to began" because there was no real build-up to be found. There were elements of build-up and places where the songs could have peaked, but they didn't because there wasn't enough emphasis put on the peak parts or the build-up parts. So to sum it up, the feeling I get from listening to your songs is that they are flat and "bland" through the whole song and maybe a bit too complex for their own sake. These combined result in the fact that the songs are pretty hard to grasp, and thus they don't turn out to be something really memorable.
</EDIT>Have you listened to any of the composers I listed above? I'd love to hear your opinions regarding these too, and also I'd like to hear about your goals as a composer. I know you want to make catchy and melodic tunes akin to the ones produced in the NES/SNES era, which I totally respect. But for that, there's still work to do in my opinion. You're clearly talented and clearly do something right already (I mean you don't win "best music score" prizes for nothing), and I'd love to hear more about you and your songs in the future.
PS. By the way, based on your name, I take it you're american-japanese? Nevermind, browsed your site a bit and found out that this is indeed the case.
EDIT: Looks like I accidentally quoted my own post when I meant to edit it... removed the duplicate now.
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