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Part One of this article can be found here: http://scooteratreides.blogspot.com/2011/02/appeal-of-videogame-music-for-older.html

I’ve heard a lot of JapRPG music before on various SNES  games, and it was alright (Terranigma springs to mind), but one of the first times I’d gotten into a game for its stand-alone music (I mean that literally; in this game I’d literally stand by myself and just listen to the score) was actually not a JapRPG, but an American one. It’s also my favorite game of all time: Secret of Evermore. It was developed by Squaresoft USA, and
many thought it was a shallow copy of Secret of Mana But I loved it, and love it still. The theme for Fire Eye’s Village grabbed me, and it just got better from there. Tracks such as ‘Dog Maze’, ‘The Queens’, and  ‘Cecil’s Town’ were a revelation to me in comparison to the JapRPG’s I’d been playing: They generally tried to do, for want of a better term,  ‘orchestral pieces’ in MIDI, which sometimes made them feel overcrowded, mainly because they were trying to establish an ‘epic’ kind of vibe. SoE, on the other
hand, managed to establish it’s particular complementary vibe for each section through what are, in general, rather sparse pieces, which was new to me and it grabbed me hard. I was impressed that these relatively simple tracks managed to give me the correct kind of emotional response they were going for, with no need to overdrive the SNES’s sound chip with as many audio tracks as possible. I didn’t see this again until Final Fantasy VII.

Final Fantasy VII (hereby referred to as FF7) was, of course, an amazing game. I actually took two weeks off from school to play it; that’s how keen I was for it’s awesomeness to envelop me like some kind of spiky-haired blanket of Japanese storytelling. The music from the opening scene, and in the slums, was good, but when I really started to take notice was when I heard the track ‘Oppressed People’, in the area around the Honeybee Manor. It reminded of the kind of techniques used by Secret of Evermore, and again, the
first time I entered that area I just stood there waiting to hear the entire track before it looped back to the start. As those who have played it will know, you end up having to do some weird stuff in the area, such as have a squatting contest with some gay bodybuilders, as well as trying to get the material together to make the male lead, Cloud, a drag costume. It was the first time since SoE that I’d seen/heard an area, the
activities therein, and the music seem perfectly in sync. Other areas the music in FF7 achieved this effect were at the Golden Saucer, with Red XIII in the Valley of the Fallen Star, and, of course, in the final battle with the game’s big bad, Sephiroth, as what could arguably be called the game’s greatest track, ’One Winged Angel’, pumped away in the background.
Anyway, I just wanted to establish some examples before I start the crux of the article, the effect this music has on the older gamer. Of course, for many older gamers the music here means nothing to them, even if they did play the above-mentioned games, so I’ll relate how these affected me personally and hope that you can make your own comparisons based on what I write.
I was quite late joining the computer generation, because as we didn’t have much I’d always preferred to ask for, on birthdays and Christmas, a new game, or, very rarely, a new console (after they had come down in cost, two or three years after release). So I didn’t end up getting my first computer until sometime in the late 90’s. But having used PC’s my friends owned I became aware of emulators, and that’s what drove me, and a friend to help me, build a PC from various spare parts I could scrounge. I was dying to play all those old SNES games I loved so much and that, I thought, were better than any of the stuff I was playing on my PlayStation. And that's when I learned that, really, you just can't go back. Stuff you never noticed before, because you never had a point of comparison, reared their ugly heads, like an angry Hydra awakened by your nostalgic cravings: poor controls, shoddy graphics, poor gameplay, and the like. This absolutely crushed me at the time. Out of the hundred or so games I'd managed to play thanks to cheap rentals, or trades with friends, only a small handful were really playable from start to finish*. But that's when I realized that the music was the one thing that could take me back to what I consider to be my halcyon days of gaming, namely my SNES/PlayStation days. (It was years later, when I finally got the internet for the first time in 2009, that I could get the OST's for the PlayStation games like the Final Fantasy games released for the console that I rediscovered this phenomena).