Great article, my friend Kevin. I had to play the videos and go back and read the paragraph to understand some of your points. I have learned new things after reading your great article as I'm one of those who really care about sound/music. When I talk about games that have great music regardless of the overall quality of them, I can only think of Nier. That game had one of the greatest soundtracks I've ever heard in this generation. I used to enter the house only to hear the music there. Also, I used to go to that girl in the center of the village who plays the guitar and sings an amazing song. There are many games that I really enjoyed the music in them, there's Heavy Rain, Final Fantasy: Crysis Core, MGS4, FF13, and so on. As for your second question, I played some games that had bad music but I can't remember any of them.
Great article. Really great. In a video game, all I ever care about is the main character. If the main character was a good one, then the game has the potential to be good "just like Snake and Shepard". This is also the main reason why I didn't enjoy the story of Crysis 2, playing as a character who doesn't speak at all killed the game for me. I also would like to mention some games that had really good stories but the game itself lacked some essential elements which affected the game's quality. Look at Yakuza 3 & 4, or Mafia II. All these games had great stories "and cutscenes too" but gameplay and controls were bad, so a lot of players -unfortunately- decided to pass them.
Meghterb's comments