I tend not to think about music so much in games. I guess it's all about how it fits together. But sometimes a track really stands out, and I turn into a Youtube zombie until I can find it. Here are games that spring to mind as having tracks that particularly haunted me (or were just plain memorably cool).
For a very cool game music blog:
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The whole damned soundtrack is great. Great for the atmosphere, with a wooden quality in the violins evoking some of that old-meets-new theme that the game's trying to hit. They actually let people download the entire thing, which I was very happy for.
I think the specific piece is called Cloakwood Forest. It has a quality that I wanted to call cinematic when I was first describing it, but then I realized a movie would never, ever take that much time with a musical theme. This is more about Romanetic-era composer stuff, trying to paint pictures purely with sound. Just great.
The Sacred Icon (theArbiter's Theme) was a piece of music I spent a particularly long time trying to track down. The part I love is featured in the raid the Arbiter does on the heretics' suspended platform. It has this sort of doomed mission feel that fits his warrior's mentality, taking on a mission he knows will be his end, but doing it anyway, surrounded by wild, gusting winds. Frigging great.
Never played it, but the main theme to this song unlocked my forgotten love of space music, that is, music that seems to inhabit a large space (and not much bigger space than outer space itself). It feels slightly alien, too. Any song that can do that just wins. I lack musical vocabulary but I think it's that harmony of round notes that splays across the main theme, before the military march part, that does it for me. Probably was featured during the ads for the game.
Specifically Darkside of Xeen has this moment in the dungeons, one of the two alternating themes for them, that has such strong, almost technological menace to it, marching, growling toward you in a way. Just great. When I would run into it in a tower or dungeon I would just stop and listen to it for a time.
The main theme plays WAAAAAY too much, to the point where I was apologizing to everyone else in the room when it started up again. But I still love it despite its overuse. Very heroic and evocative of the fantasy mood.
I mean more than just Phantasy Star II, but I'll single this one out as having music that both got you ready for adventure, but also prepared you for the possible sacrifices involved.
This game is almost a cliche with some people, but during a particularly dark moment in my life, the song that plays as Cloud is climbing a hill somewhere in the mid-game felt like a ray of sunshine to me. The overworld theme is one of the first songs I ever heard in any game that really made realize a game could deliver emotion subtly. Not by killing off a main character, but just through its skillful application of music. Few game soundtracks bring out so much whimsy in me as this one's does. Nabuo Uematsu, composer.
The main theme, with its strange organ music, also came to me at a dark point in my life and helped emotion that needed to get out get out. I don't quite know why it worked (and I don't know why dark moments tend to coincide with Final Fantasy games, but that's putting the cart before the horse I think). Again there was whimsy and sadness in this one too, or maybe I'm projecting it a bit. Whatever. Nabuo Uematsu gets credit for both these soundtrack gems.
Holy crap. I'm not sure I noticed the incidental music so much, but when you have a ton of those old soft shoes (which in modern times seem to exclusively connote haunted decadence for some strange reason) playing every time people are getting blasted, it helps create a great nightmare tapestry. Yes, I used the word tapestry.