A popular one to meme on in JRPG, particularly Tales circles, is (or was, at least, idk if it's too old at this point) is
Lying in Darkness from Tales of Graces. It's the infamous tomb theme from the prologue that's notable for how droning and repetitive it is and is the example I point to that shows Motoi Sakuraba at his absolute worst, when he's both working outside his element and is completely uninspired. He can do good ruins/tombs themes - he has it in him (
Zao Ruins from Tales of the Abyss is great) - but Lying in Darkness feels like he just phoned it in completely and never bothered looking back.
More recently allot of the work from Mitsuo Singa has come under my eye for scrutiny and disdain. He's a contractor that at this point composes 1/3+ of the OSTs for Falcom games and his quality ranges from pretty good to impressively awful, usually favoring the bad side, so it's tough to pick just one.
Welcome to Chaos from Ys 9 might best capture how unstructured his tracks are and trash his rock is, with metal riffs thrown in at random and with awful progression, and how disjointed his compositions can be. On the other hand, his EDM is somehow even worse than his rock, and so shit like
Synchronicity #23 from Trails of Cold Steel IV is burned into my ear drums - The harsh, blaring sounds he uses at :45 and the long, stretched out synth notes through 1:18 were so bad the first time I heard them that I removed my headset and muted the dungeon music shortly after (muting in a Falcom game
). The man can do good work -
Iclucian Dance from Ys 8 is I think everybody's favorite Singa track and I personally love ADD's smooth sax in
Marionette, Marionette from Ys 9 (the famous Singa "buzz" isn't even that bad here although I want to believe Singa could have picked a better instrument to accompany the sax). All largely consistent too since piano, violin, and esp. saxophone (stuff jazzy and gamey) are usually where Singa is best, but man is his track record bad otherwise.
