The first scene was recorded with no voice-acting, just as it is in the game. Cloud lies in darkness as voices in his head silently move across the screen. As he awakens, Aeris's flower garden fades into view, easily the most verdant natural scene the game has shown us so far. (Remember, all we've have seen up to this point is the run-down Midgar slums.) Just as we take in the setting, the music begins to play, a soft rendition of Aeris's theme called "Flowers Blooming in the Church." Cloud and Aeris's first conversation is punctuated by moments of silence and odd pauses, but their strange flow only adds to the scene's mystery and charm. Aeris moves towards the camera, then walks away, and a new instrument picks up the melody as the characters move from introductions to conversation. Through it all, the music reigns supreme.

For the second example, I convinced my friend, voice-actor Sarah Elmaleh, to help me re-create the same scene with voiceover performances. (Sacrilege, I know, but bear with me.) As you watch the video, try not to be distracted by the individual performances - notice instead how immediately the presence of a human voice changes the way your ear focuses. Instead of hearing only the gradual swell of the music accompanying the subtle, pantomimed interplay between the two characters, our ears are drawn immediately to the sound of the voices. When Aeris begins to talk at length about her flowers, the soundtrack is swallowed whole. Our ears simply don't have the bandwidth to process both a strong melody and a person talking.

Imagine if the entire game had been like that! I think that an HD re-release of FFVII would lose a great deal of the spirit of the original, not because of updated graphics or character models, but because adding a vocal track would sacrifice the lovely stillness of the original game. Look at Advent Children. The vocal cast of the 2005 film is top-notch, but the more the characters talk, the more the film starts to feel like an unfocused mess. That chaotic quality is even more evident when held up against the elegance of the game that preceded it.

I remember the voice-acting turning point. It was in the early 1990's. The adventure games I was playing started to include a spoken audio track on their CD-ROM versions, giving those of us with a SoundBlaster the option to finally hear our favorite characters speak. The first game I played that had this option was Sam & Max Hit The Road. Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson's performances were perfectly charming, but I remember being turned off nonetheless. I wanted to imagine the characters' voices for myself, I wanted to slowly make my way through each environment, figuring out puzzles while accompanied only by the goofy musical score.

I played Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers with no spoken dialogue, and upon revisiting it, I found that even Tim Curry's scenery-chewing performance as Gabriel didn't work for me. Similarly, I've played through the special editions of the first two Monkey Island games and more often than not I've found myself turning off the vocal track in favor of the original presentation.

Don't get me wrong; I have nothing against good videogame voice-acting. Despite the easy jabs at his overexposure, I dig Nolan North's work in the Uncharted games and beyond. The Metal Gear series just wouldn't be the same to me without David Hayter's hypnotic, gravely performance as Solid Snake, and I've even written at length about how much I enjoy the work of Mass Effect's Jennifer Hale.

All of those games, the Uncharteds, the Metal Gears, the Mass Effects, purposefully approximate Hollywood films, and so their soundtracks follow the template that's been established by Hollywood composers: big, strong melodies that play only during opening credits and occasionally during less busy action scenes, with the music transitioning to quiet harmonic pads during spoken conversations. Those games have solid, sometimes even great soundtracks, but they're hampered by the cinematic format. They can't compete with the rich musical experience offered by a dialogue-free game.

Nowhere is it written that games must approximate Hollywood films, and it's no coincidence that the games with the best soundtracks tend to be the furthest from the Hollywood model. There is an entire school of new, exciting composers doing great work on games that—you guessed it!—don't feature any voice-acting at all. Danny Baranowsky's groovy jams from Super Meat Boy, Souleye's triumphant bounce in VVVVVV, Laura Shigihara's joyfully creepy Plants vs. Zombies score, Double Fine composer Peter McConnell's terrific work on Stacking and Costume Quest, and Jim Guthrie's extraordinary Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP soundtrack. In each of those games, the music doesn't simply compliment the story or characters, it's a character unto itself, and a vital part of the overall experience.

It could be argued that if spoken dialogue isn't an integral part of a videogame, neither is music. After all, it's perfectly possible to play most games with the sound turned all the way off. But sound effects, spoken dialogue, and music should't be lumped together so easily. As I argued in my column last month, I believe there is a fundamentally musical aspect to the act of playing a game, and the presence of a good soundtrack heightens and compliments those mechanical rhythms. Like a well-written duet, the interaction between gameplay and musical score creates a fascinating sort of über-composition that is unique to the videogame medium.

As developers add spoken dialogue and sound effects to their games, they should always weigh the value of those things against the possibility that they will overshadow their game's other vital aspects: bounce, flow, rhythm, and feel. Games and music can both wordlessly convey feelings of challenge and stress, joy and terror, and progression and release, and a talented composer can weave his or her melodies straight into a game's mechanical systems to create something dynamic and uniquely beautiful. But that's only possible if he or she is given the space to do so - there's a fine line between music and sound, and an even finer one between sound and cluttered noise.

Kirk Hamilton is a writer and musician in San Francisco. He is the games editor at Paste Magazine and writes about music, games and culture for a variety of publications. His monthly column at Kotaku focuses on the many ways that music and video games intersect. He can be found at kirkhamilton.com and on Twitter @kirkhamilton. Email him at Kirk [at] KirkHamilton [dot] com.