Café Leblanc — Persona 5 Smooth Jazz & Rain

Shoji Meguro scored Persona 5 in 2016 in a register almost no other game touches: acid jazz, funk bass, Hammond organ, and Lyn's vocals over the top. Café Leblanc is the back-alley coffee shop in Yongen-Jaya where the protagonist sleeps in the attic, and its theme "Beneath the Mask" became the piece people put on to study. This mix buries it in rain and quiet room noise — cups, half-heard conversation, the door.

The added ambience is the whole point. Meguro mixes his originals dry and forward, which is right for a menu screen and slightly too present for background use; rain and room tone push everything back a metre. Five and a half million plays suggests a lot of people arrived here the same way, looking for the Leblanc feeling on a night when they were not playing anything at all.