What I especially love about this song is the sustained, poor production quality noise. Utuk Xul, hailing from Cali, Colombia, are not a band to write home about, and The Goat of the Black Possession is not a particularly special album. One especially degrading review on Encyclopaedia Metallum gives it a lowly 25%, and I’m afraid there’s not much in the review that I can argue with. But what may well be entirely generic songs are masked by a really menacing and constant wall of sinister noise. The quality of the recording is spot on, whatever one might say about the song writing. On one hand “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” really captures the aural spirit of black metal. On the other hand it captures everything that’s especially cheesy about the genre it represents.
Kicking off with a liturgical ode to Satan, the album goes on to mimic every stereotype of the genre in fairly generic form. It’s impossible to tell whether the band is trying really, really hard to be evil or whether the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek a la Carpathian Forest, but unlike Carpathian Forest they lack the relative fame to make that distinction relevant. This song’s title refers to Lucifer–the band present themselves as devout Satanists of the literal Christian sort, not LaVey’s variety–and the lyrics are everything one could hope for in especially cheesy black metal: “Call the moon, Lucifer, the morbid star! The ancient god of the light, my force! Lucifer prince of the abyss! Morbid star, light of the abyss! The hell light of the storms!”, etc.
The one thing the 25% review got definitively wrong, I think, is in chastising them for buying into the Swedish scene he dubs “norsecore”. The term is an entirely appropriate insult for one of black metal’s weakest subgenres, but part of what makes most bands in the Swedish scene pretty bad is their refined recording quality; the blast beat ad nauseam routine isn’t an innately bad thing. On “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” (What became of “part I” is anyone’s guess. It doesn’t appear on this album.) I think Utuk Xul really nailed it. The atmospheric noise just screams evil here, and, moreso than other tracks on the album, this song is sufficiently devoid of attempts at song construction to function as one continuous, sustained explosion. I love it.
I actually find The Goat of the Black Possession as a whole fairly enjoyable for the same reason I like this song, but there might be a bit of nostalgia playing into that too. It was the product of one of my earliest completely arbitrary purchasing sprees in search of unknown black metal bands, and in 2003 I had a lot less to compare it to. “The Ancient God of Light (part II)” is the only track I’ll flaunt without reservations, but if you really enjoy its effects as a background piece then you probably won’t be disappointed by the rest.
Whether Utuk Xul really take themselves seriously is anyone’s guess, but intentionally or not they succeeded in producing one of the lamest photo shoots I have ever seen. Enjoy:
I’m going to keep it fairly friendly for these first few entries before I delve into the darker side of the scene. Today’s feature song is Tunteellinen Valssi by Karelian folk band Myllärit, appearing on their 1999 release In the Light of the White Night. Though this is the only album I have by them, the band have been around for quite some time. They first formed in 1992, and they have since released seven albums.
I am not particularly good at tracing older musical styles, and I don’t know if there’s any sort of precedent for waltzes in Finnish/Karelian tradition, but Tunteellinen Valssi and the album as a whole keep the instrumentation fairly local. In the Light of the White Night consists of a wide range of styles which nevertheless all fall within the broader category I’ve come to associate with Karelian folk. Unlike Poropetra, Myllärit have no ties to the metal scene to the best of my knowledge. I can only speak for one album, but from what I’ve read I gather they stick pretty consistently to traditional folk forms.
I think the majority of their songs are sung in Finnish, but their Finnish Wikipedia entry (yay Google Translate) claims that they also sing in Ingrian, a Finnic language only spoken by about 500 people in the Ingria region just south of Karelia. It always excites me to see modern folk and metal bands doing their part to preserve fading linguistic and cultural traditions.
“Tuatha Dé Danann” refers to mythological pre-Christian inhabitants of Ireland, and contestedly translates as “peoples of the goddess Danu”. If an entirely appropriate name for an Irish folk metal band, what makes Tuatha de Danann especially odd is that they hail from Varginha, Brazil. The band can, moreover, claim to be one of the earliest-formed acts to perform folk metal, dating back to 1995 (though they quite recently broke up.)
Tuatha de Danann are fundamentally power metal–the definitive metal genre of Central and Southern America (I was in Costa Rica when Iron Maiden played there in 2009 and you’d have thought it was a national holiday). I’ve never been a big power metal enthusiast, so I never had much of a desire to explore Tuatha de Danann’s albums further, but the opening track to Tingaralatingadun, released in 2001, does a delightful (and historically, exceptionally early) job of flawlessly merging power and folk metal in a manner somewhat similar to Elvenking during their finer years. It is a bit more earthy than Elvenking, much to its advantage, and the effect of the constant guitar solo doodling, whistle, and generally airy production creates a lighthearted, mischievous vibe that I would describe as more fantasy than folk–or at least, it invokes a more fairytale superstition of early morning magic. Follow these guys into a cave and you might find a few hundred years have passed on your way back out.
The biggest selling point for me in this song is the tone of the whistle. I cannot sufficiently emphasize my love for whistles. There is no instrument I enjoy more, either to listen to or to play (banjos get a close second, though I’d be kidding myself if I claimed I could play one). “The Dance of the Little Ones” is especially successful in generating a sort of ‘through the fog’ whistle tone which I’ve heard employed by such diverse musicians as Belarusian folk band Stary Olsa (Стары Ольса) and Japanese video game composer Miki Higashino, and which I desperately wish I knew how to reproduce.
October is a fine month for music. Everything from the cheesiest of black metal to the most ethereal of folk finds its home in a season which glorifies gore and the old gods together in a grand renunciation of conventional Christian values. I make an effort every year to present a sort of soundtrack to the season. Last year this amounted to a meager one post, but this go around I aim to do a song a day every day from now until the 31st.
The criteria will be two-fold: the song must be either dark, pagan, fantasy-oriented, or at least authentically folk; and I cannot have ever featured it on Shattered Lens before. It’s going to be an interesting ride. I feel at the moment completely out of touch with my music collection, and too hopelessly bereft of time to do anything about it. Musically, I spent the grand bulk of this year focusing on vgm. I must say the venture was eye-opening, and I have a much broader appreciation of video game music to show for it, but it’s a subject quite far from my typical focus. I will be putting my vgm series on hold for the month (it is incomplete anyway, and such a break will hopefully give me time to extend it), and focusing on music a bit more relevant to the season.
Today’s feature song is Tunturikukka by Finnish folk act Poropetra, taken from their self-titled 2004 demo release. While their full-length album features substantial rock influence, their demo is an outstanding example of uncompromised contemporary folk of the Finnish/Karelian variety. The band’s name is, according to Encyclopaedia Metallum, “the name of a mythological blue moose which travels through the sky”. Their founder, Juha Jyrkäs, has supposedly collaborated with folk metal legends Korpiklaani.
Tunturikukka is a track I’ve been keeping around for years now. I don’t recall when exactly I discovered the band, but I may have had it in my collection since the year of its release, and it still never fails to make an impression on me. I’ve always extracted a warm, sort of wintery vibe from the tune, and there’s something a bit reverent about it. From what I’ve read, I gather the lyrics pay ample homage to Finnish mythology, and on Tunturikukka most among the demo tracks I get a real sense of connection with the past.
VGM Entry 60: Splatterhouse
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
Today is October 1st, and Shattered Lens readers probably have a good idea of what that means.
Namco’s Splatterhouse series first emerged in the arcades in 1988. As the advertisement poster used in this music video suggests, it was one of the first video games that really possessed the graphical capacity for some good old fashion gore. You play as Rick Taylor, a run of the mill college student who takes refuge from a thunderstorm in an old rickety mansion and inevitably finds himself demonically possessed, hacking and slashing his way through all sorts of hellspawn and ultimately butchering his girlfriend before defeating the mansion’s demon fetus-spawning womb and escaping. Quality stuff.
The game is accompanied by quite an impressive soundtrack.
When not taken to weird, incoherent noises such as on “Poltergeist”, the game has a knack for some rather pretty tunes that are only disturbing when placed in context. (The theme for Jennifer is one such instance; let’s not forget that the scene results in you chopping her head off.) I am not sure whether Yoshinori Kawamoto or Katsuro Tajima composed Splatterhouse. The former name crops up slightly more often on vgm websites, but trusting the majority consensus has lead me astray plenty of times before. Unfortunately, Namco have featured so seldom in my gaming music compilation that I am not really in a position to take an educated guess.
Splatterhouse is probably not thought of by most gamers as an arcade series. The original 1988 Splatterhouse only found obscure ports–to the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 in 1990 and the Fujitsu FM Towns in 1992. Its sequels made a bigger splash, becoming staples of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. Splatterhouse 2 and Splatterhouse 3 were released only seven months apart, in August 1992 and March 1993 respectively.
Both sequels were composed by Milky Eiko, and despite their wide acclaim, Milky’s rather outlandish pseudonym does not seem to have surfaced since. I could not find any other Eiko associated with Namco, and he must be regarded as both one of the last and one of the most famous game composers to be buried in complete anonymity, before composition credits became standard.
On an odd final note, there was actually another series game, Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti, released in 1989. It was an SD game, that is, super deformed, which generally refers in video games to over the top, excessively cute anime portrayals of familiar characters from earlier games. Released exclusively on the Famicom, Wanpaku Graffiti offered good clean serial murder for the whole family.
VGM Entry 59: Street Fighter II and SNES domination
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
An enormous disparity had emerged between the Super Nintendo and competing platforms by the early to mid-90s. The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, released two years sooner, still didn’t have much to offer, and the arcade was fading fast. The former simply couldn’t compete with the SNES’s ability to simulate real instrumentation, and the latter, I suspect, was no longer funded the way it used to be. This lends itself to a number of comparisons, but in consideration of the fact that my available time for writing these articles is rapidly coming to an end, let’s just jump straight to the point.
The Street Fighter II series is a massive and confusing string of titles through which Capcom managed to milk a great deal of money releasing minor updates and new characters over a short period of time. The original Street Fighter II came out for the arcade in 1991. This was followed (in the arcade) by Street Fighter II: Champion Edition (April 1992), Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting (December 1992), Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (October 1993), and Super Street Fighter II Turbo (March 1994).
If that were all, it would be fairly easy to sort out, but each of these games was given a different title based on region and platform. Street Fighter II Turbo for the SNES, for instance, was a port of Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, not Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Street Fighter II: Special Champion Edition for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive was not a port of Street Fighter II: Champion Edition, but rather of Hyper Fighting. The additions made in the original Champion Edition were carried over into most future versions of the game and ports, such that the original Sega Master System Street Fighter II (released in Brazil, where there was inexplicably still an SMS market, in 1997) was actually Street Fighter II: Champion Edition.
I would love to sort all this in a nice coherent list, but it would take me all day, and as I said, my time for writing these articles is starting to run short. So let’s just look at the version currently playing: Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers. This one was released for the Super Nintendo in 1994 as simply Super Street Fighter II. Skip ahead to 5:12 and you’ll hear a delicious little oriental arrangement reminiscent of Miki Higashino’s Yie Ar Kung-Fu. (Again, time restricts me from actually finding the name of the song.)
Wikipedia credits Isao Abe and Syun Nishigaki with composing the Super Street Fighter II soundtrack. This is a little confusing as well, since Isao Abe and Yoko Shimomura get credited for the original Street Fighter II and a lot of the music is the same, but whoever wrote it, you’ve now heard the arcade version of the song, and I think we can all agree that at least in the 80s sound quality (not necessarily composition and arrangement) was substantially better in the arcade than on any home system.
The same song appears in the SNES Super Street Fighter II song compilation at 4:29, and I don’t think I need to point out how it’s better. Here’s a game released for a 1990 system, and the quality of sound is decisively better than Capcom’s 1993 arcade release. Forget about state of the art technology in the arcade; I think at this point companies were cutting costs, and high-end sound systems had to go.
Here’s another case in point. Shining Force (Sega, 1992) was a tactical RPG released for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. Composed by Masahiko Yoshimura, it is one of the most highly regarded soundtracks on the system. Aside from a ton of spin-off titles, Shining Force as a series only saw three installments, and each of these featured a different composer. Motoaki Takenouchi, for all his talents, didn’t do such a hot job with Shining Force II (Sega, 1993), and the third was released on the Saturn, so we’ll just focus on the original.
Masahiko Yoshimura did a really outstanding job here with the limited resources available to him, especially when the gameplay situation called for intensity. The tracks beginning at 1:47 and 2:34 especially impress me in this regard. Yoshimura’s militant snare carries the day, and there’s also something interesting going on in company with the bass. The deep piano tones on this second track play tricks on my ears, projecting a piano vibration onto the bass when I listen to the song as a whole which clearly isn’t there when I focus on the bass specifically. Both at the start of the 1:47 track and mid-way into the next, around 3:19, he musically employs a tone that sounds more like a jumping sound effect in order to simulate an instrument sample that probably wasn’t available on the system, and it works. You can catch some more of this in the track that kicks off at 7:23.
Packed with catchy songs creatively arranged to artificially simulate a higher degree of orchestration than the system allowed, Shining Force was a great success.
But what it took a lot of creativity to pull off on the Genesis the SNES made easy. Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando (both of Kirby series fame) composed Arcana (HAL Laboratory, 1992) the same year Shining Force came out, and the improvement in sound quality was staggering. RPGs to a large extent defined the SNES. I have no statistics to back this up, but I have to imagine more popular games outside of Japan fell into the RPG/adventure/tactics spectrum on the SNES than on any other system, to such an extent that NOA even incorporated an “Epic Center” column into Nintendo Power for two years (March 1995-November 1996).
An end date of late 1996 roughly coincides with the North American launch of the Nintendo 64, when Nintendo Power subscribers began to feel the effects of the cartridge gaming fallout. RPGs were big games, calling for big capacity, and the Playstation rapidly became developers’ new system of choice.
But this was 1992, and even little known, quickly forgotten titles like Arcana were blowing Sega and arcade gaming out of the water.
VGM Entry 58: Illusion City
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
Illusion City never saw an English translation. Micro Cabin first released it in December 1991 for the MSX turboR, and this was rapidly followed by versions for the PC-9801/PC-88VA (January 1992), FM Towns (July 1992), Sharp X68000 (July 1992), and a bit later the Sega CD (May 1993).
On a completely irrelevant note, I finally looked up why they called it the Towns, and apparently Fujitsu named their 1989 PC after 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Charles Hard Townes. Aaanyway, Illusion City had a soundtrack to rival the SNES legends, and that’s about all you’ll ever find concerning the game in English. It *gasp* doesn’t even have an English Wikipedia page.
The music collections you’ll find scattered across youtube–and these are relatively abundant–showcase the MSX turboR version, so I will to. Two years behind our current historical progression or three years after the original release of Snatcher, I thought it best to bring the game up now since they’re occasionally compared. The two have next to nothing in common concerning gameplay, but they are both cyberpunk, and I gather they have some common plot features. (Not that I would know, short of digging up a fan translation.)
Illusion City is not a visual novel. It’s an RPG. The best you’ll find concerning what style of RPG are a few stills here and there; I am thoroughly convinced that no Illusion City gameplay video exists on youtube. You’ll find plenty of videos of the introduction, and there’s an ending/credits roll video out there for the Sega CD version. That’s about it. But with these credits, conveniently originally in English, and a last resort Google Translate of the game’s Japanese Wikipedia entry, we can piece together its authorship easily enough.
The music was composed by Tadahiro Nitta (the same Nitta responsible for Micro Cabin’s Final Fantasy MSX port), Yasufumi Fukuda, and Koji Urita (Kouji Urita in the credits). These are the names listed on the wiki, and the Sega CD credits clearly distinguish them (“Music Compose”) from composers contributing new material to the port (“Mega-CD Special Music”). This latter group consists of Hirokazu Ohta, who “arranged and computer programmed” the intro and end-game music, and Yasufumi Fukuda, who added new combat music. Lastly the credits list Hirotoshi Moriya and Masato Takahashi under “sound” for the “Mega-CD Work Staff”.
There we go: clean and concise credits. How often does that happen on a Japanese PC game port?
In so far as this is the first cyberpunk RPG I know of (the Phantasy Star series comes to mind as a similar comparison), Tadahiro Nitta, Yasufumi Fukuda, and Kouji Urita had their work cut out for them. Where Masahiro Ikariko and company were able to score Snatcher more or less like a movie, Illusion City required themes for all of the contrivances of a standard RPG. The sort of poppy vibe with which Tokuhiko Uwabo flavored Phantasy Star II, to use a game I’ve previously showcased, can’t fly in cyberpunk–if that is in fact what kind of game Illusion City is, as many have claimed. It needed something a bit more dark and grimy.
Whether they really pulled it off is debatable, but if “City Noise” (3:37 in the present video) is in fact the main town theme then they definitely had the right idea. Oh, it’s not dark on the scale of Snatcher, but I get the sneaking suspicion anyway–mainly from the Sega CD intro and outros–that this is more of a futuristic adventure game with cyberpunk overtones than Akira-worship. It definitely succeeds in creating a futuristic RPG soundtrack to a far greater extent than what I’ve heard of Phantasy Star, and it’s got a decently dark edge.
VGM Entry 57: Snatcher (part 2)
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
Needless to say, when a game is released in six formats over a span of eight years the list of credits gets pretty wild. If we take Wikipedia’s unsourced credit synopsis for every Snatcher release mingled into one, it would appear that Akira Yamaoka, Keizou Nakamura, Masanori Adachi, Kazuhito Imai, and Masanori Ouchi are responsible for the score. But let’s not do that.
Konami’s ost releases generally only credit the Kukeiha Club as a collective, so that’s of no real help. Thanks to Snatcher‘s devout fan base though, a video of the end credits is available on youtube for every version of this game. They struck me as a bit suspect in so far as every version except the PC-Engine was in English, when only the Sega CD version was officially translated. But I do get the feeling–I’m sure plenty of people could easily confirm or deny–that a lot of games in Japan for whatever reason have English credits.
In any case, the PC-8801 ending credits are perhaps the most thorough I’ve ever seen in a game, and whether their English (Engrish really) is a fan translation or the authentic original, I do think it would be nice to provide a transcript. This is the track by track credits as listed in the two-part youtube video posted by AFX6502, condensed to save some space. Most tracks were listed with two names: one in quotations and one in parenthesis.
Compositions by M. Ikariko:
“Prologue Demo” (Bio Hazard Snatcher)
“Title Telop” (Evil Ripple)
“Pursuer Part1” (Creeping Silence)
“Pursuer Part3” (Pleasure of Tension)
“Pursuer Part4” (Endless Pursue)
“Katrine Part1” (Innocent Girl)
“Katrine Part2” (Theme of Katrine)
“Bath Room” (Virulent Smile)
“Joy Division” (Decadance Beat)
“Blow Up Tricycle”
“Mortuary Part1” (Morg)
“Restoration”
“Search Light” (Spreading Diehard)
“Credits”
“Game Over” (Lement for The Death)
Compositions by M. Shirakawa:
“Team Logo” (Slave to Metal)
“Jaime” (Theme of Jaime)
“Outer Heaven2” (Theme of Izabel)
“Title Part1” (Theme of JUNKER)
“Title Part2” (Theme of Randam)
“Title Part3” (Faded Memories)
“Title Part5” (Peace of Mind)
“Action” (Danger Dance…and Justice for all)
“Epirogue” (Beyond Sorrows)
Compositions by S. Fukami:
“Theme of Opening” (Twilight of Neo Kobe City)
“Outer Heaven1” (The Entrance to Hell)
“Goodbye Randam” (Eternal Promise)
“Requiem” (For Harry)
Compositions by S. Masuda:
“Pursuer Part2” (Criminal Omen)
“Pursuer Part5” (Follow up the Scent)
“Wrong Answer” (Axia)
“Transform Risa” (Virtual Image)
Compositions by M. Izumi:
“Ending 1” (Master of Puppets Among The Disease)
“Theme of Ending” (We Have to Struggle for Our Future Against Our Doubt)
Compositions by M. Adachi:
“Theme of Metal Gear” (Theme of Tara)
-remix from “Metal Gear” RC_750 1987-
Joint composition by I. Mizutani and M. Ikariko:
“Snatcher Title” (Squeak!!)
Composition by Pear Point:
“Jingle Bell” (Jingle Bell 2042)
So there you have it. Originally, Masahiro Ikariko composed 16 of the tracks, the rather elusive M. Shirakawa composed 9, and the remaining 13 were composed by a combination of Masanori Adachi, Seiichi Fukami, Mutsuhiko Izumi, Iku Mizutani, and another virtually anonymous figure, S. Masuda. Ikariko, Shirakawa, Fukami, and Masuda are given clear precedence over Adachi, Izumi, and Mizutani in the credits, and must have comprised the main music team. (While the credits to the original MSX version of Metal Gear are likewise confusing and Adachi is not listed where I looked, I have to assume he wrote the original song, “Theme of Tara”, upon which the Snatcher tune is based and had no direct involvement here.) We don’t even know M. Shirakawa and S. Masuda’s full names. Isn’t that something?
The PC-8801 credits tell us quite a bit more about Snatcher‘s music than simply the track-by-track credits. For instance, chief editors Hideo Kojima and Naoki Matsui named the songs. Iku Mizutani did the sound effects, and Masahiro Ikariko and Kazuhiko Uehara “arranged” the music–a credit Konami clearly distinguishes from composition.
The MSX2 credits are included in the PC-8801 version, so there’s no ambiguity on this front. Masahiro Ikariko and Kazuhiko Uehara made the MSX2 arrangements (with the exceptions of “Theme of Metal Gear”, converted by Uehara and Mizutani, and “Jingle Bell”, converted by Ikariko, Uehara, and Shirakawa).
The PC-Engine credits are in Japanese, and in the mess of a hundred open Firefox tabs I’ve lost track of the url to the translation I found, but I did copy it down:
It’s kind of weird to me that Shirakawa, who wrote a quarter of the music in the game, is not included here, but perhaps he and Masuda had left Konami and were erased from memory. Or perhaps Ikariko, Fukami, and Izumi returned to write additional material, but based on the songs I’ve heard, I get the impression that the list of original compositions for the PC-Engine version is quite short. Based on how the PC-8801’s credits were worded, I am lead to believe the PC-Engine arrangement was Kazuki Muraoka’s baby, with Motoaki Furukawa filling in the few added original tracks, however Furukawa has referred to himself as being “in charge of the BGM” for the PC-Engine port. Whether he meant merely the new compositions or the arrangements of the originals is beyond me.
The PC-Engine version and future releases included a revamped intro scene, for which I’ve provided the Sega CD take in spite of its awful voice acting, so that you can hear it in English. “One Night in Neo Kobe”, the song beginning at 2:55 in this video, was one of the new PC-Engine additions written by Motoaki Furukawa (he also confirmed composition of “Tears and Stains”, which must be “Tear-Stained Eyes“), and it remains one of the most famous songs of the game.
The Sega CD port was the first major departure from Ikariko and company’s original score. The credits here, which I’ve derived directly from the English version of the game, are pretty vague:
This list is kind of strange, because it was the Sega CD port’s arrangement that made it so drastically distinct from the first three versions. The songs were still based on the originals, but in a manner akin to Rob Hubbard and Tim Follin’s liberal port adaptations (consider the C64 ports of Commando and Bionic Commando respectively, for example). The credits clearly refer to the Sega CD arrangement, and Masanori Adachi must have been directly involved this time around. Even so, some of the tracks, “One Night in Neo Kobe”, aren’t even arrangements, but rather the exact same songs appearing on the PC-Engine. It’s pretty odd that Motoaki Furukawa and Kazuki Muraoka are restricted to a “Special Thanks” mention at the end of the credit roll.
Also, the distinction between “Sound Design” and “Sound Programmer” is completely obscure here. Konami don’t even bother with distinguishing between music and sound effects. Some of the ‘sound design team’ credits may have almost no real involvement in the music. Keizou Nakamura is credited specifically for SFX in a later version of the game, suggesting that that was his role here as well, and someone claiming to have spoken with Akira Yamaoka says he had little to no involvement in the project.
At this point in time technology may have advanced to the point where “programmer” did not as a rule imply “arranger”, and it’s possible that Osamu Kasai and Akira Souji’s contributions comprised a technical task which made the audio possible but did not affect what it actually sounded like. Never mind my uneducated speculation though; suffice to say the Sega CD port is a grey area dividing the old Snatcher compositions from the new.
Most PSX/Sega Saturn Snatcher songs were in fact new compositions entirely distinct from the originals. “The Morgue” is an example in which the changes are pretty rewarding. I think they definitely improve the whole ‘surrounded by rotting corpses’ atmosphere, whether that is actually the appropriate atmosphere for the scene in context or not. It does little to compensate for the outrageous censorship rules Sony inherited from Nintendo, but whatever. Here are the credits for both:
PSX: Sound System Programmer:
Noritada ‘Nor’ Matukawa Sound Mixer:
God Adachi Music Composer/Arranger/Performer:
KIDA-Sun SFX:
Hiroe Noguchi Guest composers:
Hiroshi Tamawari
Akira Yamaoka
Kosuke Soeda Guest Performer:
Tappy Original Score Composers:
Kazuki Muraoka
Motoaki Furukawa
Saturn: Sound Programmer:
Akiropito Sound Mixer:
Masanori Adachi
Music Composer/Arranger/Performer:
KIDA Sun
Syouichirou Hirata SFX:
Keizou Nakamura Guest composers:
Akira Yamaoka
Hiroshi Tamawari
Guest Performer:
Tappy Original score composers:
Kazuki Muraoka
Motoaki Furukawa
Akira Yamaoka
Hiroshi Tamawari
KIDA Sun
If you’re curious about the aliases here, “Akiropito” is Akira Souji, “God Adachi” is Masanori Adachi, “Tappy” is Tappi Iwase, and I couldn’t find the slightest clue for identifying “KIDA-Sun”. This makes for an odd discussion, as “KIDA-Sun” appears to be the most responsible party for the PSX and Saturn soundtracks. It’s also rather strange that Akira Yamaoka, Hiroshi Tamawari, and KIDA-Sun are listed as original score composers on the Saturn but not on the PSX, as to the best of my knowledge the Saturn used the exact same songs, making only minor (but always for the better) changes throughout. I don’t know that this change to the credits indicates a real change though: Akira Yamaoka and Hiroshi Tamawari are listed as ‘guest composers” in both versions, and a guest composer is still a composer, so it might all boil down to redundancy. In that case, we need only ask what became of Kosuke Soeda.
So basically, our credits look like this:
PC-8801 and MSX2
Composition: Masahiro Ikariko (16), M. Shirakawa (9), Seiichi Fukami (4), S. Masuda (4), Mutsuhiko Izumi (2), Iku Mizutani (1), Masanori Adachi (1)
Arrangement: Masahiro Ikariko, Kazuhiko Uehara
PC-Engine
Composition: Primarily the original 1988 staff, with additions (probably) limited to Kazuki Muraoka and Motoaki Furukawa
Arrangement: Kazuki Muraoka
Sega CD
Sound staff: Keizou Nakamura, Masanori Adachi, Kazuhito Imai, Masanori Ouchi, Akira Yamaoka
Sound Programmer: Osamu Kasai, Akira Souji
VGM Entry 56: Snatcher (part 1)
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
At this point I think it’s safe to talk about Snatcher. Snatcher has quite a long history. Konami first released it on the PC-8801 in November 1988, following this up with an MSX2 port the following month. In 1992 it found its way to the PC-Engine, and in 1994 it got its first English translation via the Sega Mega-CD. It would go on to appear on the Playstation in February 1996 and the Sega Saturn in March before all was said and done.
Snatcher was a cyberpunk visual novel, which isn’t the sort of thing North American and European gamers are particularly familiar with. It also featured some graphic violence, partial nudity, and cultural references, which didn’t jive well with North America’s outrageous censorship and copyright laws. All of these factors contributed to the long delay of an English port, and it’s quite remarkable that Konami ended up making one at all. The market was not in fact ready for it, and Jeremy Blaustein, who oversaw the localization, admitted that the game “only sold a couple thousand units”. He provided the legitimate argument that this resulted from Konami’s decision to release a game on the rapidly tanking Sega CD, not any shortcomings of the game itself. Snatcher remained popular in Japan however, and by the sixth and final release in March 1996 it also boasted six different variations on the main soundtrack.
What’s great for our purposes is that liquidpolicenaut on youtube already did all the legwork for comparing them. In some cases, such as “Decadence Beat (Joy Division)”, the original PC-8801 and MSX2 versions survive every port on into the Sega Saturn, but more often the songs get replaced for the Sega CD or Playstation and retain their new forms the rest of the way.
It’s by no means immediately obvious which take on this song is best. As songs by themselves, displaced from any game, the MSX2 version stands out the most to me, but the comments by actual fans of the game seem to denounce the MSX2 version as out of touch with the atmosphere of the scene. “Joy Division” (censored to “Plato’s Cavern” for the US Sega CD port) was Snatcher‘s general store chain. As a cyberpunk game, it naturally ought to be a little bit sleazy, but since I never played it personally I can’t say just how far that should go. The Sega CD version sounds like a porn shop, and the PSX version sounds like the score to what the Sega CD store is selling. The Sega Saturn take, despite being practically identical to the PSX take in construction, comes off quite tasteful due to better quality instrument samples. The potential complaint, of course, is that it’s too tasteful to be wholly appropriate.
If the PC-8801 take is a bit too funky and the PC-Engine a bit too weird, I’m left with the MSX2 take. It has a very technological feel to it. This is music for the sort of store I’d go to to buy my cybernetic crack injection kits for sure. The visual helps it out too; the store clerk looks a lot more seedy and a lot less evil on the MSX2 and PC-8801 than in the other takes, and the emphasis on grey (the PC-8801 has a brown floor) makes the whole place seem a little metalic–a little more futuristic. Oh the MSX2 take wins for me hands-down. But I’m listening to this with nothing but a song, a single image, and a general idea of cyberpunk to go on. I never played the game. Maybe the MSX2’s atmosphere, while consistent in audio and imagery, is totally out of place in it. One of the great benefits of Snatcher and liquidpolicenaut’s comparison videos is to bring these finer aesthetic considerations to mind.
I mentioned that “Joy Division” was renamed “Plato’s Cavern” on the Sega CD. It’s one of many censorship issues that forced minor changes in detail as new ports were made. The left-hand mask on the wall behind the store clerk on the MSX2 and PC-8801 was Predator, and it vanishes starting with the PC Engine. Amazing what petty things billionaires will file lawsuits over…
The censorship on “Pursuer Part 4 (Endless Pursue)” is a little more obvious. (Supposedly the dog was twitching, still alive on the original versions, and this was removed before they took out the image altogether.) Musically, this is another instance where the same song was maintained for all six versions of the game. Here the differences aren’t nearly as extreme, either. Again the Playstation take comes off the worst to my ears, and this time the Saturn’s improved sound does not sufficiently redeem it–at least if this is meant to be the fairly tense, down to the wire scene that the track title and early versions imply.
I can’t think of any context in which the PSX and Saturn versions might sound appropriate to be quite honest. The PSX take kicks off like some progy jazz piece that completely fails to acknowledge any sort of distress, or anything remotely unsettling (we’re still staring at a dog with its guts spilled out mind you, even if it’s censored). The bass drum beat is made no less obnoxious in the Saturn version by actually sounding like a bass drum, and its pace is totally out of touch with the melody. No, the PSX and Saturn versions are bad–no getting around that.
If you go back to the MSX2 take, you’ll find that it’s far more imaginative anyway. Variations in the intensity of the drum beats give it a dimension lacking in the last two versions. The higher-pitched notes behind the main melody in the PC-8801 introduction carry the song much more effectively than their MSX2 equivalent, emphasizing the pace of events, and the variations in percussion intensity are retained, but the main melody is just a bit too clean. The MSX2 take has a more hollow, raspy sound. I suppose I would characterize the MSX2 and PC Engine versions as prioritizing an element of danger, while urgency dominates the PC-8801 and Sega CD takes.
I could go on like this for every track, but I fancy it’s already gotten old. Tomorrow I’ll tackle who exactly wrote it all.
VGM Entry 55: Honorable mentions of ’92
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
No ‘best of’ compilation can ever satisfy everybody, and the difficulty of coming to agreement increases with the number of options available. With the average game soundtrack’s quality always on the rise, the task of singling out anything but the obvious best becomes sort of arbitrary after a while. I present these last few titles with the recognition that I have probably missed quite a number of arguably better works:
Super Mario Kart (Nintendo, 1992) would be the last major title passed off to Soyo Oka at Nintendo. Having scored Pilotwings in 1990 and Sim City in 1991, her distinct style briefly became a major voice of the Super Nintendo, but whether she should be counted among the best is very debatable. I will stand by the claim that Sim City was an outstanding and underrated work, but in general Soyo Oka was no Koji Kondo. Her inclusion isn’t obvious.
I played Super Mario Kart as much as any kid, and not a single song from it stuck in my memory over the years. The nostalgia here isn’t old familiar tunes. It’s an old familiar style. Soyo Oka had an extraordinarily distinct sound, and it’s her style of music, not any of the melodies, which lends such consistency down the line from Pilotwings to Super Mario Kart. I count this game among the best of 1992 because it does an excellent job of sounding like a Nintendo game for the SNES. It’s quite possible that Soyo Oka’s Nintendo career quickly diminished afterwards simply because they stopped producing this type of game. Her all-purpose sound worked great for simulations and racing, but after 1992 Nintendo came to focus much more heavily on character/plot-centric action and RPG titles. Star Fox, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, these sort of games focused on franchise characters who required distinct theme songs.
Nintendo did not produce any more high-profile, well marketed games that could have actually fit Oka’s style until 1996, with Ken Griffey, Jr.’s Winning Run and Tetris Attack, but by then she had left the company.
I have only found two titles crediting Taro Kudo as composer, and that’s quite a shame, because both have found their way into my vgm series. Masanori Adachi’s partner on Super Castlevania IV, Kudo took on the task again the following year with Axelay (Konami, 1992). His mostly chill, relaxing tunes must have made a fairly substantial impact on the gameplay. Nothing frantic or unnerving here; the music carries a sense of confidence, and makes the game look a lot easier than it probably was.
Devilish (Hot-B, developed by Genki Co, 1992), known as Dark Omen in Japan, begins like some sort of Home Alone soundtrack, but before long it breaks out into more recognizable Genesis beats that will characterize a large portion of the game. Hitoshi Sakimoto managed to produce a very consistent and haunting selection of songs here that accurately reflect the settings of the game. These settings are themselves something of an anomaly. The game is basically an enhanced version of Breakout, but it’s set in an RPG world. You bounce into those rectangles in forests, deserts, airships, castles, the works.
About the only thing this bizarre mashup has against it is a plot. The main villain “turned the prince and princess into two stone paddles”? Really? … Really?
When I was a kid I for some reason always thought Kirby was an old, classic Nintendo character, perhaps because Kirby’s Adventure (Nintendo, 1993) was released for the NES despite the Super Nintendo having been around for three years. What inspired Nintendo to market a major franchise character on outdated and secondary systems is beyond me, but the little pink cream puff wouldn’t make his Super Nintendo debut until Kirby Super Star at the absurdly late date of March 1996. This may have been due in part to HAL Laboratory, not Nintendo, actually developing the games. But HAL Laboratory had released multiple Super Nintendo games by the end of 1991, so your guess is as good as mine. Kirby’s Dream Land (Nintendo, 1992) for the Game Boy was in fact the first game of the franchise, and it established a lot of the series’ iconic songs.
The other thing that caught me off guard is Jun Ishikawa composed it. I had been lead to believe it was the work of Hirokazu Ando. Ando did make an appearance on Kirby’s Adventure and many future installments, but the earliest original compositions appear to belong to Ishikawa. Ando and Ishikawa appear to have been HAL Laboratory’s main composers, collaborating together in many HAL titles both within the Kirby franchise and without, and perhaps this has created some of the confusion. Or perhaps Wikipedia is simply wrong. The bold claim in the Kirby’s Dream Land article that Jun Ishikawa was “the only composer for this game” (rather than just listing him as the composer and leaving it at that) is sourced to another game wiki site (Moby Games) which lists the credits in more or less the same unsourced manner that Wikipedia does, and makes no such explicit claim. Maybe Ishikawa wrote it all, or maybe he and Ando were in collaboration from the get-go, but either way Kirby’s Dream Land initiated a major Nintendo franchise series with catchy, highly regarded songs that ought not go unmentioned.
The last song I’d like to point out is the title theme to Agony (Psygnosis, 1992), composed by Tim Wright. Agony was a peculiar little shmup for the Amiga 500, fantasy themed to the extent of featuring a laser-blasting owl as the main hero. There is little room in your standard video game for a classical piano piece of this sort; it’s certainly not the type of thing you might associate with active gameplay. With the Commodore 64’s long history of loader music completely disassociated from the game however, and the Amiga’s much improved audio, this was the most probable platform for a work like Tim Wright’s to take shape.
Through the Shattered Lens 