Author Archives: necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 54: Final Fantasy V

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 54: Final Fantasy V
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Square had a fresh set of games to offer in 1992, and I will turn to them next.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest has amusing origins. After assessing the disparity in RPG sales between the Japanese and North American markets, Square concluded that Americans were just too dumb for Final Fantasy V, so they made the ultra-simplified Mystic Quest instead and commissioned Ryuji Sasai to compose a hard rock soundtrack for it.

Well, I don’t know if Sasai was actually specifically tasked to mix in heavy metal, but it would be funny if he was. And thankfully he did, because it’s really this game’s only redeeming quality. I wasn’t quite 10 years old when I played it, and I remember it boring the shit out of me.

Any stylistic similarities between Final Fantasy Mystic Quest and Final Fantasy Legend III are lost in the change of medium. The things that made Sasai a god among musicians on the Game Boy just weren’t options here. Most of the music is instead pretty generic. The title theme for instance, the first track in this mix, is appropriate and entirely forgettable. It’s in the combat sequences that Sasai really gave his all and salvaged the game from total despair. The regular battle music (2:03) could fly as a final boss theme in any other game, while the last castle (3:58) and final boss battle (8:36) hit even harder. But the real prize winner here is the regular boss battle music (6:39). This track just begs to be covered by a power metal band.

Yeah, it’s got nothing on Final Fantasy Legend III, but to a piss-poor attempt at a video game Sasai at least contributed some slight redeeming value. Then there’s Final Fantasy V.

As you listen through the Final Fantasy V soundtrack, one thought that might cross your mind is “Heh, this kind of sucks.” Yes, yes it does. Here is the track list for this compilation:

(0:00) Prelude
(1:08) Final Fantasy
(1:56) Dear Friends
(2:41) Ahead On Our Way
(3:35) Lenna’s Theme
(4:18) Battle Theme
(5:00) Royal Palace
(5:34) What?
(6:08) Home Sweet Home
(7:00) The Airship
(7:30) Four Warriors in the Dawn (Galuf’s Theme)
(8:03) Moogle’s Theme
(8:49) Go Go Boco!
(9:32) Fanfare

Quality is all relative. Compared to the average SNES game, Final Fantasy V might be stellar, but Nobuo Uematsu in 1992 ought to be held to a higher standard. To his credit, I think this was more of an experimentation than a creative flop. In that grey area between heavy NES restrictions and full orchestration, there was probably a lot of freedom to branch out from the styles that were perhaps expected of Uematsu. Máire Breatnach had recently arranged the Final Fantasy IV soundtrack into Celtic Moon, and Uematsu surely had some hand in that. I think perhaps he was going for something a little more folk oriented here and it just didn’t quite hit the mark. You can hear it in the Final Fantasy Main Theme (1:08). Trumpets and the feeling of a string orchestra are replaced by a simple harp at first, and as other instruments join in it never ascends into the illusion of an orchestra, remaining essentially a three-piece set.

But the use of a trumpet is more odd than rewarding in this instance, and the string tone measures out like chords on a keyboard, failing to create the illusion of the real deal. Songs like Royal Palace (5:00) are pleasant in concept, but the programmed loop nature of each track is just too apparent to make me feel like I’m listening to anything more than some MIDI imitation. There’s nothing remotely natural about the harp or synthy strings here; a real orchestra would never play this. It’s not that the music needed to feel orchestrated, but Uematsu employs the sort of instruments for which orchestration is expected. Home Sweet Home (6:08) is a good counter example. The strings that come in later still make too many hard stops to sound natural, but overall the arrangement manages to avoid counter-intuitive instrumentation, and it pays off.

Another good example, Harvest, doesn’t appear in this compilation. Here once again Uematsu avoids ‘orchestral’ instrumentation and lets his folk vibe play out uncontested. It’s one of the few instantly appealing tracks in the game, and I can’t help but think that had this instrumentation been the rule and not the exception, Final Fantasy V would have been a lot better off.

VGM Entry 53: Soul Blazer

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 53: Soul Blazer
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

A personal SNES favorite of mine is Soul Blader (Soul Blazer in North America), composed by Yukihide Takekawa and released by Enix in January 1992. Takekawa is not a big name in the video game music industry, but he’s composed a number of other soundtracks for film and anime. I gather his main profession is as a vocalist. Whatever influences he brought to the table, Soul Blader is a much more diverse soundtrack than your standard orchestral-centric fantasy fair.

Quintet made a lot of amazing games for the Super Nintendo, but this one was probably their best. Like ActRaiser, the game revolves around a heaven and hell scenario, where The Master faces off against The King of Evil, in this case named Deathtoll. Basically, a powerful king corrupted by greed forces a scientist, Dr. Leo, to invent a portal to hell so that the king can strike a deal with the devil. Deathtoll agrees to give him all the riches in the world in exchange for all of the souls in his empire, and King Magridd promptly goes about replicating these hell portals all over the place and trapping pretty much all life and material connected to it within them. The Master sends you, his messenger, to earth to destroy the portals and set the Freil Empire free.

That’s the entire plot, really. There aren’t any major twists or turns. You just make your way across a fantasy realm freeing souls until you finally confront and defeat Deathtoll. As far as an actual story is concerned, yeah, it’s pretty bland, but Quintet manage to really turn it into something wonderful.

You may have heard of the “Soul Blazer” series, consisting of Soul Blader, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma. I never played Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma was never released in North America, but I gather the unofficial series attribution is derived from subtle commonalities and returning side-characters rather than any overt consistency in plot or gameplay. If that is the case, then I think we can safely regard ActRaiser as an equal shareholder in the collection. But before I get into that, let’s look at this initial track compilation. It consists of:

(0:00) Intro Theme
(1:27) Lonely Town
(2:14) World of Soul Blader
(3:32) Solitary Island
(4:34) The Mines
(6:01) Into the Dream
(6:40) Dr. Leo’s Lab
(7:37) The Marshland of Lost Sight
(8:24) Lisa’s Song

Solitary Island, The Mines, Dr. Leo’s Lab, and The Marshland of Lost Sight are all combat zone themes, and perhaps the most obvious examples of what an amazing job Yukihide Takekawa did here. If you’re struggling to really define his style, I think the appropriate term is “video game music”. I mean, Takekawa transcends all style standards in precisely that way Super Nintendo music ought to. If you check out Solitary Island especially, you’re going to here an amalgamation of folk, orchestral, and rock elements so thoroughly intertwined that any attempt to distinguish between them would be simply misguided. The effect produced in the listener is what really counts at this point. Takekawa’s combat music, aside from the final boss theme, is never really intimidating. It’s adventurous and, as a consequence of the bass and drums, a little bit grimy, precisely as it ought to be. I mean, you’re God’s avatar here. You can’t ‘die’. There’s no serious danger, just work to be done. This is music for getting down to business, and your business is killing demons. If the regular boss battle music (“The Battle for Liberation”) is utterly generic and “Dr. Leo’s Lab” gets old quickly, I would still say Takekawa did an outstanding job over all.

And besides that, the combat music is all extraordinarily relevant. The sort of creatures you’ll be fighting in Dr. Leo’s lab is obvious enough through the music, and likewise “Solitary Island” has a sort of pirate vibe going on. “Icefield of Laynole” (or “The Icy Fields of Leinore”, or “Ice Field of Lanoyle”, depending on your source) is one of the best at this. Without ever devorcing the drum and bass style that ties the whole soundtrack together, it nails a snow and ice-themed zone sound. It doesn’t bend to any stereotypes of what a winter zone ought to sound like, but the jazzy overtones lend some real credence to the expression “smooth as ice”.

Isn’t this just gorgeous? I think so. Takekawa let his imagination run wild with some of these, and you can hear the whole game in action even if you’ve never actually seen it. “Seabed of Saint Elle’s” (or “The Depths of the Sea of Saint Elle’s”) is obviously the water level. Like “Icefield of Laynole”, it doesn’t feel nearly as dirty as the other combat zone tracks, and it’s no coincidence that these are the two most fanciful zones in the game, inhabited by dolphins on the one end and gnomes on the other.

Dolphins? Really? Well, Quintet were a bit more creative about that than you might think. One of the big reoccurring themes throughout Soul Blazer is reincarnation, and as God you can communicate with anything that has a soul. So you’re not dealing with some weird anthropomorphic society here. They’re certainly a bit more, well, technologically advanced than real dolphins, but so are plenty of fictional human societies. The souls you encounter everywhere are all capable of more or less the same level of intelligence and are only restricted by their physical bodies. The gnomes, for instance, have an incredibly short lifespan, and their souls often reflect on how much they’d taken for granted in past lives as humans. You get used to this pretty quick; the first character you meet in the game is a tulip.

I’m not sure why these track titles are so screwy. I have this song as “Temple of Light”. RPGFan, who I consider reputable, have it as “A Temple in Ruins”, and the youtube video says “Rotting Temple”. Your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, here is one of the few combat zone tracks that sets aside the drum and bass drive. Aside from the simple fact that this made for a great song, the change of pace fits its situation in the game as a dungeon within a dungeon; you enter the temple from the “Marshland of Lost Sight” combat zone.

Anyway, the biggest parallel between Soul Blazer and ActRaiser is really in the whole city-building simulation appeal. Quintet didn’t give Soul Blazer an actual city simulation side, but each town does grow as a direct consequence of your actions. Each town zone starts out as an empty map, and it’s only as you release souls within the combat zones that their bodies reappear and their homes are rebuilt. You certainly don’t have to save every soul to beat the game, and a number of them are hidden, so you do retain a modest degree of control over how each town will ultimately appear. Any possibility of boredom with the game’s fairly basic combat mechanics is nullified by it; you essentially build cities by killing monsters, which is a perfect amalgamation of ActRaiser‘s two different modes.

Did I mention Yukihide Takekawa was a vocalist? He might be the only video game composer to sing on his own score. This rendition of Lisa’s Song (also credited as A Night Without Lovers /Koibito no Inaiyoru) appeared on the official soundtrack released about a month after the game, and I think it’s safe to assume that it would have appeared in the game’s ending credits had the technology of the day allowed for it.

And now if you’ll go excuse me, I have a date with ZSNES. And I’d been so good about not wasting time on replays up to this point…

VGM Entry 52: Tim Follin’s Legacy

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 52: Tim Follin’s Legacy
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

The end of the NES era did not mark the end of the NES. Games would continue to appear on the system all the way up to February 1994, with Wario’s Woods (Nintendo) constituting the final licensed game for the system. Neil Baldwin was not the only classic chiptune artist to find refuge in the persistence of outdated systems. The underdog hero of my video game music series, Tim Follin, rode the third generation of gaming out to its end as well.

What’s more, the late transition of C64 chiptune artists to the NES brought out all kinds of amazing features on the system that were never realized during the system’s heyday. I did Tim Follin a terrible disservice by skipping over Silver Surfer (Arcadia Systems, 1990) for the Nintendo and Magic Johnson’s Basketball (Arcadia Systems, 1990) for the Commodore 64, having not really discovered either until it was too late to include them, but it’s not too late to touch on his 1991 masterpieces.

Treasure Master (American Softworks, December 1991) initially picks up right where Pictionary left off, and in this game you can really experience the climax of Follin’s NES pursuit, wherein groovy jam tracks took the place of progressive rock as a focal point. Just as Follin’s Commodore 64 works made a clean break from his original ZX Spectrum style, his NES compositions matured into a sound all of their own.

It’s not that prog elements were a thing of the past; Follin’s quintessential sound persists across every platform, and Treasure Master has its fair share. But on no two systems did he ever sound quite the same. He was ever and always a musician to place the system at the heart of the composition. It’s something I was criticizing other musicians for failing to do long before he was ever on my radar, and soundtracks like Treasure Master are vibrant proof of just how significant this sort of compositional mindset could be. This is the antithesis of Nobuo Uematsu’s eternally reinterpritable works; it is inconceivable in any other medium.

I don’t recall whether I actually made the observation before or simply thought it to myself, but I am inclined to believe that a lot of chiptune musicians struggled and faded away in the fourth generation because the lack of severe restrictions forced them to completely redefine their vision of what video game music should be. They were fundamentally musicians first and composers second, and the SNES, with its bountiful possibilities, simply could not function as an instrument. It was a means to an end, not an end itself, and that requires a whole different assortment of talents. Tim Follin struggled on the SNES, perhaps for the first time in his career. It’s no small triumph that he (and his brother Geoff, who likely contributed far more to the ‘Follin sound’ than I give him credit for) did ultimately overcome the challenge with Spider-Man and the X-Men in Arcade’s Revenge and Plok, which I will get to soon enough.

The majority of Tim Follin’s SNES works leave something to be desired however, and with the extraordinary exception of Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future (Sega, 2000) for the Dreamcast, he would never really thrive as a video game composer again after the mid-90s. Suffice to say Tim Follin’s real glory days ended in 1991.

At least he went out with a bang. Gauntlet III (US Gold, 1991) was to be his final Commodore 64 title. Composed in collaboration with Geoff, it carried on in the spirit of Ghouls’n Ghosts.

A history of the development of Follin’s sound would make for an interesting mini-series all of its own. There’s certainly no linear progression to it, and I couldn’t pretend to establish one without ignoring quite a few games which defy conformity. (Even the suggestion that his NES soundtracks were inseparable from the system he wrote them for was a minor stretch if we consider similarities between Pictionary and Magic Johnson’s Basketball.) But the title theme to Gauntlet III most certainly follows from “Level 5” in Ghouls’n Ghosts, and trace signs of this thematic approach can, I think, be heard in the in-game theme from Black Lamp (Firebird, 1988) and the title theme from ChesterField: Challenge to Dark Gor (Vic Tokai, 1988). I make the observation to establish that this sound was emerging prior to Follin’s direct interaction with the original Ghouls’n Ghosts score by Tamayo Kawamoto. His outstanding cover of Level 2 aside, the C64 port shares little in common with the arcade music.

At any rate, that was only the title screen. Gauntlet III was one of those rare exceptions to the Commodore 64 rule of putting your best effort on the loader. To that credit goes the character select screen.

Was Tim Follin’s final C64 composition also his best? It’s definitely a contender. Gauntlet III lacked the quantity delivered in Ghouls’n Ghosts–I gather the actual gameplay was silent, though I’ve not been able to confirm this–but the quality is impeccable.

Tim Follin spent 1989 through 1991 breaking every mold and defying every standard ever set for what may well be considered the finest system in the history of video game music, and in so doing made his name inseparable from the final pages of the Commodore 64 legacy. Having simultaneously done the same thing for the Nintendo, and having single-handedly defined the ZX Spectrum as a system capable of a unique sound independent from both powerhouse competitors, he may well be rightly regarded as the most accomplished musician of the third generation era.

It’s a shame his time with the Amiga 500 was so brief. Underwhelming in comparison to the Ghouls’n Ghosts port, Tim and Geoff’s Amiga Gauntlet III music suffers merely from a lack of sound quality. I have been unable to find any copy of this song that delivers with the depth and clarity of Ghouls’n Ghosts, but I suspect this is more a consequence of a low bit rate in its modern conversion than a flaw in its original form. The bagpipes do seem to clash with the rest of the song from 1:40 on, but I’d rather not pass judgement until I’ve heard a higher quality recording. In any case, Follin was showing no signs of relenting on the Commodore Amiga, and it was surely decisions beyond his control at Software Creations that ultimately tied him into a Super Nintendo track from 1992 on.

VGM Entry 51: Neil Baldwin

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 51: Neil Baldwin
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Who was Neil Baldwin? I have yet to even mention Neil Baldwin. In fact, I never even saw his name until quite recently, by a total accident of chain-clicking vaguely related youtube videos. It must be a gross oversight on my part. There’s no excuse for having missed Neil Baldwin.

I mean, his earliest works, like Shadow Skimmer (The Edge, 1987), might have been easily overlooked. They were fairly decent, but not groundbreaking in any sense, and in the glory days of Commodore 64 music ‘pretty good’ wasn’t going to stand out. Neil Baldwin was just learning the ropes in the late 80s, with the works of Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway serving as his main inspirations. His real legacy began when, much like Tim Follin, he brought the techniques of Commodore 64 composition to the NES.

And much like Tim Follin, he put 90% of Nintendo composers to shame. Magician (Taxan), released for the NES in 1990, was the first game by British developers Eurocom. It was also Neil Baldwin’s first NES composition. It sounds more advanced than nearly anything else on the system.

What exactly distinguishes it–how Neil Baldwin (and Tim Follin) were capable of producing such better sound quality on the NES than indigenous composers with no Commodore 64 background–is technical and way beyond my understanding. But thankfully, those explanations have already been made. See, Baldwin did that one thing that we all wish every video game composer would do, and which hardly ever actually happens.

He went back and wrote about his own compositions in long, thorough detail, and provided mp3s of the lot of them.

http://dutycyclegenerator.com

How cool is that? It would be kind of silly for me to go about repeating everything that he says here, especially when I’ll never quite understand it unless I get my hands on the equipment and try to program some game music myself. So I’ll leave it for the original artist to explain.

This particular soundtrack is Ferrari Grand Prix Challenge, the NES port of F-1 Hero MD for the Genesis/Mega Drive, released by Acclaim in 1992. Neil Baldwin’s score for the NES port is an original composition, not a replica of the Genesis music. Yes, there was still some great NES music this late in the game.

Hero Quest and Erik The Viking both have pretty interesting stories. If you scroll down far enough on Baldwin’s site you can read them in full, but to sum it up briefly, both of these games were never officially released. Baldwin actually thought that the music to Hero Quest, written in 1991, had been lost, until he ran into vgm fans talking about it. A little investigation revealed that the author of the game, Chris Shrigley, had preserved a copy of it and released it independently long after the fact.

Erik The Viking‘s story is the exact opposite. The actual game, which was fully completed in 1992 but, due to miscommunication between the developers and producer, never released, has been lost. Baldwin observes that it could quite possibly still exist somewhere, but it is certainly a lost artifact at the present. This time around, it was Baldwin that saved all of the original audio and released it independently years later.

Neil Baldwin has composed much else besides these five games, and his post-Commodore 64 work is consistently a cut above. I definitely recommend Erik The Viking first and foremost among his NES works. As for his later SNES compositions and beyond, I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for them when I get there.

VGM Entry 50: Final Fantasy Legend III

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 50: Final Fantasy Legend III
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

1991 might have been the finest year for classic Game Boy music. I really can’t say until I advance a bit further along in this project, but even beyond the best of the best, the average score seems to have really picked up the slack. I’d have rambled on about the virtues of such titles as Bomber King: Scenario 2 (Blaster Master Boy in North America) in 1990, but in 1991 their above-average quality isn’t quite enough to merit extensive discussion.

One soundtrack that definitely does not earn its keep is Final Fantasy Adventure by Koichi Ishii. A weak effort for such a lofty name, Final Fantasy Adventure did, unlike the Legend series, carry the classic monicker in its original Japanese version, at least as a subtitle. But if Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden, that is, the prequel to Secret of Mana, was a musical disappointment, it wasn’t Square’s only Game Boy venture that year.

The other, Final Fantasy Legend III, or SaGa 3 in Japan, is my favorite Game Boy soundtrack, and one of my favorite game scores in general. Not all of the songs are original to it. The title theme for instance has been around since the start of the series. But it’s never sounded quite like this. Nobuo Uematsu sat this project out, as did Kenji Ito. Instead a new name in gaming music took the job: Ryuji Sasai. It was only his fifth video game composition, and I am fairly certain you’ve never heard of the first four. I hope you’ll remember this one.

Quality song-writing is certainly the first step. Ryuji Sasai was a rocker at heart, but unlike say, the earlier works of Yuzo Koshiro, his songs here are properly restrained. They all have a certain pep to them that the first two SaGa games lacked, but they never go overboard. But I think the most compelling part of his work here is the arrangement. A lot of video game soundtracks leave me wondering whether the quality or lack thereof of the youtube samples impacts the apparent quality of the original music to a significant degree: To some extent Final Fantasy Legend III almost sounds enhanced. But I noticed it on youtube; I noticed it on the ost; I noticed it on my own Game Boy when it first came out: There’s been no doctoring here. The sound quality in this game is just phenomenal.

I mean, plug in some headphones and just listen to the way these sounds lock into each other. Even the generic town theme is just massive. The drums pan all over the place without ever making it obvious as they do in say, Belmont’s Revenge. That accompaniment rolls in the left ear while the bass switches between the middle and the right, and the main melody prevails over all. With such rich and complementary tones, the actual effect is to create a sound that completely surrounds and encompasses you.

Every track employs this same means to perfection. “Theme of Another Dimension”, the airship music, has an amazing amount of depth. All of the elements of the song have a physical position, and their motions are the driving forces behind the music. You can feel the engine running in the bass and the wind rushing by in the percussion, some clouds breezing past at the 15 second mark.

My favorite Final Fantasy Legend III song is “Holy Ruins”. I would like to think it speaks for itself. The music to this game impresses me as much now as it did twenty years ago, and I think if Ryuji Sasai had kept on composing for the Game Boy he would have really made a name for himself. As things turned out, he didn’t. This was his only Game Boy composition to the best of my knowledge, and after scoring Final Fantasy Mystic Quest the following year he would disappear until 1996. Why other Game Boy composers, even the best, largely failed to capitalize on the potential for depth that he achieved here is beyond me, but his innovative arrangements brought the system to life in a way I have never heard before or since–at least, outside of the modern day chiptune scene.

VGM Entry 49: The Game Boy in ’91

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 49: The Game Boy in ’91
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

How was the Game Boy doing? 1989 and 1990 were fairly dismal (remember that what I presented was the best out of close to one hundred titles), but things had to improve sooner or later. And Capcom released not one, but two Mega Man games for the system in 1991. Surely they would make the most of Game Boy sound and give their competitors something to strive for.

Well, no. I suppose not. I don’t know what Mega Man did with those scissors last time he whooped him, but this is about the most impotent rendition of Cut Man conceivable. The only track Makoto Tomozawa actually gets right in Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge is Fire Man, and that’s too little too late for redemption. Part of the problem might be that Capcom outsourced their Game Boy titles. Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge, released in July, was still generally well received.

The sequel Mega Man II, pumped out a mere five months later by a different developer than Dr. Wily’s Revenge, was more of a total botched job. The team supposedly had no familiarity with the game series when they got tasked with it. This doesn’t necessarily show in the music so much as in the gameplay. I’ve never played it, but it’s supposedly just a dumbed down and spliced port of Mega Man 2 and Mega Man 3.

Kenji Yamazaki, to be fair, did a moderately decent job of maintaining the general style of the series. Despite being an original score, his is more true to form than Makoto Tomozawa’s attempt to arrange songs from the original Mega Man. But it still leaves a lot to be desired. If the tracks at 3:18 and 7:31 feel like they could be Mega Man classics, the track at 1:28 kind of makes me want to die.

How Capcom missed the bandwagon after Gargoyle’s Quest is beyond me, because Konami sure didn’t. I couldn’t find any composition credits for F-1 Spirit (known as World Circuit Series in North America and The Spirit of F-1 in Europe), but the music kicks ass. The decision to keep that running motor sound effect in the background throughout the game was certainly questionable, but I’m not going to say they’d have been a little better off without it. It’s not an obvious nuisance, adding an extra gritty feel to an already really chippy soundtrack. I think the excellent selection of percussion tones does the job well enough on its own, but hey, if they want to keep it as noisy as possible I’m not going to complain. The Game Boy was good at that. The tunes are perpetually catchy, the drumming is loud and intense, and the constant distortion of the sound effect keeps everything good and heavy even when the main melody occasionally chills out.

Sports games have a long history of terrible soundtracks, but Konami really nailed it this time. And it wouldn’t be their greatest accomplishment in 1991 either.

This game has a funny name. I mean, it’s not a port of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge is an entirely different game. There’s no obvious explanation for why Konami chose to go this route. Why not call it Castlevania: The Adventure II? The Japanese titles straighten this out, sort of. Castlevania: The Adventure was Legend of Dracula there, whereas the original 1986 Castlevania was Devil’s Castle Dracula. So there was no ambiguity in naming it The Legend of Dracula II. This was actually the only title in the series that made any sense at all.

See, the game Haunted Castle was also called Devil’s Castle Dracula. Oh, and so was the game Vampire Killer. And you know Castlevania IV? Yeah, that was also called Devil’s Castle Dracula. And while our The Adventure was Legend of Dracula, our Simon’s Quest was Devil’s Castle Legend. It’s kind of like how they confusingly called the North American N64 Castlevania installment Castlevania instead of, you know, Castlevania 64. Except they really still haven’t straightened things out forty-some titles later.

But whatever. I wish I could post every single track from Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge for you, because there isn’t a downer in the mix. You can find a complete collection on youtube, compliments again of explod2A03. Hidehiro Funauchi didn’t just perfect the Game Boy sound on this one; he nearly surpassed every game in the series while doing so. If you put all the songs of the early Castlevania titles in the same medium I suppose Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge might not come out on top. The melodies aren’t quite as catchy, and the songs are a bit more repetitive in general. But I do believe it makes more effective use of its system’s capabilities than Castlevania IV or any of the NES titles. The whole album is in constant motion, even on some of the softer songs, and while the back and forth speaker-hopping doesn’t quite work through headphones–the contrast is just too severe–it greatly enhances the effect out my speakers.

“Evil Gods” is my favorite song in the game. It’s deliciously distorted, embracing as its main drive the sort of tones that many Game Boy musicians had gone out of their way to avoid up to that time. The sound is really massive, more so I think than even a lot of major Commodore 64 works. Hidehiro Funauchi figured out how to make the Game Boy sound amazing, and it had a lot more to do with choosing the right sounds than with writing a catchy melody.

Yeah, 1991 was definitely the year that Game Boy music came into full bloom. Ultimately the prize goes to Ryoji Yoshitomi for his masterpiece Metroid II: Return of Samus. It is everything that the original Metroid didn’t quite manage to be. Metroid tried really hard to feel like an ambient and natural element of the game. It tried to bring the planet to life through sound, it just… didn’t.

Metroid II starts out like a Hitchcock nightmare, and the chaotic random blips which soon join in don’t exactly soothe the soul either. By the one minute mark I’m thoroughly unnerved, and then something really pretty happens. What’s going on here? Well, I think this is Ryoji Yoshitomi nailing the whole point of the game. Here you are on SR388, the Metroid home planet, sent to exterminate their species. Sure, the place is creepy as hell, but it’s also a living organism. You want to breathe life into the planet through the music? This is how you do it. Using sound effects of the ground shaking as the drum beat was a pretty sweet final touch.

Most of the music in Metroid II is more upbeat than the introduction. The track beginning around 2:05 is one of the most memorable I’ve heard on the Game Boy, and it’s so astonishingly well attuned to the system that it really couldn’t have sounded any better on the SNES or beyond. The bass and drums feel like they’re a part of the earth below you, not some tune playing in the background. Sure, sci-fi and chiptunes go hand in hand, but plenty of other musicians missed the mark. And what about that mesmerizing number at 4:08, eh? It’s pretty much post-rock, and I think I could contently listen to it for hours on end if I could get my hands on the ost.

Not every track in the game is great. The one at 3:26 is nothing to brag about, and the ending theme is a stereotypical and irrelevant jingle, albeit pretty. But I’m sold. Yoshitomi’s soundtrack lives and breathes in rhythm with the planet it’s set upon. It accomplishes exactly what the original Metroid soundtrack set out to, and I think, alongside Yoshitomi’s creative genius, the beautiful and unique tones of the Game Boy made it happen.

VGM Entry 48: Streets of Golden Hedgehogs

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 48: Streets of Golden Hedgehogs
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

With the new higher standards brought on by the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis/Mega Drive composers would have to start trying a little harder if they wanted to compete. Some certainly did pick up the pace, and 1991 might be considered the first year with a decent selection to choose from.

There were a couple famous soundtracks in the mix. Streets of Rage (Sega) by Yuzo Koshiro is certainly one of them. I do not possess the patience to listen to each and every Genesis/Mega Drive soundtrack like I’ve been doing with the Game Boy, nor did I ever own the system as a kid. I can only really pick and choose these titles based on my perception of popular opinion. But the one series that popped up more consistently than any other on people’s lists was Streets of Rage.

It’s a chill, laid back score that I could listen to all day without ever really tiring of, and the gritty melodies make it a lot more down to earth and appropriate for a street fighting game than the more airy sounds I tend to associate with this sort of musical style. And perhaps more importantly, the music I associate with this style was mostly written long after Streets of Rage.

I mean, Koshiro deserves a lot of additional credit for being the first game musician to really try this–or else, the first to really pull it off. It’s a style I take for granted today, and perhaps that’s why Streets of Rage doesn’t strike me as immediately as it ought to, but in 1991 games just didn’t ever sound like this. A lot of them couldn’t, really. You couldn’t do this on the SNES. The bass and drum tones just weren’t good enough. You certainly couldn’t do it on anything earlier outside of the arcade. Koshiro did an outstanding job of acknowledging and exploiting the Genesis’s best sound qualities, and perhaps a lot of the best system scores to follow are a bit in debt to him.

We’ve all heard “Green Hill Zone”. As a game intended to compete with the Mario series, the music of Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega), composed by Masato Nakamura, definitely falls a little short, but that doesn’t make it bad. The songs were sufficiently catchy, and for a high-speed game they provided a pleasant counterweight.

One of the distinct features of Sonic the Hedgehog is the bass lines. Songs like “Spring Yard Zone” (1:58) are really made by them, and even such hopelessly generic tracks as “Labyrinth Zone” (2:49) maintain a distinct Sonic the Hedgehog flavor through the bass.

I could post a lot of other also-rans that are much better than previous Genesis music yet stil leave something to desire. Jewel Master by Motoaki Takenouchi and Zero Wing by Tatsuya Uemura, Toshiaki Tomisawa, and Masahiro Yuge certainly fall into this category. But I just don’t feel that they’re all that valuable in the larger picture. With so many unconditionally great scores out there by 1991, being the best for a particular system simply no longer mattered all that much.

The real Genesis winner for me this year is Golden Axe II (Sega), by Naofumi Hataya, and you’ll hear why in the very first sound in the game. What that crushing drum beat is doing here is beyond me, but I love it. It makes absolutely no sense in what is ultimately a bluesy jam title track, but I couldn’t care less. From start to finish, the soundtrack to Golden Axe II is underwritten by a restrained desire to be heavy metal.

This shines on some tracks more than others. “Ravaged Village”, for instance, lacks the heavy drumming, but the highly distorted bass tones do the job. Maybe not ‘metal’ in this instance, it still retains quite an edge. The bass feels like a pool of lava bubbling beneath you. There’s something very familiar sounding about this sort of bass with that snake-like melody on top, but I can’t quite put my finger on it–perhaps a coincidental similarity in a later game.

This was Naofumi Hataya’s first game score by the way, as far as I can tell. He joined Sega in 1990, and would go on to play a major role in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise up through the present day. If his future works were as good as this one, I have a lot to look forward to.

“Castle” is completely ridiculous, accenting a slow, foreboding song which meets all of the stereotype standards for a fantasy game with a crushing mechanical drum line that I’m pretty sure is trying to punch me in my face through my headphones.

Thank you for being awesome, Naofumi Hataya.

VGM Entry 47: Sim City

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 47: Sim City
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

I’d like to focus in depth for a moment on a soundtrack that you might not have expected to even make the cut. Sim City, composed by Soyo Oka, doesn’t get all that much praise. It’s fairly often forgotten, and almost always blown off as a mere solid effort. But I think it’s really quite a brilliant work of art–one of the Super Nintendo’s finest.

Soyo Oka got her start as a video game composer with Nintendo, working on five forgotten titles for the NES between 1988 and 1989 before graduating to the SNES and being tasked with three higher profile projects: Pilotwings in 1990, Sim City in 1991, and Super Mario Kart in 1992. For whatever reason her work load diminished a bit after that: she was charged with arranging Koji Kondo’s music for Super Mario All-Stars in 1993 and then stepped back to the NES to team up with Shinobu Amayake for the final licensed game to ever be released on the system, Wario’s Woods, in 1994. She departed from Nintendo in 1995.

It’s a shame that her career with them was so brief, because during this time her distinct, often jazzy style rose to be the second voice of Nintendo. You could always tell a Soyo Oka score from one of Koji Kondo’s despite their many similarities, and if Kondo was probably better, Oka nevertheless remains terribly under-appreciated today.

The concept of Sim City presents a bit of a musical challenge. Just how ought a city simulation in a modern setting sound? I think she completely nailed it, and I rather wish this compilation was better organized to show it. The menu music that starts at 0:45 here says it all. It’s a wonderfully visual work: the lazy trumpets and accompanying hum depict towering and stationary skyscrapers surrounded by that staccato higher pitch early morning hustle and bustle, with the rapid yet never rushing stop-and-go bass tying it all together.

Following the short Dr. Wright theme (which, I should point out, is substantially better than most of the “shopping” game tunes it resembles) we are treated (at 1:47) to the first of six population-themed songs which garudoh unfortunately fails to present chronologically. “Village” is your lowest population, and the tones she chooses are just perfect to distinguish it from a standard RPG small-town theme; it puts you in the same warm, safe place, but it still feels entirely modern, in an Earthbound sort of way.

Humor me and pause the video for a moment. The next track, “Growth”, starting at 2:33, is merely a brief interlude which really doesn’t belong here, but it’s a good opportunity to switch videos since what follows in garudoh’s is misplaced.

“Town” is a beautiful and brilliant transition. The main melody of “Village” is retained, but instead of a lazy country town you now have a population on the move beginning to become acquainted with sophistication. The classical theme perfectly retains a feeling of a small world while giving you a sense of progress which “Village” lacks.

“City” is perhaps the weakest link of the six, but you can definitely get a feeling for Oka’s intentions here. It’s a great deal faster and less stable than “Town”, but it still clings to a sense of something classical. The musical progression has reached a stage of uncertainty; a small community is on the brink of losing its identity and giving way to the future, but it has yet to make that final step. “City” is a track best appreciated in context, and I think what follows explains a lot about it.

“Capital” is definitely my favorite Soyo Oka song in any game. The opening segment is just stunning. Your population has finally taken the last step and acknowledged its collective existence. It brilliantly captures that adventurous and fleeting sensation of being an anonymous unit in a perfectly attuned machine, and it appropriately comes to an end far sooner than anyone would like, returning to the more private experience of “Village”, only now presented in a sort of dreamy, surreal state, conditioned by the memory of that brief sensation at the start of the song.

“Metropolis” lays all dreams of harmony to rest. The lazy trumpets of the menu tune are back, but here the staccato overlay is harsh and synthy, the bass down to business. It’s a real city now, not some idealistic vision of one, and this machine’s only collective consciousness is apathy triumphant. Gameplay-wise you’re getting down to business too, and if that first residential block you ever built is getting in the way of the new sports stadium, it’s time to send out the eviction notices.

“Megalopolis” is an interesting track to end on. Fast paced and pleasant, you’ve got to love the machine to get this far. The fun is in striking the perfect balance now, not in micromanaging a paradise. But the song still slows down for a moment to reflect on your roots, and for all practical purposes it’s an end credits theme. There’s no winning. There’s just perpetual motion and memory. And so the track loops on and the game continues, but in some off sense you’ve reached the end.

Soyo Oka is one of the most underrated composers in the history of the business, and Sim City is her finest work.

VGM Entry 46: Konami in ’91

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 46: Konami in ’91
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

It was to be expected that Nobuo Uematsu and Koji Kondo would make magic on the Super Nintendo. Plenty of other composers did as well at an early stage. Konami in particular launched a number of impressive titles in 1991, and I think I’ll take a moment to showcase three of them.

Super Castlevania IV was composed by Masanori Adachi and Taro Kudo, both of whom remain rather obscure figures in the game music industry. There was actually a false rumor going around that Masanori Adachi died during the 1994 Sega Mega-CD port of Snatcher. In a sort of ‘meet the staff’ easter egg (in which Adachi also participated), Kudo jokingly wrote “Rest in peace, Mr. Adachi!” Credits to his name are so few that this has been taken literally by many, but it would make his future compositions quite a miraculous feat.

Super Castlevania IV marks a major reconception of the series’ sound, which will not be completely apparent in these opening tracks. Skip ahead a bit, to “The Chandeliers” (4:29) and “Secret Room” (6:35) for instance, and you will get a much better feel for the degree of diversity introduced in Adachi and Kudo’s new vision. At times the game embraces its classical roots to the fullest. They take full advantage of the SNES’s capacity for authentic piano, organ, and string sounds to cut out all the rock filler, when the situation calls for it. The album still has plenty of contemporary drumming, but it doesn’t feel quite as rock driven as the NES games, much to its benefit in my opinion. Rock would still infuse plenty of new compositions, but the SNES allowed a lot more room for diversity. I think Adachi and Kudo accomplish the most when they go for the straight classical sound, as on “The Chandeliers”, but they make a commendable effort to explore a large variety of styles appropriate for different elements of gameplay.

The first three tracks in this mix are of course the classic series staples “Vampire Killer” (1:05), “Bloody Tears” (0:00), and “Beginning” (1:50), from Castlevanias I, II, and III respectively. It’s certainly nice to hear the old familiar songs in an improved medium, and they did a fairly good job with them (though I do think this version of “Bloody Tears” could use some work–they play it too safe with the main melody and drum track for the addition of the flute and heavier percussion at the end to accomplish its desired effect), but what I think is more significant is that these three songs don’t stand out as anything really above and beyond the rest of the score. On the Nintendo they were exceptional, and familiarity is definitely a plus, but I honestly like a lot of Adachi and Kudo’s original compositions just as much.

If you’ve been keeping up with my posts, you should be thoroughly familiar with Ganbare Goemon by now. If you haven’t been, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about. Six years and six sequels after the launch of the series, a Ganbare Goemon game finally made it to North America. The port, retitled The Legend of the Mystical Ninja, didn’t launch until 1992, but the Japanese Ganbare Goemon: Yukihime Kyuushutsu Emaki from which it derives came out in 1991. Though well in keeping with the traditions of the series, The Legend of the Mystical Ninja was something of a musical novelty for western gamers.

Its composers were somewhat obscure. I could find very little on either Kazuhiko Uehara or Harumi Ueko, and though Ueko continues to appear in soundtrack credits up to the present day (mostly under the peculiar alias Jimmy Weckl), Uehara seems to all but vanish after a brief career in the early 1990s. It’s a shame, if the two in collaboration were capable of producing this kind of quality. But Uehara may also be a Yoshihiro Sakaguchi type–a sound programmer confusingly credited with a few other artists’ original compositions. I’ve seen him specified as the programmer in certain liner notes, and it would also explain the occasional credit he receives for what was I believe Mutsuhiko Izumi’s Turtles in Time score. But again, I don’t know just how extensively sound programmers were involved in composition. So this might be the work of Harumi Ueko, or he and Uehara might both have played fairly equal roles.

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja presents an oriental score, as you can tell, and I think it does a delightful job of it. If it is reasonable to expect more out of a SNES title than improvements on the same old NES sounds, then perhaps a little more situational diversity was in order. The light-hearted and adventurous style can only capture so many moods. But what it does well–create a sense of light-hearted adventure–it does exceptionally well. It’s the hoaky town and shop themes that prevent The Legend of the Mystical Ninja from being a consistently excellent soundtrack. The music written for the field of combat is all spectacular.

0:36. That is where you’ll want to skip to if you can’t handle some classic 90s cheese. A year before it became known to most of us as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV, Konami released this game to the arcade under its SNES port’s subtitle, Turtles in Time. I was pretty shocked to find this, actually. Konami’s original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (that is, confusingly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game on the NES) and X-Men were by far my two favorite arcade games as a kid. I had no idea Turtles in Time even existed as such. Anyway, Mutsuhiko Izumi did the hard-rocking soundtrack. The music is largely the same in both games, and while nostalgia leads me to favor the SNES version, the arcade original is probably just a slight bit better–but only slightly, and this is debatable.

For instance, if you skip to 3:38 in the arcade mix and 2:43 in the SNES version–“Bury My Shell At Wounded Knee” if memory serves me–you’ll find a major disparity between the drum tracks. Turtles in Times‘s percussion is essentially indistinguishable from a real drum set. Turtles IV can’t compete there, but it does its best to compensate with some pretty wild sound effects and a really bizzare distorted bass. These features throughout the game grant the SNES port a unique and immediately identifiable sound all of its own. In some cases this paid off to such an extent that the port sounds slightly better than the original. Such is, I think, the case for the Super Shredder fight music.

I am lead to believe that Kazuhiko Uehara or Harumi Ueko, the same names associated with The Legend of the Mystical Ninja, were responsible for Turtles in Time‘s SNES port, and if so 1991-1992 was a pretty successful period for the both of them. Turtles IV is an outstanding and fairly faithful adaptation, recreating the original sound where technology allows and inventively maintaining the spirit of the original where it does not.

I can’t say I’ve heard too many instances, at a time when port soundtracks were necessarily different, of an original game soundtrack and a port both being equally exceptional. It worked out this time, compliments of Mutsuhiko Izumi, Kazuhiko Uehara, and Harumi Ueko.

….

Oh yeah, that brief nightmare at the start of the arcade version sampler? That was from the Turtles’ 1990 “Coming Out of Their Shells” tour. What

the fuck?

VGM Entry 45: A Link to the Past

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 45: A Link to the Past
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

I never did find out why Koji Kondo did not score Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, but then, very little about that game made much sense in any department. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past got the series back on track both stylistically and musically.

Yet the music to A Link to the Past never much agreed with me as a kid (though I enjoyed it more than Super Mario World). It’s got a really dark side to it which I think often goes unrecognized, and which made it incredibly appropriate for the game. I mean, there is nothing warm and fuzzy about A Link to the Past. Monsters all over the place, guards out to kill you… The whole world’s got only one town in it and everyone there’s a crook or a witch or just all around unfriendly. Your only real companion is some chick’s voice in your head, and you don’t really ever get to interact with her along the way. In spirit, this was more some horror/nightmare game than a standard adventure/RPG. It made me really uncomfortable as a kid, and it should have. You know, half your companions might die or betray you in Final Fantasy IV, but at least you had them. As Link, you’re quite alone in the world.

I think Koji Kondo perpetuated the angst. You can divide the majority of the soundtrack into string and trumpet tracks and harp tracks. The latter are soothing, sure, but they mostly occur in little safe haven faerie pools. I’m sure glad Tinker Bell is on my side, but I don’t think I’ll be sheathing my sword any time soon. And the former, the former are spooky. Seriously. When you get the same tones on the Hyrule Castle theme (2:25) that you hear in the Forest (3:55) there’s got to be something up. Hyrule Castle is supposed to be protecting your realm, and sure, you’re an unwelcome guest, but the effect is to make the castle itself feel like it’s under some dark spell. You’re not just battling corrupt politicians here; there’s something evil pervading this whole world. Indeed, the forest ends up being one of the most comforting songs on the album, because the flute it least renders it merely mysterious and not obviously dangerous.

Kakariko Village (not sampled here), the only town in the game, uses slightly different tones, but they still have that sort of ghostly texture to them, and in consequence it feels no more comforting than that enchanted mysterious forest.

I think I can best describe my childhood Link to the Past experience as simultaneously captivating and unnerving. I don’t care to speculate what Koji Kondo had in mind when he composed it, but suffice to say I think its consistency with the gameplay is phenomenal.