Category Archives: Music

VGM Entry 62: Enix

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 62: Enix
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Today Square might be remembered as the uncontested kings of Super Nintendo RPGs, but this is not an accurate assumption. As a young kid obsessed with anything approximating the genre, I anticipated every new Enix release with nearly equal glee. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Enix was a publisher. You won’t find games developed by them. While Square’s games emerged in house from the drawing board, Enix released titles developed by a wide variety of companies.

Quintet was the leader of this pack. Quintet is a Japanese video game developer officially founded in April 1989. According to Wikipedia, the first game credited to them is Legacy of the Wizard (Nihon Falcom, 1987), an installment of the Dragon Slayer series. Hence a bit of a to-do is made about their origin, with “June 1987 / April 1989” listed as the ambiguous founding date. The source for their official founding date links to a nearly illegible magazine scan (in English), and I don’t want to give myself a headache trying to decipher it, so I’ll take the Wikipedia editor’s word on that one. (The fact that whoever edited the article noticed an ambiguity in the first place marks them as more attentive than the vast majority of game-related editors.)

But the article and its relevant links lead me to believe the issue isn’t as complex as it seems. Tomoyoshi Miyazaki, director and president of Quintet, was a Nihon Falcom employee (he was involved in developing the first three Ys titles), and it just so happens to be the case that Legacy of the Wizard was released in North America in April 1989. The only real confusion is that Wikipedia suggests that Quintet developed both the Famicom and the NES ports, and that the former was released in 1987. If both were released in 1989, or alternatively if Quintet only developed the NES release (if the division of labor between developer and publisher renders this thought unintelligible, my apologies), then there is no issue. And moreover, if Tomoyoshi Miyazaki was a Nihon Falcom employee, the ambiguity may capture a simple gap in time between Miyazaki beginning to call his development team Quintet and his registering the name as a corporate entity.

Whatever the case may be, Quintet were busy in 1993. Following ActRaiser in 1990 and Soul Blazer in 1992, they managed to pump out two games in a span of two months. This probably wasn’t a great idea in retrospect. Illusion of Gaia, composed by Yasuhiro Kawasaki, was musically pretty shallow (this might account for why I never bought the game after renting it as a kid), and as an installment in the unofficial Soul Blazer Trilogy it was a sad decline from the quality of Yukihide Takekawa’s Soul Blazer. In its subtler moments, 2:49 to 5:35 for instance, it boasts an atmospheric vibe vaguely reminiscent of Jeremy Soule’s Secret of Evermore two years later, but the rest is of poor quality.

ActRaiser 2 on the other hand had an outstanding score, and is a real testament to the diversity offered by Yuzo Koshiro. While I remain unmoved by his more popular Streets of Rage sound, as a classical composer he not only competes outside of the video game spectrum, but makes the Super Nintendo sound like a real symphony with unprecedented professionalism. Nobuo Uematsu is always quick to point out that he had no professional training, and my own musical inclinations lead me to treat such claims with an appreciative nod of respect, but where he did try to emulate an orchestra on the Super Nintendo he never came close to the level of Koshiro. (Indeed, “Dancing Mad”‘s charm is it’s quintessentially SNES sound within the orchestration.)

Koshiro’s work in ActRaiser 2 in contrast might as well have been a live recording. Koshiro is, like Chris Hülsbeck, an artist I’ve I in many ways simply failed to appreciate, but not here. Quintet’s problem in this instance is that Koshiro’s stellar score was ActRaiser 2‘s only redeeming value. I mean, I never played it, but that fact is directly relevant to its commercial failure. In choosing to abandon the simulation side of the gameplay and go for a straight side-scroller they essentially ostracized their entire fanbase and entered a much more competitive field in which the Enix seal of approval meant jack.

Produce was a pretty obscure developer founded in 1990, probably most known for Super Adventure Island (Hudson Soft, 1992) and The 7th Saga. My most vivid memories of The 7th Saga are of the obnoxious pseudo-avoidable encounters that were for all practical purposes random but gave you the sensation of just being bad at avoiding them. Still, as with most Enix titles it was a refreshing change of pace from the Dragon Quest-patterned norm, and perhaps it had a good plot of which I was simply oblivious at the time (I doubt it though.)

What really strikes me though, listening to this video, is that it actually had a really great soundtrack. Norihiko Yamanuki doesn’t even have a vgmdb entry, and he’s surely one of the most obscure SNES composers to have actually accomplished something. There’s nothing really compositionally striking about the music of The 7th Saga, and it doesn’t really surprise me that I overlooked it as a kid. Yamanuki’s accomplishment here is more in the subtle qualities of the arrangement. The bubbly little tapping tones that prevail throughout this collection, most dominantly in the track at 1:00, really give the game a heartwarming sort of appeal; it’s quite pretty.

Ogre Battle was probably the most successful real-time strategy game for the SNES, at least in the United States. It stemmed from a long lineage of similar titles in Japan, but few had found sufficient success for overseas ports. Quest, the developer, had worked on similar projects in the past, though Ogre Battle would be the first in their Ogre series. A game of few settings and themes–the entire plot unfolds within the combat setting, and there are no separate story scenes as in say, Final Fantasy Tactics—Ogre Battle demanded a whole bunch of tunes well suited for long, drawn-out conflict.

The game did, nevertheless, have a pretty extensive soundtrack. Masaharu Iwata did the bulk of the composition, contributing 24 tracks, while Hitoshi Sakimoto added 12 and Hayato Matsuo added 6 (based on the ost liner notes on vgmdb). If the music sounds a little similar to the score of Final Fantasy Tactics, that’s no coincidence. Masaharu Iwata and Hitoshi Sakimoto composed it too.

VGM Entry 61: The RPG generation

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 61: The RPG generation
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

The Super Nintendo RPG/Adventure legacy didn’t come over night. But ActRaiser (Enix, 1990), Final Fantasy IV (Square, 1991), and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Nintendo, 1991) did not necessarily set the stage, either. RPGs had been huge in Japan for quite some time. The Super Nintendo provided both the capacity to carry them and the consistency to focus costs on a single product (imagine the amount of time and resources which must have went into porting PC RPGs to a half-dozen different systems). This didn’t inspire computer gaming companies to switch gears–Nihon Falcom continued to pump out their titles for the PC-9801 all the way up to 1996, slowly switching to Windows with only one Super Famicom title, Ys V: Ushinawareta Suna no Miyako Kefin (1995), to show for themselves in between. But other publishers saw RPGs as a more viable option now, and Capcom, Taito, and Nintendo hopped on the bandwagon while Square and Enix picked up the pace. (Konami held off producing RPGs until the Playstation era.)

The fact that these types of games did not start to appear in abundance on the SNES until 1992 might have been a simple consequence of developers spending most of 1991 making them. 1992 to 1995 were the glory days of SNES fantasy gaming, and perhaps the crowning era in the history of video game music.

Capcom’s first big RPG was Breath of Fire (1993), credited to a long list of composers including Yasuaki Fujita (Mega Man 3), Mari Yamaguchi (Mega Man 5), Minae Fujii (Mega Man 4), Yoko Shimomura (Gargoyle’s Quest, Street Fighter II), and Tatsuya Nishimura. Thankfully track by track authorship is actually available, and we can see that Yasuaki ‘Bun Bun’ Fujita did the grand bulk of the composing, with Mari Yamaguchi contributing five songs and the other three chipping in a song each.

Here’s a track list for the compilation:

(0:00) The Dragon Warrior
(1:24) Fate
(2:54) Starting the Journey ~Breath of Fire~
(4:11) Deep Forest
(5:18) Battling
(6:02) Sand Palace
(7:07) Dejection
(8:05) Fishing

As a series, Breath of Fire was not really all that well noted for its contributions to video game music. I don’t want to blow off the rest of the games here and now before revisiting them, but I distinctly remember playing through most of them with the radio on (I never actually played Breath of Fire V). The original Breath of Fire was definitely more of an exception than than the rule. The soundtrack is peppered with memorable, moody numbers. It’s most famous song, at least in so far as it was carried on in future installments, is Mari Yamaguchi’s overworld theme, “Starting the Journey”. But it is Yasuaki Fujita’s bleaker contributions that really make the game stand out from the crowd. “Deep Forest” and “Dejection” could both easily pass for ending credits themes to some complex plotline defying the good versus evil stereotype–the sort of RPG we all crave but rarely find outside of the Suikoden series. They’re both delightfully dark and finite, screaming “it’s over, but did you really win?”

Of course neither of them are actually credits music, and Breath of Fire was never known for its plot. The series had an incredible knack for being simultaneously completely forgettable and quite fun to play–perhaps a consequence of actually challenging combat (at least, in comparison to the vast majority of turn-based RPGs.) When it came to music, the original was the only one that actually made a lasting impression on me when I played it.

Lufia & the Fortress of Doom, composed by Yasunori Shiono, was another series starter in 1993. There were actually only two Lufia titles in the 90s, and I suspect the later handheld releases came as an afterthought. Taito were prolific producers with a history in the gaming industry dating all the way back to 1973, but they had always shied away from the RPG market. With the cooperation of newly-established developers Neverland Co., Lufia would be their first attempt.

As for the history of Neverland, something on Wikipedia is clearly wrong. It claims Lufia‘s developer was founded on May 7th, 1993, and it claims the game was released on June 25th, 1993. But while Neverland certainly must have had an earlier origin, Lufia does appear to be their first of very few titles. In that regard, the Lufia series was kind of unique. I won’t pretend to know what goes on behind the scenes in the gaming industry (my dream of directing RPGs has always been a total fantasy), but I have to imagine when a producer develops their own game there’s a fairly more intimate degree of interaction between the two sides. Square and Nintendo as of 1993 nearly always developed their own games. The wildcards in the world of non-PC RPGs almost always went through Enix (the most famous developers being Quintet and Chunsoft). Neverland-Taito then seems like a pretty unique pairing–an independent developer working with a producer that had never marketed an RPG.

Lufia & the Fortress of Doom was in every manner a rough draft–a sort of prototype for Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, which was infinitely better and one of the best RPGs in the history of the SNES. Unlike Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest (from what I gather), Breath of Fire, Seiken Densetsu, Quintet’s unofficial ‘Soul Blazer Trilogy’, and Zelda really, the Lufia series was both plot-centric and cumulative, taking place in the same world with a continuous history and related/reoccurring characters. As if in collusion with the rest of the development team’s maturation, Yasunori Shiono’s compositions improved substantially in the second title, but we will get to that later.

Good adventure/RPG music was not limited to the Super Nintendo. The Game Boy was a musical instrument par excellence, with by far the most aesthetically pleasing tones of any system on the market lacking diverse instrument sampling. (I hope that’s a suitable delineation for a technical subject of which I still know absolutely nothing.) The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is far and wide my favorite score in the Zelda series. It might have nothing on Ryuji Sasai’s work on Final Fantasy Legend III, but Link’s Awakening brings the Game Boy to life in a really beautiful way. Indeed, its only real fault is a failure to employ his three-dimensional stereo effects. The game’s crowning jewel, Tal Tal Heights, appears early in this compilation (0:30), but the whole score merits attention.

Koji Kondo surprisingly had nothing to do with it. Link’s Awakening was a joint effort between Kazumi Totaka, Minako Hamano, and Kozue Ishikawa, all of whom I’ve yet to mention. Kazumi Totaka actually had a pretty long history with Nintendo, providing music for the sort of games you might expect to hear Soyo Oka on (Mario Paint, Wave Race 64, most notably Animal Crossing, which I do hope I remember to feature if I ever get that far). Minako Hamano was responsible for roughly half of the Super Metroid soundtrack, though her name rapidly fades from the pages of history, and Kozue Ishikawa is a virtual unknown. But this motley crew managed to piece together one of the quintessential scores of the Game Boy, and in doing so earn themselves a place in video game music history.

October Music Series: Townes Van Zandt

Posted on by necromoonyeti

Townes Van Zandt lived a troubled life, characterized by constant alcoholism, drug abuse, and failed relationships. He finally passed away of heart failure in a state of delirium tremens on January 1, 1997, at the age of 52, cryptically 44 years to the day after the death of perhaps his greatest influence, Hank Williams, under similar circumstances. As a song writer his music was inconsistent, but at his finest moments he tapped into his inner demons with an acute awareness that he was living more in dream than reality. He created his own folklore both in life and in song. The latter was quite deliberate, emerging sometimes from scratch and sometimes with attention to older legends. Narrated in the first person, always at night, bridging a gap between sleep and consciousness, he painted strikingly vivid images of personal confrontations with foul spirits and terrifying monsters physically imbued with emotional states which could never take on material form outside of a dream, or a song.

To call Spider Song a metaphor would do it a disservice. Of course it is about overcoming some inner demon, whatever that may be, and yes, through the battle against the spider we gain some insight into Van Zandt’s personal struggles, but that’s trivial. He’s not just beating that old dead horse again. The spider begins “in his dreams”, and at no point does it definitively leave them, yet the song is structured in such a way that Van Zandt’s dreams come to characterize more and more a real, physical monster encountered collectively by the narrator and the audience. What you get is a subtle transition from a nearly explicit metaphor (it’s in his dreams) to, by the end, momentary belief that a real, heroic, pitched battle against a giant spider is about to ensue. You don’t fully forget that the spider originated as a sort of representation of emotional states of fear, depression, or whatever you read into the first few stanzas of the song, but nevertheless here it stands, a menacing physical object. No, this song should not be regarded as a metaphor. Rather, our recognition of metaphor is employed to, over time, trick the senses into visualizing something supernatural.

Our Mother The Mountain is laden with hints at the supernatural from the outset: The woman’s esoteric claim to have come from her mother the mountain, her mysterious medallion, the refrain “singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o” with an emphasis on “lu-ra-lai”… “Lorelei”… The music feels like a dream, and the lyrics too, until the narrator stops observing the dream and tries to interact, reaching for her hand. The woman’s response is a manifest nightmare–a completely nonsensical appeal to pure foreboding terror captured in her physical actions. The narrator never sees her again, but he swears that it wasn’t just a dream, and as the listener you can’t help but believe him.

Spider Song

There is a spider in my dreams
Long and silent is his name
Cold as lightning is his smile
Final is his sting

His curse is deep as seven skies
Boys, I wouldn’t tell you lies
The legends say he never sleeps
and he’s never hungry long

He’s got us boys, I believe it’s true
But I’m fighting til he lays me down
Run his foul black body through
Cleave him all asunder

Think of your women, won’t you boys
Think of your mother growing old
Think about your darling son
Spit in the spider’s eye

Up at ease, against him ride
We’ll not take him by surprise
Give a scream down in your dreams
Let him know we’re coming

There is a spider in my dreams
Long and silent is his name
Cold as lightning is his smile
Final is his sting

Our Mother The Mountain

My lover comes to me with a rose on her bosom
The moon’s dancing purple all through her black hair
And her lady’s-in-waiting, she’ll stand ‘neath my window
And the sun will rise soon on the false and the fair
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

She tells me she comes from My Mother The Mountain
And her skin fits her tightly, and her lips do not lie
She silently slips from her throat a medallion
Slowly she twirls it in front of my eyes
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

I watch her, I love her, and I long for to touch her
The satin she’s wearing is shimmering blue
And outside my window her ladies are sleeping
My dogs are gone hunting; their howling is through
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

So I reach for her hand, and her eyes turn to poison
And her hair turns to splinters, and her flesh turns to brine
She leaps ‘cross the room. She stands in the window
and screams that my first-born will surely be blind.
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

Then she throws herself out to the black of the nightfall
She’s parted her lips, but she makes not a sound
I fly down the stairway and I run to the garden
No trace of my true love is there to be found
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

So walk these hills lightly, and watch who you’re loving
By Mother The Mountain I swear that it’s true
And love not a woman with hair black as midnight
and a dress made of satin all shimmering blue
Singing tu-a-lu-ra-lai-o

My lover comes to me with a rose on her bosom
The moon’s dancing purple all through her black hair
And her lady’s-in-waiting, she’ll stand ‘neath my window
And the sun will rise soon on the false and the fair

AMV of the Day (Horror Edition): Am I Not Human? (Another)

Posted on by Arleigh

Yesterday site anime and manga contributor pantsukudasai56 posted his anime horror post for the month be recommending to everyone to watch the anime horror series Another. Using that as inspiration I’ve chosen the latest “AMV of the Day” by picking an AMV that uses that very series as the foundation for the video.

I’ve still have to find time to watch the series, but I know that Another is a horror anime that seems to have reached cult-status and beyond since it’s release earlier this year. Unlike pantsu here I do enjoy lots of anime horror but I will agree that they’re not in the same realm as mahou shoujo and slice-of-life series in terms of consistent quality. The last horror anime that I thought to be very good was Gakuen Mokushiroku (better known as Highschool of the Dead) but even that series earns much of it’s popularity due to it’s excessive (I thank Zoidberg Jesus for it everyday) use of fanservice shots.

With this AMV we get one from a high-quality horror anime and also paired up with one of the music industry’s preeminent producers of musical scores from Two Steps From Hell. This time around AMV producer AnimeFanOtaku123 uses that groups song, “Am I Not Human?”, to be the score for the chosen scenes from Another to complete the video. In fact, AnimeFanOtaku123 does such a great job with this AMV that one could easily say that it works perfectly well as a trailer for the series if one didn’t think it was an AMV to begin with.

I’ll probably have one or two more horror-related AMV’s before the end of the month, but this is a good choice for this month..

Anime: Another

Song: “Am I Not Human?” by Two Steps From Hell

Creator: AnimeFanOtaku123

Past AMVs of the Day

VGM Entry 60: Splatterhouse

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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.

oldskoolgamertje on youtube has provided a complete soundtrack of the MSX version for your enjoyment. Cheers.

AMV of the Day: Moves Like Jagger (NSFW)

Posted on by Arleigh

This particular tune had stuck itself in my head all week and I finally figured out who sang the song. Maroon 5 is a band that I would consider as being part of this new generation of pop rock. That’s not to denigrate the band or anything. I like them well enough and when they release a new single it’s usually one that’s quite catchy which makes them big hits for the band. It’s the use of one of their songs that the latest “AMV of the Day” uses to some good effect.

“Moves Like Jagger (Anime Mix)” is the latest AMV and one produced by one xXxKrazyKookiexXx and one that uses scenes from a cornucopia of anime series. It’s a video that’s simple and straightforward in that the editor tries (and succeeds) in syncing the lyrics being sung to lip movements in the scenes chosen. Even the type of scenes picked fits the song well with all of them characters dancing, singing or doing both.

DxXxKrazyKookiexXx has other AMV’s, but this is one that I’ve latched onto as a favorite of this particular producer and just like the song used in the video this AMV is just as catchy and fun. It is also quite fan service heavy which means NSFW as a word of warning.

Anime: Macross Frontier, Nyan Koi, Needless, Baka to Test, Seitokai Yakuindomo, Princess Lover, Kampfer, Highscool of the Dead, Sekirei, Sora no Otoshimono, Asobi ni Ikuyo, Hyakka Ryouran Samurai Girls, Ladies vs Butlers, Bakemonogatari, Naruto, Chaos Head, Uta no Prince Sama, Melancholy of Haruhi Suziyama, Rosario+Vampire, Teppo Tengen Gurren Lagann

Song: “Moves Like Jagger (Radio Edit)” by Maroon 5 feat. Christina Aguilera

Creator: xXxKrazyKookiexXx

Past AMVs of the Day

VGM Entry 57: Snatcher (part 2)

Posted on by necromoonyeti

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:

Sound Program:
Kazuki Muraoka
Music:
Motoaki Furukawa
Kazuki Muraoka
Masahiro Ikariko
Seiichi Fukami
Mutsuhiko Izumi
Sound:
Kazuki Muraoka

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:

SegaCD Sound Design:
Keizou Nakamura
Masanori Adachi
Kazuhito Imai
Masanori Ouchi
Akira Yamaoka
Sound Programmer:
Osamu Kasai
Akira Souji

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

PSX and Saturn
Composition: Kazuki Muraoka, Motoaki Furukawa, KIDA-Sun, Akira Yamaoka, Hiroshi Tamawari, Kosuke Soeda (Saturn only)
Arrangement: KIDA-Sun, Syouichirou Hirata (Saturn only)

I’ll leave it at that. I hope you’ve enjoyed the sound samples in the meantime. I know I certainly have.