Tag Archives: gargoyle’s quest

VGM Entry 66: Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 66: Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

The release of Star Fox in 1993 was a sign of quite a few great games beyond the RPG/adventure genre to come. The following year would see another visually revolutionary blockbuster, this one completely blowing Star Fox off the map. Rare, a famous name on the Nintendo, held back developing much for the SNES until they were good and ready to take the system by storm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Z29Mh80JiQ

Donkey Kong Country (Nintendo, 1994) essentially marked the peak of graphics on the Super Nintendo. It never got appreciably better than this, though plenty of other developers would rise to equal it by the end. Considering just how bad the graphics of say, Final Fantasy VII or Super Mario 64 look today, its amazing how well the best of the SNES have stood the test of time. Musically the game did not have quite as big of an impact, but it definitely maintained the cutting edge standard.

Composed by Dave Wise (Wizards & Warriors), Eveline Fischer, and Robin Beanland, the game’s sometimes hoaky jungle themes might be misleading; somewhat silly tunes out of context, they were ideally suited for the gameplay, and they completely defied the limitations of the SNES. I mean, plenty of great musicians were able to craft soundtracks that didn’t sound contrived. They weren’t obligated, as in the 8-bit days, to treat their audio chip as an instrument for any hope of success. But when Nobuo Uematsu added a pseudo-vocal track to Aria Di Mezzo Carattere he wasn’t fooling anybody; the extent to which SNES music could sound performed rather than programmed came in degrees and was not directly relevant to quality. (Final Fantasy VI, Uematsu’s opera included, was one of the best scores of all time despite sounding nowhere near as authentically orchestrated as Yuzo Koshiro’s ActRaiser 2.) But I feel like Donkey Kong Country was remarkably successful in its ability to distance itself from any sense of these limitations.

I mean, it’s electronic music in spirit (or more appropriately ‘new age’, though that is a dangerous term to throw about in so far as the musicians who have defined it share little in common with the finest musicians to have been branded with it) and it should not be compared to attempts at orchestration, but the subtle panning and fading, the outstanding percussion, the appropriate and convincing use of ambient jungle noises in the background… it all adds up to a sound that goes beyond the system, as if they had the nearly limitless possibilities of composers from the Playstation era and beyond.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EiIfQYDeYo

While Donkey Kong was enjoying his first incarnation as a well-defined, major franchise character, Samus was returning for her third venture, and her first on the SNES. Super Metroid (Nintendo, 1994) was one of the best games on the SNES, presenting a massive, open world for exploration that surpassed its series predecessors and remained unmatched until Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Konami, 1997). And much like Castlevania, the Metroid series was synonymous with good music. Super Metroid was composed by Kenji Yamamoto and Minako Hamano (Link’s Awakening), and as best I can tell this was very much a joint effort. The ost on vgmdb credits both artists with 11 out of the 24 tracks. (Hirokazu Tanaka is credited for the last two.)

The two had their work cut out for them. While Tanaka’s original was, I think, far more novel in concept than as an actual finished product, his vision of the Metroid sound as carried on by Ryoji Yoshitomi in Metroid II: Return of Samus was nothing short of perfection.

Super Metroid took a slightly different approach from the get-go. The first two games featured eerie yet beautiful intro songs which really captured the conflicting nature of the metroids as morally innocent yet dangerous predators (one of Metroid’s unique features in early gaming is that some of the monsters aren’t evil or lifeless ‘bad guys’, but rather a natural species taken advantage of by, well, evil bad guys). Super Metroid, on the other hand, starts off on a human space station, and the opening conflict is between Samus and the Zebesian Ridley, not a metroid, so a different sort of musical theme was in order. Yamamoto and Hamano effectively captured that with dark and suspenseful music that offered none of the warmth of the first two games.

Furthermore, the majority of the game takes place on Zebes, the home world of the space pirates who are manipulating the metroid species for conquest. The original Metroid took place here as well, but a lot had changed plot-wise since then. The metroid species had been all but exterminated, and Samus at any rate had had a much more intimate encounter with them in Metroid II than would be possible on Zebes. Their presence here was no longer such a significant factor (in setting the mood, though they remained central to the plot), and the Zebesians presented a less mysterious and more sinister threat.

Yamamoto and Hamano wrote some pretty creepy music for Super Metroid, and it served its purpose well, but the bulk of the tunes were earthy in ambiance and more action-oriented, precisely in keeping with the mood of the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO2G6S5aQ1k

The SNES had some less famous gems in 1994 too. Demon’s Crest was the third installment in Capcom’s largely forgotten Gargoyle’s Quest series, which was in turn derived from the Ghosts’n Goblins series. It couldn’t have been much of a commercial success in North America; at the height of my teenage game obsession I managed to never even hear of it. It had a unique classical soundtrack which rarely stands out in any single instance but deserves a great deal of praise for its consistency. The composer never gives in to temptation by picking up the pace, keeping an even keel that succeeds in maintaining a sort of Halloween spook to the whole game from beginning to end.

Who composed it? I was about to say Yuki Iwai, because she’s almost universally credited for it, but this is yet another one of those gross misconceptions derived from failure of in-game attribution. Apparently Demon’s Crest has no credits (I never played it), and some time long ago someone decided Yuki Iwai must have composed it because she composed the previous series installment, Gargoyle’s Quest II (Capcom, 1992). Thankfully someone on Wikipedia caught on to this and did some research; a compilation cd of music from the series explicitly credits the score to Toshihiko Horiyama.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_qfPaZZycs

And then there’s Live a Live (Square, 1994), composed by the rising star Yoko Shimomura (Gargoyle’s Quest, Street Fighter II, some minor involvement in Breath of Fire). Shimomura left Capcom in 1993 and joined Square, with whom she would maintain a long and productive partnership up through the present day. Chances are you never heard of and almost certainly never played the RPG Live a Live. Even in the present day of classic game redistribution it has never received an official English language port. It’s a shame, because with a lively mix of adventurous western themes and oriental melodies, Live a Live presented one of the most spirited soundtracks on the SNES.

It was also one of Yoko Shimomura’s first independent scores. Though she receives solo credit for a few earlier games–F-1 Dream (Capcom, 1989) for the PC Engine and The King of Dragons (Capcom, 1991) for the arcade for instance–the bulk of her earlier games list joint credits, and these can be pretty misleading. (She only contributed one song to Breath of Fire from what I gather.) Live a Live then might be seen as one of her first really extensive works, and it was definitely a sign of good things to come. With a legendary repertoire to include Super Mario RPG and Kingdom Hearts, Shimomura would be making herself heard in video games for a long time to come.

VGM Entry 41: Game Boy

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 41: Game Boy
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

I nearly forgot to address the Game Boy. Released in April 1989, by the end of 1990 it was already pushing 100 titles. Perhaps production was easy and inexpensive, I don’t know, but this was a system that shot off at lightning speed. In consideration of all of the great music chiptune artists are making on the Game Boy today, I made a diligent effort to listen to a good 80 or so of these early titles. I figured there had to be a ton of hidden gems out there, but there really weren’t.

It’s actually really surprising how completely ho-hum the vast, vast majority of early Game Boy soundtracks were. Even those you might expect to be leading the pack, Castlevania: The Adventure (Konami, 1989, Dracula Densetsu in Japan) and Super Mario Land (Nintendo, 1989) for instance, offered next to nothing worth noting. Those which did peak my interest were often quite obscure. Fist of the North Star: 10 Big Brawls for the King of Universe (Electro Brain Corp., 1990) for instance has no identifiable composer. I searched long and hard to no avail.

This game supposedly stunk, and perhaps the music was not held in very high regard because of this. I thought it was a pretty solid effort. The Game Boy’s bass tones are very full and encompasing, capable of giving a song a great deal of depth. Very few musicians actually put this to use, but whoever composed Fist of the North Star had an ear for it. The way the extended bass notes compliment the melody reminds me a lot of Ryuji Sasai’s approach on my favorite Game Boy soundtrack, which we’ll be getting to here in another year.

The title track to Battle Bull (SETA, 1990), composed by Takayuki Suzuki, strikes me for its ability to pack in such a big sound. It is stylistically exactly the sort of thing I set out to find. It’s a shame there seems to be only one song here, because Suzuki turns out to be one of the few Game Boy composers who really understood how to make the most of the system. In retrospect after looking a few years ahead, this is easily one of the best Game Boy songs I have ever heard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg48s-cZYK0

Square’s SaGa series became a nearly annual event following the first instalment, Makai Toushi SaGa, released for the Game Boy in December 1989. The first three were known in North America as the Final Fantasy Legend series–a title chosen in the hopes that familiarity would boost sales. I know the strategy worked for me. But the series did share at least one thing in common with Final Fantasy, at least initially. Nobuo Uematsu was commissioned to compose it. Despite what you might read, I am fairly confident that he composed Final Fantasy Legend in its entirety. At least, the liner notes displayed by vgmdb.net claim this. Final Fantasy Legend II, released the following December, was a joint effort, with Kenji Ito tackling about half of the tracks.

I am only going to present the original Final Fantasy Legend here out of consideration of space, but the sequel is about equal in quality and worth checking out. Nobuo Uematsu did an excellent job of carrying over his style onto the Game Boy, and a few tracks, like the introduction and the victory fanfare, would become series staples. The only noteworthy RPG series for the Game Boy to the best of my knowledge, the Final Fantasy Legends boasted a much larger song selection than most other Game Boy games at the time, and the consistant high quality really put to shame most of the competition.

Nobuo Uematsu and Kenji Ito really definitively proved that the dearth of good Game Boy music was a consequence of negligent composers, not system restraints. Uematsu was as new to the Game Boy as anyone else when he composed his first work for it, and, as you can plainly hear, that was a simple enough challenge to overcome. Much like the first three Final Fantasy soundtracks, the music of the first two SaGas did not so much conform to the system as force the system to conform as much as possible to a multi-platform vision of what an RPG ought to sound like. The music of Final Fantasy Legend you are hearing here certainly bears a distinctly Game Boy sound in so far as it was impossible not to, but the music neither capitalizes on the systems strengths nor succumbs to its difficulties. It really just sounds like Uematsu doing his thing in the early years.

Gargoyle’s Quest (Capcom, 1990) was pretty amazing. It was created by Harumi Fujita, the original arcade composer of Bionic Commando, and Yoko Shimomura, a new name to the business who you’ll be hearing plenty more of in the future. It is also a part of the Ghosts’n Goblins series, which you’ve heard pleanty of already.

Gargoyle’s Quest does everything right. The decision to abandon percussion altogether did wonders for enhancing the semi-classical melodies. The songs are consistantly well-written, and the melodies are often permitted to run wild, with no stagnation and no breaks in the actual presence of sound. The Game Boy had by far the most beautiful tones of the chippier-sounding systems–that is, pre-SNES/Genesis/Amiga–and they always seem to ring out to their fullest in states of perpetual transition. I don’t know, maybe I’m superimposing what worked best for Gargoyle’s Quest onto what worked best for the Game Boy in general, but it seems like this is the sort of system where you can never have too many notes.

But if that’s stretching matters, I would at least say that the Game Boy is a system on which boldness almost always profits. It’s a shame that Tim Follin didn’t, to the best of my knowledge, write any Game Boy music. But anyway, Gargoyle’s Quest, one of the best soundtracks the system would ever know, was certainly not lacking in it. I might never be able to really put my finger on the features that so strongly attract me to this system, but you’re hearing a lot of them right now. You can hear the soundtrack in its entirety here, once again compliments of explod2A03.

Funny that, for all I just said, my favorite Game Boy soundtrack of this 1989-1990 period is soft and simple Yakuman (Nintendo, 1989), a mahjong game composed by Hirokazu Tanaka and only released in Japan. A frequently occurring figure in my articles, Tanaka’s game audio history goes all the way back to monotone bleeps in the 1970s. His role as a major composer would rapidly fade after 1990, but he was partly responsible for such esteemed works as Metroid, Mother, Earthbound, Dr. Mario, and the Nintendo ports of Tetris. He also composed Super Mario Land for the Game Boy, which I find quite dull. Go figure.

Well, that wraps up my thoughts on the first two years of the Game Boy. Honorable mention goes to Maru’s Mission (Jaleco, 1990, composer again unknown) and Burai Fighter Deluxe (Taxan, 1990/1991), composed by Nobuyuki Shioda. And really I was a bit harsh on Castlevania: The Adventure. I don’t care for it, but it’s not bad.