Tag Archives: kinuyo yamashita

VGM Entry 24: Metal Gear and More

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 24: Metal Gear and More
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Notice: Square Enix have apparently deemed one of my soundtrack reviews a copyright infringement and demanded I remove it. I have complied, and I kindly encourage you to boycott all Square Enix products in the future. Since their games are terrible these days anyway I am probably doing you a favor. (Their complaint involved brief audio samples from only one video game–amusingly out of print today–so I have left my other reviews intact.)

At the same time that RPG/adventure game music was coming into its own on the Nintendo, a lot of solid action soundtracks followed in the wake of Castlevania. Metal Gear (Konami, 1987) kicked off a series that would not really rise to major prominence until 1998, but its history of good scores dates back to the originals.

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

Metal Gear called for a lot of spy work and sneaking around, and its original soundtrack captured precisely that. Not the music you were expecting to hear? Well, two versions of Metal Gear were released in 1987. The first, released in July, was for the MSX2, and it contained a completely different soundtrack from the NES version that followed it in December. It’s not entirely clear who composed it; Wikipedia lists Iku Mizutani, Shigehiro Takenouchi, and Motoaki Furukawa as the composers for Metal Gear without distinguishing between ports. That’s pretty shady business, as Kazuki Muraoka’s NES score contained a number of original compositions and was much more popular, at least in the western world. Most sites only list Iku Mizutani for the MSX2 and Kazuki Muraoka for the NES, while the only official release of the MSX2 soundtrack simply credits Konami Kukeiha Club.

Well, I watched the actual ending credits of the MSX2 version, and Konami lists it as:

Main Sound Effect:
Iku Mizutani

Sub Sound Effect:
Shigehiro Takenouchi
Motoaki Furukawa

The same bad translation persists on the NES version, where Kazuki Muraoka is responsible for all “Sound Effect”. So that’s enough to sort it out, right? All evidence suggests that Mizutani composed the MSX2 version (with a little help from Takenouchi and Furukawa) and Muraoka composed the NES version.

Of course these indecisive credits always leave room for speculation. Here’s one for you: The PC88 visual novel Snatcher (Konami, 1988) contains an arrangement of the song “Theme of Tara” (1:49). The game offers very thorough credits, and it expressly states that the song was composed by Masanori Adachi and arranged by Masahiro Ikariko and Kazuhiko Uehara. If it’s just an arrangement of the MSX2 original, then… wait a minute…

But Adachi isn’t even credited in Metal Gear. Did Konami perhaps forget who wrote the MSX2 music and credit Adachi by mistake? Here’s the real kicker. Snatcher was ported to the MSX2 shortly after its release, and for the port Iku Mizutani is credited with arranging Masanori Adachi’s composition, which was, if our credits all add up, a copy of Iku Mizutani’s original Metal Gear composition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r0lEkwtqQU

Oh well. We are at least pretty sure Kazuki Muraoka wrote the NES one. In the very least he’s the only name appearing in the credits in association with sound. His score was a mix of arrangements from the MSX2 and new songs, and as far as I’m concerned the new material was almost always an improvement. Generally this consisted of replacing the weaker tracks, but Muraoka did take the risk of replacing “Red Alert!” (0:16 in the previous video), perhaps the best song in the MSX2 mix, with a completely new track under the same name (2:03). The decision paid off.

If you would like to hear some comparisons between the original MSX2 compositions and Muraoka’s ports, look for “Mercenary” (4:21 on the MSX2 video, 2:55 on the NES) and “Return of Fox Hounder” (6:52 on the MSX2 and 4:25 on the NES). Unless I overlooked something, the rest of this NES compilation consists of original compositions. The whole Metal Gear sound as established on the MSX2 turned out to be excellently suited for the NES–a system on which speed and catchiness served well to compensate for a lack of much bass or distortion. Even so, my favorite Muraoka addition is a slow one. I have no idea why “Password Entry” (3:37) was put to such petty use. It would have made a fine ending credits theme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwiKP7etEnc

Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (Konami) also made its first appearance in the summer of ’87. By this time Kinuyo Yamashita had moved on to other projects, and Kenichi Matsubara picked up the job. Like Kinuyo Yamashita in the original, it would be his only contribution to the series.

And what a contribution it was. His efforts to maintain stylistic consistency with the first game are commendable, and he did so while writing equally catchy and memorable songs. Obviously his most famous work (and probably the most famous song in the series) is “Bloody Tears”, appearing second in the video. But I was really quite surprised to encounter tracks like “Dwelling of Doom” (2:10), which could just as easily have become series staples had future writers chosen to retain them. Kenichi Matsubara arguably surpassed the original Castlevania with this soundtrack, and it wouldn’t be the last time that the series stood at the forefront of video game music.

In the meantime, Kinuyo Yamashita had by no means fallen by the wayside. Her work on Arumana no Kiseki (Konami, 1987) is really outstanding, taking advantage of the Family Computer Disk System’s enhanced capabilities to produce a very clean, crisp sound. (The FDS was an extension of the Famicom released only in Japan. Its early titles included The Legend of Zelda and Metroid.) I have to imagine the only reason Arumana no Kiseki never got much praise is because fewer people heard it. Konami seem to have gotten around the copywrite challenges of making an Indiana Jones ripoff by simply never releasing the game outside of Japan, although they may have been better off paying up and releasing it. The first licensed series game for the NES, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Mindscape), released some time in 1987 or 1988, was a gameplay disaster on par with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and its soundtrack is a lame attempt to preserve the original John Williams score.

explod2A03 on youtube provides a nice collection of music from Arumana no Kiseki, available here, along with a number of other forgotten soundtracks from the era.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei_YMyN_69Y

Of course we all know what the most important video game music series on the NES was, and Capcom, not Konami, get the credit this time. Known as Rockman in Japan, the original Mega Man was unleashed upon the world in December 1987. Manami Matsumae did not compose for the Mega Man series for long. After scoring Mega Man and contributing to Takashi Tateishi’s work in Mega Man 2, she sort of dropped off the face of the earth, not to resurface in the series again until Mega Man 10‘s massive collaborative effort in 2010. But the legacy she began is one of the finest in gaming history.

Here’s a track list for the compilation, in case you’re interested:
(0:00) Epilogue
(1:40) Stage Select
(1:57) Robot Intro
(2:04) Cutman
(2:52) Fireman
(3:28) Elecman
(4:22) Gutsman
(4:57) Iceman
(6:00) Dr. Wily’s Castle 1
(6:44) Dr. Wily’s Castle 2
(7:20) Robot Battle
(7:49) Dr. Wily Battle
(8:17) Bombman
(9:02) Victory!

Of course the series did not find massive commercial success until Mega Man 2 the following year, but from the beginning it was as intimately tied to its score as the Final Fantasy series. It isn’t nostalgia that leads modern-day rock bands and chiptune artists to cover “Cutman”, “Fireman”, and “Bombman”, just to name a few. It’s because the music is outstanding. I mean, I think the samples speak for themselves. Manami Matsumae established a standard of quality which Capcom would strive to maintain for many years to come. Takashi Tateishi would soon raise the bar higher, but it may well be argued that, without Manami Matsumae’s original concept of what Mega Man music ought to sound like, none of the future improvements would have ever been possible.

VGM Entry 15: A question of authorship (part 1)

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 15: A question of authorship (part 1)
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Everyone has likely heard at least some passing reference to the “console wars” between Nintendo and Sega beginning with the release of the Sega Master System in 1985. I am curious to know whether this is a posthumous attribution. The Master System never had a leg to stand on outside of Europe, and the heat never really came on until Sega released the Genesis/Master System in 1988. (Their rapid transition from third to fourth generation console may have had a lot to do with this.) Nintendo and Sega became ruthless rivals in the 1990s, playing all sorts of mind games with their markets and seeking out every legal loop-hole in the book. It makes for quite an interesting story, and I was initially inclined to think that frequent efforts to root out its origins in the third generation era generated some misconceptions over just how directly these companies targeted each other in the mid-80s. But perhaps I am wrong. Was the Master System’s flop a direct result of Nintendo strong-arming the market?

A part of this origin story lies in Nintendo’s licensing policies. One can frequently find such statements as “Any developer who signed on to produce software for the NES was trapped into an exclusivity contract. They were not allowed to develop games for competing systems for two years following the beginning of the contract, and they were limited to releasing only five games a year.” (Lucas DeWoody, “Nintendo vs. Sega: The Console War: Part One”, October 24, 2007. The original online publication appears to have been deleted.)

This sounds like quite a pickle, but I would like to know its more precise ramifications and loop-holes. What constituted a competing system? If these merely meant the Sega Master System and the Atari 7800, not home computers, then that could explain a lot, but it seems odd to me that Nintendo would let so many other competitors squeak by.

The reason I bring this up in the first place is because, come 1986, it feels as though nearly every game not published by Nintendo was appearing in half a dozen different formats. This has quite a few consequences for video game music, because the variance in sound quality from one medium to the next was vast. It becomes very difficult to point out a stellar soundtrack when the particular arrangement of that soundtrack, more often than not created by someone other than the original songwriter, is such a pivotal factor.

I would like to spend some time on this topic. Let’s look again at “Vampire Killer” and “Wicked Child” from Castlevania.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHvG0j0ekXM

Does anything sound a bit different? Well, the tracks I posted yesterday should have sounded more like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KI2aB86u-zQ

Konami released Vampire Killer for the MSX2 about a month after they released Castlevania for the NES. MSX was a home computer architecture employed by a large variety of manufacturers. You could have a Yamaha MSX, a Sony MSX, a Sharp MSX, etc. Did that, along with a name change, get Konami around Nintendo’s licensing clause? Well, Castlevania series enthusiasts may claim that Vampire Killer was its own distinct game, but it doesn’t look it to me. Nintendo had no trouble pulling Rainbow Arts’ The Great Giana Sisters off the shelves despite it copying Super Mario Bros. to a lesser extent than Vampire Killer copied Castlevania (I’ll be covering that later). Whether Konami were less legally bound or simply had a sort of gentleman’s agreement (Nintendo had a lot more to lose by pissing them off) will remain a mystery to me for the time being.

But anyway, this is only the first example of many, and I wish to emphasize the musical distinctions. “Vampire Killer” in Vampire Killer has a much more crisp sound, which I would say is more readily appealing. But you’ll notice that early into the first break away from the main chorus, precisely at 22 seconds in both videos, a lot of the subtler notes which give the Castlevania version its real charm are completely missing in Vampire Killer. It’s enough to make or break the song for me, and moreover it could be enough to make or break the composer.

Now skip ahead to 1:32 in Vampire Killer and 1:35 in Castlevania and let’s take a look at “Wicked Child”.(Garudoh really did an outstanding job of syncing these up.) Here the distinction is shamefully obvious. The entire dramatic introduction is missing in Vampire Killer, and worse yet, the alternating bass beat of the main chorus has been reduced down to a single repeated note. I can’t bare to go any farther; Vampire Killer‘s soundtrack is a travesty compared to the original.

Or does it simply make do with the MSX2’s limitations as best it can? How do I know whether this was a cheap, hasty reconstruction or a thoughtful, best possible scenario? I suppose I’ll never know unless I attempt to reconstruct it myself or else listen to a whole bunch of other soundtracks released for both systems. But if I have to contextualize all of this stuff within a given system, and a lot of the best soundtracks appear on multiple systems, and a lot of their authors had nothing to do with the port arrangements, well this is all getting to be quite messy.

I observed in my last post that Kinuyo Yamashita refrained from disclosing which Castlevania tracks she wrote, despite having written most of them. Perhaps this is because game composition was far more of a group project than meets the eye. Satoe Terashima appears to be credited for both games under “music and sound effects”, and I tend to associate sound effects more directly with sound programming, but even the credits here are by no means official in the form I found them, and I have found plenty of fan-based game credits which falsely attribute the original sound programmer to a port. This distinction is critical. We have reached a point in time here where ‘composer’ and ‘sound programmer’ begin to branch off into separate jobs. Writing a catchy tune is one thing, and arranging it for a given platform is quite another. In the computer world the two jobs may have remained synonymous, but this was not so on the Nintendo. Where multiple parties are involved in this process, the qualities which distinguish an outstanding video game musician become hopelessly obscured.

It’s nice to put names and faces to the songs I love, but it’s important to realize that at least at some level this can be a facade. Even if Konami had never produced a quick port to the MSX2 and the Nintendo version was all we had to roll with, there’d be no telling which of the soundtrack’s more subtle thrills derived from the main melody’s author.

VGM Entry 14: Konami in ’86

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 14: Konami in ’86
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

I never actually got into the Castlevania series until Symphony of the Night came out in 1997. It was conspiratorially taken off my radar. My parents weren’t about to have any of that demonic, Satan-worshiping trash in OUR household. Here’s some change, go pick up that new one I heard about in Reader’s Digest. M.C. Kids was it? (We actually owned a copy of the infamous unlicensed Bible Adventures.)

But I digress.

What drew me to Symphony of the Night in the first place was Michiru Yamane’s outstanding soundtrack. Her classical compositions drove the game, defining the setting and mood in a way that graphics alone could never accomplish. What I hadn’t known at the time was that this was a series tradition dating all the way back to the 1986 original. Even some of the tracks remained. Vampire Killer, arguably the most iconic song of the series (its rival, Bloody Tears, first appeared on Simon’s Quest in 1987), was in place from the get-go.

Konami is an especially difficult company to sort out soundtrack credits for. Kinuyo Yamashita has acknowledged that she composed most of the soundtrack, but refrained from disclosing which tracks specifically were her work. Her official biography confirms Wicked Child and Heart of Fire. The rest is anyone’s guess. The classical influences in both of these songs, which so appropriately set the mood for the entire game series, may well have been a part of her conceptual contribution.

Of course the entire soundtrack isn’t this great. Vampire Killer, Wicked Child, and Heart of Fire stand pretty far above the rest. The music varies from excellent to merely sufficient, though much to its credit it never devolves further. Kinuyo Yamashita still struggled I suppose, as did most of her contemporaries, to make do with the highly limited sound selections technology made available. But if some of the tracks sink a bit into mediocrity, they at least never dip below it. The classical influences maintain the work’s consistency and provide the requisite spooky haunt of a vampire game. She never tries to get too experimental about creating a sinister sound (as opposed to say, Hirokazu Tanaka on Metroid, which was just a little more hit-or-miss than people care to remember), and the decision pays off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w_E4MmOugU
(Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Dōchū)

Another significant Konami series launched in 1986 is Ganbare Goemon, familiar to western audiences as Legend of the Mystical Ninja. Konami never made a real go at marketing this series in North America. The SNES title Ganbare Goemon: Yukihime Kyuushutsu Emaki, appearing in North America as The Legend of the Mystical Ninja in 1992, was our first of very few ported installments. In fact, Wikipedia lists a whopping 35 Ganbare Goemon titles, of which only five were ever ported. At least up through the SNES era they all featured the Asian folk style you are currently hearing.

The first was Mr. Goemon, a 1986 arcade game, but Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Dōchū followed that same year for the Famicom and was not a port. Satoko Miyawaki is occasionally credited with the composition of the latter, however I could not confirm this, nor whether he had any involvement in the arcade version. This musical style, similar to that of Yie Ar Kung-Fu, was and remains relatively unique for video games. Konami’s musicians would continue to improve upon it over the years, making it a staple feature of all of the early Ganbare Goemon games.