Knightmare is basically a top-down shooter. You are a knight and your girlfriend has been kidnapped by an evil sorcerer. To rescue her, you must make your way across the grounds of his castle, while avoiding the monsters and guards.
That’s you, in the white armor. The bat and the gray balloons may look harmless but if they touch you, you explode. Fortunately, you have an unlimited supply of arrows that you can shoot at them. You can also use the arrows to destroy obstacles, like those boxes with the question marks. If you shoot an arrow into a black circle and then retrieve it, you get a weapons upgrade.
You will need that weapons upgrade because eventually, these people show up:
The blue knights are considerably faster than the bats and the balloons. It takes more than one arrow to kill them and they have arrows of their own.
It took me a while to get the hang of it.
At the end of each level, there is a boss who must be destroyed. At the end of stage 1, the boss appears to be Medusa.
I have not had much luck against Medusa.
I liked Knightmare. Like all of the best shooters, it is simple but also challenging and extremely addictive. It is a game that you can go back and play again and again, which is what I am going to go down right now.
There is a common quip you’re likely to find if you read comments on Konami’s Snatcher: of all the games that I have never played, this one is my favorite. The game was ported and rehashed for much of the late 80s and 90s, appearing on the PC-8801, MSX2, PC-Engine, Sega Mega-CD, Sony Playstation, and Sega Saturn. The highly censored Sega CD port was the only English translation, and given how horribly that system flopped, you have almost certainly never played this game. That’s no fault of Konami’s. America and Europe are not exactly hot markets for menu-based graphic adventure games.
But Snatcher has a cult following of western fans regardless. Magazines reviewing the Sega CD port praised it across the board. It’s one of the earliest highly successful (in Japan at least) cyberpunk video games, and it merges this with a detective story, grasping the genre’s affinity with film noir. Its original 1988 score captured the essence of cyberpunk aesthetics, filled with jazzy melodies driven by futuristic beats where it could have easily gotten away with generic action music instead. And the game is deliciously dated: its post-apocalyptic earth–set in the oh-so-distant future of 2042–comes about as a consequence of the Soviet Union unleashing a devastating biological weapon. All of these factors make its obscurity a bit enticing. It’s not like you’ve never heard of the game because no one liked it. It’s more of a lost treasure.
The game’s western obscurity plays directly into the appeal of its genre. Learning about it, I felt like I was excavating a modern ruin from a digital trash heap, diving into long forgotten file-sharing archives and posting anonymous requests in dark corners of the internet for sources beyond Wikipedia. One of the most enjoyable stretches of my long-winded videogame music series in 2012 was the process of piecing together fragments of information to arrive at a fairly accurate break-down of the original score. It was a Konami Kukeiha Club project, which can often be a lost cause to dissect, but I dug until I found that the original PC-8801 version’s credits listed each track by individual composer. This was already complicated by the fact that it incorporated changes in the simultaneously released MSX2 port, awkwardly intermixing the staff who converted the sound. You can read my two-part entry on Snatcher below, if you’re curious:
“One Night in Neo Kobe City”, not to be confused with “Twilight of Neo Kobe City”–I had a lot of fun dealing with those sorts of naming conventions through a bad Japanese to English translator–is not original to the 1988 version of Snatcher. Motoaki Furukawa (古川もとあき) first composed it for the 1992 PC-Engine port, when greatly improved audio technology made a track like this possible. (Honestly, think about the sound quality in games you were playing in ’92. This was pretty advanced.) The song really sets the stage for the cyberpunk tech noir experience that follows. I suppose it’s not dark or foreboding, really, but when you connect this sort of sax-driven jazz to a futuristic city, the relation feels natural. When you connect it to Snatcher, it becomes cyberpunk to the core.
Hats off to Konami for letting Snatcher thrive on Youtube when so many other game producers routinely scour the net of their antiquities. (I personally had my account banned by Taito for posting some music to an obscure 80s arcade game.) I don’t know why cease and desist orders are particularly popular in the world of videogame music, but at least in my experience Konami seem to avoid that nonsense. It’s pretty cool, since the Konami Kukeiha Club doesn’t rate far behind Square-Enix’s illustrious list of composers.
I love the Metal Gear Series. I think I once spent a whole hour trying to read one of the really huge documents in Sons of Liberty. I remember seeing the first ad for the original game on the back of a comic book and geeking out at all the gadgets you had. Binoculars, sweet. Mines, cool. Night Vision Goggles, omigod!! Metal Gear is where stealth games basically started, the way I see it. Guns of the Patriots was the reason I bought a PS3 and it’s nearest competitor, Splinter Cell was the reason I picked up my first original Xbox. I’ve played every main game.
To go over the entire story of Metal Gear is a project in and of itself. For the sake of the trailer below, understand that Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots was the last story for Solid Snake (known as Old Snake in that game). This game focuses on his father, Big Boss, who was the hero of my favorite game in the series, Snake Eater. This time, Big Boss is brought to Afghanistan via Revolver Ocelot to rescue someone named Miller, among a million other things. I’m under the impression that this perhaps was the Miller from the original Metal Gear Solid (though I think maybe he’d be much younger here if that were the case).
You’d think that a new MGS wouldn’t have much to bring to the table, and that they covered just about everything. The new open world sandbox format is very different from the linear set up of all the other games. Even Guns of the Patriots, with it’s huge maps was still confined to something of a smaller space. And man does it look fantastic. Basically, what you have is Red Dead Redemption in a Metal Gear Universe.
I have no idea what The Phantom Pain refers to, though I’m already curious about the cast of characters in this one. I was hoping for a cast that was a bit more over the top in nature. Also of note is that it doesn’t appear that David Hayter is voicing Snake anymore, with Konami pulling a Ubisoft and going with a total changeover in the same thread of Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Ubisoft dropped Michael Ironside for a new vocal and motion capture talent.
VGM Entry 57: Snatcher (part 2)
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
Needless to say, when a game is released in six formats over a span of eight years the list of credits gets pretty wild. If we take Wikipedia’s unsourced credit synopsis for every Snatcher release mingled into one, it would appear that Akira Yamaoka, Keizou Nakamura, Masanori Adachi, Kazuhito Imai, and Masanori Ouchi are responsible for the score. But let’s not do that.
Konami’s ost releases generally only credit the Kukeiha Club as a collective, so that’s of no real help. Thanks to Snatcher‘s devout fan base though, a video of the end credits is available on youtube for every version of this game. They struck me as a bit suspect in so far as every version except the PC-Engine was in English, when only the Sega CD version was officially translated. But I do get the feeling–I’m sure plenty of people could easily confirm or deny–that a lot of games in Japan for whatever reason have English credits.
In any case, the PC-8801 ending credits are perhaps the most thorough I’ve ever seen in a game, and whether their English (Engrish really) is a fan translation or the authentic original, I do think it would be nice to provide a transcript. This is the track by track credits as listed in the two-part youtube video posted by AFX6502, condensed to save some space. Most tracks were listed with two names: one in quotations and one in parenthesis.
Compositions by M. Ikariko:
“Prologue Demo” (Bio Hazard Snatcher)
“Title Telop” (Evil Ripple)
“Pursuer Part1” (Creeping Silence)
“Pursuer Part3” (Pleasure of Tension)
“Pursuer Part4” (Endless Pursue)
“Katrine Part1” (Innocent Girl)
“Katrine Part2” (Theme of Katrine)
“Bath Room” (Virulent Smile)
“Joy Division” (Decadance Beat)
“Blow Up Tricycle”
“Mortuary Part1” (Morg)
“Restoration”
“Search Light” (Spreading Diehard)
“Credits”
“Game Over” (Lement for The Death)
Compositions by M. Shirakawa:
“Team Logo” (Slave to Metal)
“Jaime” (Theme of Jaime)
“Outer Heaven2” (Theme of Izabel)
“Title Part1” (Theme of JUNKER)
“Title Part2” (Theme of Randam)
“Title Part3” (Faded Memories)
“Title Part5” (Peace of Mind)
“Action” (Danger Dance…and Justice for all)
“Epirogue” (Beyond Sorrows)
Compositions by S. Fukami:
“Theme of Opening” (Twilight of Neo Kobe City)
“Outer Heaven1” (The Entrance to Hell)
“Goodbye Randam” (Eternal Promise)
“Requiem” (For Harry)
Compositions by S. Masuda:
“Pursuer Part2” (Criminal Omen)
“Pursuer Part5” (Follow up the Scent)
“Wrong Answer” (Axia)
“Transform Risa” (Virtual Image)
Compositions by M. Izumi:
“Ending 1” (Master of Puppets Among The Disease)
“Theme of Ending” (We Have to Struggle for Our Future Against Our Doubt)
Compositions by M. Adachi:
“Theme of Metal Gear” (Theme of Tara)
-remix from “Metal Gear” RC_750 1987-
Joint composition by I. Mizutani and M. Ikariko:
“Snatcher Title” (Squeak!!)
Composition by Pear Point:
“Jingle Bell” (Jingle Bell 2042)
So there you have it. Originally, Masahiro Ikariko composed 16 of the tracks, the rather elusive M. Shirakawa composed 9, and the remaining 13 were composed by a combination of Masanori Adachi, Seiichi Fukami, Mutsuhiko Izumi, Iku Mizutani, and another virtually anonymous figure, S. Masuda. Ikariko, Shirakawa, Fukami, and Masuda are given clear precedence over Adachi, Izumi, and Mizutani in the credits, and must have comprised the main music team. (While the credits to the original MSX version of Metal Gear are likewise confusing and Adachi is not listed where I looked, I have to assume he wrote the original song, “Theme of Tara”, upon which the Snatcher tune is based and had no direct involvement here.) We don’t even know M. Shirakawa and S. Masuda’s full names. Isn’t that something?
The PC-8801 credits tell us quite a bit more about Snatcher‘s music than simply the track-by-track credits. For instance, chief editors Hideo Kojima and Naoki Matsui named the songs. Iku Mizutani did the sound effects, and Masahiro Ikariko and Kazuhiko Uehara “arranged” the music–a credit Konami clearly distinguishes from composition.
The MSX2 credits are included in the PC-8801 version, so there’s no ambiguity on this front. Masahiro Ikariko and Kazuhiko Uehara made the MSX2 arrangements (with the exceptions of “Theme of Metal Gear”, converted by Uehara and Mizutani, and “Jingle Bell”, converted by Ikariko, Uehara, and Shirakawa).
The PC-Engine credits are in Japanese, and in the mess of a hundred open Firefox tabs I’ve lost track of the url to the translation I found, but I did copy it down:
It’s kind of weird to me that Shirakawa, who wrote a quarter of the music in the game, is not included here, but perhaps he and Masuda had left Konami and were erased from memory. Or perhaps Ikariko, Fukami, and Izumi returned to write additional material, but based on the songs I’ve heard, I get the impression that the list of original compositions for the PC-Engine version is quite short. Based on how the PC-8801’s credits were worded, I am lead to believe the PC-Engine arrangement was Kazuki Muraoka’s baby, with Motoaki Furukawa filling in the few added original tracks, however Furukawa has referred to himself as being “in charge of the BGM” for the PC-Engine port. Whether he meant merely the new compositions or the arrangements of the originals is beyond me.
The PC-Engine version and future releases included a revamped intro scene, for which I’ve provided the Sega CD take in spite of its awful voice acting, so that you can hear it in English. “One Night in Neo Kobe”, the song beginning at 2:55 in this video, was one of the new PC-Engine additions written by Motoaki Furukawa (he also confirmed composition of “Tears and Stains”, which must be “Tear-Stained Eyes“), and it remains one of the most famous songs of the game.
The Sega CD port was the first major departure from Ikariko and company’s original score. The credits here, which I’ve derived directly from the English version of the game, are pretty vague:
This list is kind of strange, because it was the Sega CD port’s arrangement that made it so drastically distinct from the first three versions. The songs were still based on the originals, but in a manner akin to Rob Hubbard and Tim Follin’s liberal port adaptations (consider the C64 ports of Commando and Bionic Commando respectively, for example). The credits clearly refer to the Sega CD arrangement, and Masanori Adachi must have been directly involved this time around. Even so, some of the tracks, “One Night in Neo Kobe”, aren’t even arrangements, but rather the exact same songs appearing on the PC-Engine. It’s pretty odd that Motoaki Furukawa and Kazuki Muraoka are restricted to a “Special Thanks” mention at the end of the credit roll.
Also, the distinction between “Sound Design” and “Sound Programmer” is completely obscure here. Konami don’t even bother with distinguishing between music and sound effects. Some of the ‘sound design team’ credits may have almost no real involvement in the music. Keizou Nakamura is credited specifically for SFX in a later version of the game, suggesting that that was his role here as well, and someone claiming to have spoken with Akira Yamaoka says he had little to no involvement in the project.
At this point in time technology may have advanced to the point where “programmer” did not as a rule imply “arranger”, and it’s possible that Osamu Kasai and Akira Souji’s contributions comprised a technical task which made the audio possible but did not affect what it actually sounded like. Never mind my uneducated speculation though; suffice to say the Sega CD port is a grey area dividing the old Snatcher compositions from the new.
Most PSX/Sega Saturn Snatcher songs were in fact new compositions entirely distinct from the originals. “The Morgue” is an example in which the changes are pretty rewarding. I think they definitely improve the whole ‘surrounded by rotting corpses’ atmosphere, whether that is actually the appropriate atmosphere for the scene in context or not. It does little to compensate for the outrageous censorship rules Sony inherited from Nintendo, but whatever. Here are the credits for both:
PSX: Sound System Programmer:
Noritada ‘Nor’ Matukawa Sound Mixer:
God Adachi Music Composer/Arranger/Performer:
KIDA-Sun SFX:
Hiroe Noguchi Guest composers:
Hiroshi Tamawari
Akira Yamaoka
Kosuke Soeda Guest Performer:
Tappy Original Score Composers:
Kazuki Muraoka
Motoaki Furukawa
Saturn: Sound Programmer:
Akiropito Sound Mixer:
Masanori Adachi
Music Composer/Arranger/Performer:
KIDA Sun
Syouichirou Hirata SFX:
Keizou Nakamura Guest composers:
Akira Yamaoka
Hiroshi Tamawari
Guest Performer:
Tappy Original score composers:
Kazuki Muraoka
Motoaki Furukawa
Akira Yamaoka
Hiroshi Tamawari
KIDA Sun
If you’re curious about the aliases here, “Akiropito” is Akira Souji, “God Adachi” is Masanori Adachi, “Tappy” is Tappi Iwase, and I couldn’t find the slightest clue for identifying “KIDA-Sun”. This makes for an odd discussion, as “KIDA-Sun” appears to be the most responsible party for the PSX and Saturn soundtracks. It’s also rather strange that Akira Yamaoka, Hiroshi Tamawari, and KIDA-Sun are listed as original score composers on the Saturn but not on the PSX, as to the best of my knowledge the Saturn used the exact same songs, making only minor (but always for the better) changes throughout. I don’t know that this change to the credits indicates a real change though: Akira Yamaoka and Hiroshi Tamawari are listed as ‘guest composers” in both versions, and a guest composer is still a composer, so it might all boil down to redundancy. In that case, we need only ask what became of Kosuke Soeda.
So basically, our credits look like this:
PC-8801 and MSX2
Composition: Masahiro Ikariko (16), M. Shirakawa (9), Seiichi Fukami (4), S. Masuda (4), Mutsuhiko Izumi (2), Iku Mizutani (1), Masanori Adachi (1)
Arrangement: Masahiro Ikariko, Kazuhiko Uehara
PC-Engine
Composition: Primarily the original 1988 staff, with additions (probably) limited to Kazuki Muraoka and Motoaki Furukawa
Arrangement: Kazuki Muraoka
Sega CD
Sound staff: Keizou Nakamura, Masanori Adachi, Kazuhito Imai, Masanori Ouchi, Akira Yamaoka
Sound Programmer: Osamu Kasai, Akira Souji
VGM Entry 56: Snatcher (part 1)
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
At this point I think it’s safe to talk about Snatcher. Snatcher has quite a long history. Konami first released it on the PC-8801 in November 1988, following this up with an MSX2 port the following month. In 1992 it found its way to the PC-Engine, and in 1994 it got its first English translation via the Sega Mega-CD. It would go on to appear on the Playstation in February 1996 and the Sega Saturn in March before all was said and done.
Snatcher was a cyberpunk visual novel, which isn’t the sort of thing North American and European gamers are particularly familiar with. It also featured some graphic violence, partial nudity, and cultural references, which didn’t jive well with North America’s outrageous censorship and copyright laws. All of these factors contributed to the long delay of an English port, and it’s quite remarkable that Konami ended up making one at all. The market was not in fact ready for it, and Jeremy Blaustein, who oversaw the localization, admitted that the game “only sold a couple thousand units”. He provided the legitimate argument that this resulted from Konami’s decision to release a game on the rapidly tanking Sega CD, not any shortcomings of the game itself. Snatcher remained popular in Japan however, and by the sixth and final release in March 1996 it also boasted six different variations on the main soundtrack.
What’s great for our purposes is that liquidpolicenaut on youtube already did all the legwork for comparing them. In some cases, such as “Decadence Beat (Joy Division)”, the original PC-8801 and MSX2 versions survive every port on into the Sega Saturn, but more often the songs get replaced for the Sega CD or Playstation and retain their new forms the rest of the way.
It’s by no means immediately obvious which take on this song is best. As songs by themselves, displaced from any game, the MSX2 version stands out the most to me, but the comments by actual fans of the game seem to denounce the MSX2 version as out of touch with the atmosphere of the scene. “Joy Division” (censored to “Plato’s Cavern” for the US Sega CD port) was Snatcher‘s general store chain. As a cyberpunk game, it naturally ought to be a little bit sleazy, but since I never played it personally I can’t say just how far that should go. The Sega CD version sounds like a porn shop, and the PSX version sounds like the score to what the Sega CD store is selling. The Sega Saturn take, despite being practically identical to the PSX take in construction, comes off quite tasteful due to better quality instrument samples. The potential complaint, of course, is that it’s too tasteful to be wholly appropriate.
If the PC-8801 take is a bit too funky and the PC-Engine a bit too weird, I’m left with the MSX2 take. It has a very technological feel to it. This is music for the sort of store I’d go to to buy my cybernetic crack injection kits for sure. The visual helps it out too; the store clerk looks a lot more seedy and a lot less evil on the MSX2 and PC-8801 than in the other takes, and the emphasis on grey (the PC-8801 has a brown floor) makes the whole place seem a little metalic–a little more futuristic. Oh the MSX2 take wins for me hands-down. But I’m listening to this with nothing but a song, a single image, and a general idea of cyberpunk to go on. I never played the game. Maybe the MSX2’s atmosphere, while consistent in audio and imagery, is totally out of place in it. One of the great benefits of Snatcher and liquidpolicenaut’s comparison videos is to bring these finer aesthetic considerations to mind.
I mentioned that “Joy Division” was renamed “Plato’s Cavern” on the Sega CD. It’s one of many censorship issues that forced minor changes in detail as new ports were made. The left-hand mask on the wall behind the store clerk on the MSX2 and PC-8801 was Predator, and it vanishes starting with the PC Engine. Amazing what petty things billionaires will file lawsuits over…
The censorship on “Pursuer Part 4 (Endless Pursue)” is a little more obvious. (Supposedly the dog was twitching, still alive on the original versions, and this was removed before they took out the image altogether.) Musically, this is another instance where the same song was maintained for all six versions of the game. Here the differences aren’t nearly as extreme, either. Again the Playstation take comes off the worst to my ears, and this time the Saturn’s improved sound does not sufficiently redeem it–at least if this is meant to be the fairly tense, down to the wire scene that the track title and early versions imply.
I can’t think of any context in which the PSX and Saturn versions might sound appropriate to be quite honest. The PSX take kicks off like some progy jazz piece that completely fails to acknowledge any sort of distress, or anything remotely unsettling (we’re still staring at a dog with its guts spilled out mind you, even if it’s censored). The bass drum beat is made no less obnoxious in the Saturn version by actually sounding like a bass drum, and its pace is totally out of touch with the melody. No, the PSX and Saturn versions are bad–no getting around that.
If you go back to the MSX2 take, you’ll find that it’s far more imaginative anyway. Variations in the intensity of the drum beats give it a dimension lacking in the last two versions. The higher-pitched notes behind the main melody in the PC-8801 introduction carry the song much more effectively than their MSX2 equivalent, emphasizing the pace of events, and the variations in percussion intensity are retained, but the main melody is just a bit too clean. The MSX2 take has a more hollow, raspy sound. I suppose I would characterize the MSX2 and PC Engine versions as prioritizing an element of danger, while urgency dominates the PC-8801 and Sega CD takes.
I could go on like this for every track, but I fancy it’s already gotten old. Tomorrow I’ll tackle who exactly wrote it all.
VGM Entry 55: Honorable mentions of ’92
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
No ‘best of’ compilation can ever satisfy everybody, and the difficulty of coming to agreement increases with the number of options available. With the average game soundtrack’s quality always on the rise, the task of singling out anything but the obvious best becomes sort of arbitrary after a while. I present these last few titles with the recognition that I have probably missed quite a number of arguably better works:
Super Mario Kart (Nintendo, 1992) would be the last major title passed off to Soyo Oka at Nintendo. Having scored Pilotwings in 1990 and Sim City in 1991, her distinct style briefly became a major voice of the Super Nintendo, but whether she should be counted among the best is very debatable. I will stand by the claim that Sim City was an outstanding and underrated work, but in general Soyo Oka was no Koji Kondo. Her inclusion isn’t obvious.
I played Super Mario Kart as much as any kid, and not a single song from it stuck in my memory over the years. The nostalgia here isn’t old familiar tunes. It’s an old familiar style. Soyo Oka had an extraordinarily distinct sound, and it’s her style of music, not any of the melodies, which lends such consistency down the line from Pilotwings to Super Mario Kart. I count this game among the best of 1992 because it does an excellent job of sounding like a Nintendo game for the SNES. It’s quite possible that Soyo Oka’s Nintendo career quickly diminished afterwards simply because they stopped producing this type of game. Her all-purpose sound worked great for simulations and racing, but after 1992 Nintendo came to focus much more heavily on character/plot-centric action and RPG titles. Star Fox, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, these sort of games focused on franchise characters who required distinct theme songs.
Nintendo did not produce any more high-profile, well marketed games that could have actually fit Oka’s style until 1996, with Ken Griffey, Jr.’s Winning Run and Tetris Attack, but by then she had left the company.
I have only found two titles crediting Taro Kudo as composer, and that’s quite a shame, because both have found their way into my vgm series. Masanori Adachi’s partner on Super Castlevania IV, Kudo took on the task again the following year with Axelay (Konami, 1992). His mostly chill, relaxing tunes must have made a fairly substantial impact on the gameplay. Nothing frantic or unnerving here; the music carries a sense of confidence, and makes the game look a lot easier than it probably was.
Devilish (Hot-B, developed by Genki Co, 1992), known as Dark Omen in Japan, begins like some sort of Home Alone soundtrack, but before long it breaks out into more recognizable Genesis beats that will characterize a large portion of the game. Hitoshi Sakimoto managed to produce a very consistent and haunting selection of songs here that accurately reflect the settings of the game. These settings are themselves something of an anomaly. The game is basically an enhanced version of Breakout, but it’s set in an RPG world. You bounce into those rectangles in forests, deserts, airships, castles, the works.
About the only thing this bizarre mashup has against it is a plot. The main villain “turned the prince and princess into two stone paddles”? Really? … Really?
When I was a kid I for some reason always thought Kirby was an old, classic Nintendo character, perhaps because Kirby’s Adventure (Nintendo, 1993) was released for the NES despite the Super Nintendo having been around for three years. What inspired Nintendo to market a major franchise character on outdated and secondary systems is beyond me, but the little pink cream puff wouldn’t make his Super Nintendo debut until Kirby Super Star at the absurdly late date of March 1996. This may have been due in part to HAL Laboratory, not Nintendo, actually developing the games. But HAL Laboratory had released multiple Super Nintendo games by the end of 1991, so your guess is as good as mine. Kirby’s Dream Land (Nintendo, 1992) for the Game Boy was in fact the first game of the franchise, and it established a lot of the series’ iconic songs.
The other thing that caught me off guard is Jun Ishikawa composed it. I had been lead to believe it was the work of Hirokazu Ando. Ando did make an appearance on Kirby’s Adventure and many future installments, but the earliest original compositions appear to belong to Ishikawa. Ando and Ishikawa appear to have been HAL Laboratory’s main composers, collaborating together in many HAL titles both within the Kirby franchise and without, and perhaps this has created some of the confusion. Or perhaps Wikipedia is simply wrong. The bold claim in the Kirby’s Dream Land article that Jun Ishikawa was “the only composer for this game” (rather than just listing him as the composer and leaving it at that) is sourced to another game wiki site (Moby Games) which lists the credits in more or less the same unsourced manner that Wikipedia does, and makes no such explicit claim. Maybe Ishikawa wrote it all, or maybe he and Ando were in collaboration from the get-go, but either way Kirby’s Dream Land initiated a major Nintendo franchise series with catchy, highly regarded songs that ought not go unmentioned.
The last song I’d like to point out is the title theme to Agony (Psygnosis, 1992), composed by Tim Wright. Agony was a peculiar little shmup for the Amiga 500, fantasy themed to the extent of featuring a laser-blasting owl as the main hero. There is little room in your standard video game for a classical piano piece of this sort; it’s certainly not the type of thing you might associate with active gameplay. With the Commodore 64’s long history of loader music completely disassociated from the game however, and the Amiga’s much improved audio, this was the most probable platform for a work like Tim Wright’s to take shape.
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 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
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.
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.
VGM Entry 39: End of the NES era (part 1)
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)
Games would continue to be made for the NES long after the release of the Super Nintendo, but its glory days had come and gone. Already by 1990, the system was starting to sound a little stale, and even the most impressive compositions faced an enormous burden in keeping pace with video game music at large on a hopelessly outdated system.
Koichi Sugiyama certainly didn’t produce much of interest. The improved rendition of the main theme aside, Dragon Quest IV (Enix, 1990) was not a particularly memorable soundtrack. It has no faults per se. It certainly had nothing approaching the annoyance of the original Dragon Quest‘s combat theme. But no amount of listening to the tracks beyond the main theme here has revealed the slightest hint of anything special. It’s a soundtrack secure in its simplicity. The music is wholly appropriate for an RPG, never clashing with the style of gameplay, but it also adds nothing to the experience save pleasant background music. I’ve heard plenty worse by RPG composers with much more diverse sound systems to work with, but it definitely feels to me as though this one stands out more for the fact that “Dragon Quest” and “Koichi Sugiyama” are attached to it than for its own worth.
Final Fantasy III (Square, 1990) was a somewhat different situation. It’s got a lot more emotion to it, and frankly it might constitute Nobuo Uematsu’s finest compositions on the NES, but in the context of its place in time it can be pretty hard to appreciate. Here’s a track list for the video:
(0:00) Prelude
(0:56) Crystal Cave
(1:54) Jinn the Fire
(2:43) Chocobo Theme
(3:20) The Invincible
(4:11) Battle
(5:06) Last Battle
(5:59) The Boundless Ocean
(6:59) Fanfare
Nobuo Uematsu definitely climaxed as a specifically NES composer on Final Fantasy III. “Battle” and “Last Battle” express a full appreciation for the NES as an instrument, and the rapid-fire accompaniments in both, but especially the latter, are some of the most powerful on the system. The SID-like sound on “Crystal Cave” and “Last Battle” adds a new dimension to the songs which would have been unthinkable for Uematsu a mere three years prior, while “The Invincible” is a practically perfect arrangement. If Final Fantasy might best be defined as lovely compositions poorly arranged, Final Fantasy III was definitely the full package.
The problem, and the reason it took me setting the game aside and coming back to it weeks later to be able to really appreciate it, is that this was 1990. Amidst the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, the Commodore Amiga 500, and the NEC PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, the NES just sounded terrible; it was no longer novel and it was way behind the times. Nintendo’s lengthy development paid off, as things turned out, but a lot of early 1990 releases better suited for the SNES suffered from the delay.
Resting somewhere between these two in quality was Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (Konami, 1989). I have seen no less than five musicians credited with the composition. Hashing out who all among Hidenori Maezawa, Kenichi Matsubara (Castlevania II), Yoshinori Sasaki, Jun Funahashi, and Yukie Morimoto were really responsible for the music might be a fun task, but I only have the time for so many such projects. For whatever it’s worth, Hidenori Maezawa, Jun Funahashi and Yukie Morimoto are the three most frequently credited names. Consisting of a long list of virtual unknowns, this is one of those scores for which “Konami Kukeiha Club” might be the most appropriate accreditation.
One thing that strikes me as interesting here is how the drums and bass feel like they’ve borrowed from Batman (Sunsoft, 1989) by Nobuyuki Hara and Naoki Kodaka, especially considering I felt Hara an Kodaka themselves might have been inspired in part by the Castlevania series before I ever heard Castlevania III specifically. This connection, or at least the possibility of Batman‘s drum and bass influencing Castlevania III, is virtually impossible. As it turns out both games were actually released on the exact same day: December 22, 1989. (I had originally thought Castlevania III was released in 1990, hence my placing it in this post, but it’s close enough.)
The game has some pretty impressive original tracks, especially “Beginning” (0:00) and “Mad Forest” (1:10), not to mention a new rendition of “Vampire Killer” (5:49). The overall sound is a lot less classical and a lot more peppy than previous Castlevania titles, though I think that can be forgiven in light of the good, consistent job they did with it. Again, the soundtrack only took a while to grow on me due to its historical context. It was most certainly technologically behind the times, but there wasn’t much the Konami sound team could do about that.
Through the Shattered Lens 