Tag Archives: Konami

VGM Entry 36: Mother, Batman, Goemon

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 36: Mother, Batman, Goemon
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

A lot of solid Nintendo soundtracks were released in 1989, and I can’t touch on all of them, but here are a few other noteworthies I can’t justify passing over.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijv4RKjqous

Ganbare Goemon 2 (Konami, 1989) added a lot to the sound of the original 1986 Goemon titles (Legend of the Mystical Ninja series in the west), maintaining the same style but adding a percussion track and much more complimentary and varied tone selections. I’ve not managed to find a satisfactory answer as to who composed it though. Tomoya Tomita, Koji Murata, and Michiru Yamane have all been credited here an there without any explanation as to their different rolls, and I’m pretty sure at least the latter two were definitely involved in some capacity, but I can’t be sure.

Konami has a long history of botching the names of their video games, and the Goemon series is no exception. For instance, I have seen sites unattentively list authorship credits as: “Goemon: Satoko Miyawaki. Goemon 2: Michiru Yamane”. But not only was there no game in the Goemon series actually titled Goemon or Ganbare Goemon, there were two games titled Ganbare Goemon 2. Different sub-titles sort this out, but I don’t trust the creators of massive composer compilation lists to have attentively adhered to this.

In so far as the original Mr. Goemon was released on arcade and the third Ganbare Goemon title was an MSX port of the first NES game (I’m not sure why it’s listed separately), calling the 1989 instalment Ganbare Goemon 2 was a fair move. The confusion in this instance did not arise until Konami decided to release Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shogun Magginesu in 1993. (If you add them all up, the second “Goemon 2” was the tenth Goemon video game.)

At any rate, you’re hearing Ganbare Goemon 2, no subtitle, and it was released in 1989. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1u0fh2doG4

Nobuyuki Hara and Naoki Kodaka composed Batman (Sunsoft, 1989) in the wake of Mega Man 2, when the bar for NES action game soundtracks was through the roof. I certainly don’t think it’s as good as Takashi Tateishi’s historic work, but it demands an honorable mention. Its most famous track, first in this compilation, feels straight out of a Castlevania game, whereas the second song here kicks off with more of a Mega Man vibe. All the while it is consistently driven by a forceful bass which really best defines the soundtrack. It is in large part the consequence of Hara and Kodaka landing on highly complimentary bass and drum tones which seem to mutually emphasize each other. The bass track is also much more complex in a lot of these songs than was typical for Nintendo music, and the dark, punchy vibe is perfectly suited for a Batman-themed action game.

Similarly, the frequent employment of Castlevania-style melodies is less a ripoff than a completely appropriate sound for the game. I mean, it could be a total coincidence that they sound alike at all. What is our hero here supposed to be again? Oh yeah, a bat.

Or it could be the case that Hara and Kodaka were avid fans of contemporary video game musicians and incorporated the best of every world with conscious intent. A lot of amazing works have derived from calculated stylistic fusions, and I would not rule out either possibility.

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

And then there is Mother (Nintendo, 1989). If you ever played Earthbound on the SNES, its music is etched into your memory whether you like it or not. Earthbound was the sequel, and Mother has still yet to be released outside of Japan today. I was a cool little middle school computer nerd who managed to get his hands on a fan-translated ROM, but having succeeded in acquiring it, I promptly lost all interest in actually playing it. It’s a shame, because now I am completely perplexed as to how these two games overlapped. The gameplay is literally identical to the SNES sequel, and I’m not wholly convinced that the plot is not as well. Likewise, quite a number of the songs of Earthbound first appear in Mother, including a lot of the battle themes. Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka remained partners for both titles, and there is hardly any break where one lets off and the other begins. The original was certainly one of the most unique compositions on the Nintendo, but the same can be said for its sequel on the SNES despite the music really not changing much.

This compilation is really one of garudoh’s weaker efforts, and I can’t easily provide you with many alternatives, so I may leave most of the Mother discussion for Earthbound when I get to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAf4Lt2oBp8

But on a final note, here is one of the revisited battle themes in its original form, just to give you an idea of how effective Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka’s drum and bass emphasis was even on a system as limited as the NES.

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.

VGM Entry 08: Ports complicate the picture

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 08: Ports complicate the picture
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

While I have noted that composers remained within regional spheres, games certainly did not. Ports reigned supreme, and it was not uncommon for a game to appear around the world in a half dozen different formats. Each of these required a group of programmers familiar with the given system, and it was certainly not always the case that the original arcade version remained the best at the end of the day.

Take Commando (Capcom, 1985) for instance. The original main theme was composed by Tamayo Kawamoto, an obscure name which will persistently resurface throughout this series of articles. It’s certainly a commanding little march (utilizing the YM2203, if my previous article has peaked anyone’s interest in this regard), and I’d have fed in my quarter in the hopes of hearing more. But quite a number of Kawamoto’s soundtracks are better known for what other artists made of them in the port process than in their original form, and Commando is no exception.

Put it in the hands of Rob Hubbard and, well, did you expect anything less? This wild ride might be his most famous 1985 work after Monty on the Run, and it’s all the more enhanced when you realize how distinct it was from the original. Again Hubbard shines best when he is expanding and improvising upon the music of others. The potentially performable original work is completely lost here, transformed into a uniquely SID sound and style, and with all due respect to Tamayo Kawamoto, its certainly not worse off in consequence. The problem, which would go on to haunt countless composers down the line, is that most fans of Commando have no idea Kawamoto had any part in writing it.

The composition was actually a single day project, and the entire port was pushed through by Elite Systems in a mere two months. Hubbard briefly discussed it in an interview by Jason ‘Kenz’ Mackenzie’s Commodore Zone magazine. (Issue 10 as best I can tell, probably released in 1997): “There is an interesting story behind Commando. I went down to their office and started working on it late at night, and worked on it through the night. I took one listen to the original arcade version and started working on the c64 version. I think they wanted some resemblance to the arcade version, but I just did what I wanted to do. By the time everyone arrived at 8.00am in the morning, I had loaded the main tune on every C64 in the building! I got my cheque and was on a train home by 10.00 am…”

Yie Ar Kung-Fu (Konami, 1985) is an especially odd game to consider, because its ports varied so drastically. I couldn’t find a stand-alone sound sample of the original arcade version, but you can hear it well enough beneath the sound effects of this gameplay video. The upbeat, distinctly Asian sound is a refreshing change of pace from the usual video game song styles, and in consideration of what Rob Hubbard did with Commando, you can imagine the potential for new arrangements this presents. Arguably the most famous version of the game’s music, however, is a completely bizarre departure.

The only rational explanation I can think of for Martin Galway having replaced the traditional Asian music theme with a completely irrelevant cover of “Magnetic Fields” by Jean Michel Jarre is that the title screen music is, in fact, completely irrelevant. I think perhaps Galway, either by request or on his own initiative, submitted the song as an all-purpose Commodore 64 option for Imagine Software, who produced the European computer ports of the game, and that it found its way into Yie Ar Kung-Fu simply because it happened to be available at the time. It is not one of Galway’s finer works, but I suppose you can do what you want to the loader screen. It was the combat music that really defined the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC2SBO_-NX4

Even so, the actual gameplay music to the Commodore 64 port of Yie Ar Kung-Fu is as unexpectedly similar to the arcade as the title screen is unexpectedly divergent. The arrangement makes no effort whatsoever to expand upon or even properly convert the original arcade gameplay music to suit the SID sound. Instead we’re met by an unimaginative attempt to emulate the original as closely as possible, marred by SID distortion which could have so easily emphasized the music’s finest features but instead just drowned them out. I mean, this is far more appropriate than Galway’s load screen, but so much for a middle ground between total disregard for the original and a carbon copy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OOm4CyFutQ

And then you have the Famicom/NES version, released in April 1985. (That’s five months before Super Mario Bros., to put things in context.) Without altering the style of the arcade version in the slightest, it offers an almost entirely original song. It’s really the best version of Yie Ar Kung-Fu out there–you’d be hard-pressed to argue otherwise–and its existence is a bit puzzling. Who composed it?

The notes I’ve found on Yie Ar Kung-Fu credit Miki Higashino, but they fail to distinguish between the arcade and NES versions, as if these weren’t completely different songs. Now, I am inclined to think Higashino wrote both, which is quite remarkable considering she was only 17 years old at the time. (The only other really famous game musician I can think of to get this early of a career start is Tim Follin.) The other titles credited to Higashino in the mid-80s don’t exhibit this kind of quality, but in consideration of the fact that ten years later she would compose one of the greatest game soundtracks of all time (Suikoden), I know she had it in her. The Suikoden soundtrack is predominantly folk and traditional music (like Yie Ar), and the consistency of style between the arcade and Famicom songs favors a single composer.

The other thing Higashino-authorship has going for it is that she worked for Konami, who made both the arcade and Famicom versions. She would have been involved in the sound team of both, so it’s reasonable to believe she would have had the liberty to create an entirely new song when it came time to program the port. Her hands would have been tied for the European versions, which were produced by Imagine Software. On a final interesting note, the MSX version ports the Famicom soundtrack, not the original arcade music.

It’s all just speculation though. Anyone at Konami could have potentially been responsible for the changes. I’ll leave you with one final version that was most certainly not arranged by Miki Higashino. … Ok, I’m really going to try to avoid video game covers where they aren’t historically relevant, but you have to admit this Markdoom Shehand cover is one of the most awesome things ever.

VGM Entry 02: Early arcade music

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 02: Early arcade music
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Few early games had music mainly because they were better off without it. The music of Rally-X was certainly an enhancement to the gameplay, but if it really showcases the best technology of the day then it’s easy to understand why most programmers didn’t bother. New technology came fast though, and Rally-X was hopelessly outdated in a matter of months. Carnival (Sega, 1980) is often credited as the first game to employ any of the new and improved sound chips for continuous music, but this claim amounts to little. All of the arcade developers took advantage of the advancements as quickly as they were able.

That’s why you get games like New Rally-X (Namco, February 1981), released less than a year after the original. Video game music immediately emerged in fully developed form the moment it became an option; it didn’t really take any market research to recognize that this would enhance the product.

From 1981 on, arcade music sounded pretty decent. Certainly a lot of games suffered from bad compositions, but many did try, and the work here becomes a simple matter of listening to everything and picking out the best. Arcade games had a unique advantage in this regard. Being self-contained systems, every new game had the opportunity to employ the newest technology on the market. This was seldom the case with computer games, and never the case on home consoles. A pretty massive disparity in sound quality would continue to distinguish arcade music from all of the competition up through the end of the 1980s, when the arcade began to die out as a viable source of revenue for game producers.

The indisputable king of arcade music was Taito. They backed up their claim to being the first, with Space Invaders in 1978, by maintaining a higher standard of quality than most of the competition. Jungle King (1982) is one of my favorite early examples. Here the music isn’t just a nice added feature; it’s the game’s entire selling point. The player feels compelled to keep moving, driven by a sense of urgency and adventure that would be completely absent otherwise. The sound effects make an effort to acknowledge the music’s dominance, seldom clashing and, with the hero’s footsteps on the rock-dodging stage, even roughly synching up to add another layer of depth to the music.

Jungle King has kind of a funny history. The form you are seeing here never made it far out the door before the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs won a lawsuit for copyright infringement on Tarzan. Having already tossed out a beta version called Jungle Boy, Taito recouped their losses by replacing the Tarzan character with a creepy explorer in a pith helmet and safari outfit and retitled the game Jungle Hunt. Never really satisfied with this conversion, they went back to the drawing board again after the release, replacing the explorer with a pirate. Pirate Pete became the forth and final installment of the game, featuring new graphics and a new soundtrack but the same old mechanics.

Konami may have been Taito’s driving force, persistently one-upping them. Gyruss (Konami, 1983) is a real audio masterpiece. Rally-X and Space Invaders both had tonal sound effects, and in the latter ‘sound effects’ and ‘music’ were one and the same entity. Gyruss might be seen as a sort of climax to this trend of music-sound effects-gameplay synthesis.

J. S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, might seem like an odd choice at first glance, but it had recently been converted into a rock and roll hit by the U.K. band Sky, so it certainly had some pop culture appeal. The significance here though is how well the game is paced to the music, or vice versa. Enemies appear almost on cue, and every sound effect is perfectly attuned to the background music. Really, to call it ‘background music’ at all does it a disservice. Gyruss has a very distinct song, but though the music and sound effects can be easily separated, in practice they are essentially indistinguishable.

What’s most impressive to me is that I really doubt the synthesis is programmed. It would become common enough in the future to sync up music to game events fluidly (consider the added music layer in Super Mario World when you mount Yoshi) and vice versa (the Guitar Hero series and many other games like it are based around the concept), but that’s all written into the code. In Gyruss the cues are apparent, not encoded reality. It tricks our senses, like a fine painting, and indeed it should be regarded as an interactive audiovisual work of art.

Review: Suikoden V

Posted on by Arleigh

Konami’s Suikoden series has been a fixture in the Playstation console systems since the PS1. While not as graphically beautiful as Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy series of role-playing games, Konami’s own Suikoden rpgs more than held its own in complexity of character development and storylines. These two factors have become something the Final Fantasy rpgs have really lacked since Final Fantasy VII. I would even say the Final Fantasy series hit its high-point in Final Fantasy VI and has been downhill since. Not so with the Suikoden series. From the beginning the series has beautifully combined characters and storylines to create a game that still uses the basic stats and experience mechanics of most Japanese RPGs but with a unique brand of npc recruiting and a wholly realized complex world which grows and reveals itself with each successive game in the series.

In 2006, Konami released Suikoden V in North America and there were some trepidations on how well the game would turn out. The previous game in the series, Suikoden IV, was abit underwhelming in its execution. A rarity in the Suikoden series in that the game was just ok; with some fans calling it awful. But even Suikoden IV still played better and its story less cliche than most rpgs coming out of Japan. Suikoden fans needn’t have worried about this latest entry in the series. Suikoden V doesn’t bring anything new or innovating in terms of graphics to the genre (but then these games never has in the past) but what it did was bring back the series to the high-standard of character development and storyline the series was very well-known and critically-acclaimed for.

Set six years before the events which played out in Suikoden I, Suikoden V takes places in the Queendom of Falena whose current Queen has in her possession the Sun Rune. The Sun Rune is one of the 27 True Runes which makes the backbone of what makes the critical events of the Suikoden Universe so unique to the role-playing genre. Queen Arshtat rules Falena with the Sun Rune but events prior to the beginning of the game (told in flashback) has set into motion a dangerous game of political machinations and powergrabbing between two powerful groups in the Houses of Barows and Godwins with the Sun Rune in the middle of it all.

The player is given control of Queen Arshtat’s only son to figure out just what sort of secret plans either Houses has in store for the Royals. Accompanying the player are Arshtat’s sister Sialeeds, his bodyguard and lifelong friend Lyon, and Georg (a familiar face for those who have played the previous games in the series). As the game’s story unfolds the complexity of the power struggle between Barows and Godwins and those of the Falenan Royal Family becomes more than a struggle for the realm of Falena but for its ultimate survival as something powerful and beyond human comprehension has slowly influenced those in close proximity. There’s moments of extreme sadness and ultimate sacrifices and love. Machiavellian plots and counterplots from both the protagonists and antagonists keep the player guessing as to how the story will play out. There’s also betrayals and genocidal actions which gives this entry to the series the dark edge the previous fourth Suikoden lacked.

Unlike most JRPG’s (Japanese RPGs), Suikoden V doesn’t have an end-of-the-world storyline but one which stays regional, but makes the plot no less epic and actually gives the game more freedom in how the story unfolds. The game’s story has to rank up there with Suikoden II‘s as one of the best rpg storylines ever and only lags behind the second game due to that game’s having a brilliant and memorable villain in one Luca Blight. The main characters and most of the 108 Stars of Destiny characters were well-written with their own distinct personalities and motivations for joining the fight. The dialogue during the game is mostly done through text with each character show in anime-style profiles. The cutscenes on the other hand uses voice acting which for a rpg was done pretty well with voice actors who actually gave each character voiced a distinct personality. It would’ve been nice if Konami had included the Japanese voice-acting in addition to the English translation. It’s a minor gripe, but nothing that takes away from making Suikoden V such a great game.

The gameplay mechanics returns back to the 6-party formation from the first three games in the series. There’s still the usual co-operative attacks when certain combinations of characters are put in the battle party. The co-op attacks could involve just two characters all the way up to six characters combining to create devastating non-runic attacks. There’s also co-op attacks between characters using runes. These combined runic attacks are some of the most damaging attacks in the game and allows the player a reason to actually bring a balanced party of 6 characters that’s made up of fighter strong in physical attacks and those adept in runes. The newest change in the battle mechanics occur in the war battles. Gone is the turn-based system that’s worked well in the first four games. Suikoden V‘s war battles now takes place in real-time which makes for much more hectic battles. The player must constantly know where each of his units are and how they’re stacked up against the opposing forces.

Suikoden V is a great game and also brings the Suikoden series back to great form after an interesting but lackluster attempt at innovation with Suikoden IV. This fifth entry did everything right in what made the series great. It had a great and compelling storyline with complex and distinct characters. Suikoden V misses surpassing the great Suikoden II in greatness just due to that game having certain classic and memorable characters. This is an unfair comparison but something that still puts the second game ahead of V, but just barely. That shows just how great this game really is. Already announced by Suikoden’s creators that V will be the last Suikoden game for this current generation of Playstation console system. While the title hasn’t made a return to consoles that’s not handheld if this was the last game in the series then it was a proper send-off.

Song of the Day: Transcending Love (by Michiru Yamane, Takashi Yoshida, Masahiko Kimura, Keiko Fukami)

Posted on by Arleigh

I am what you would call an avid gamer. I’ve been playing video games since I was a wee lad and marveled at the Atari 2600. I moved from that system through the many systems after it to my current one which is my Xbox 360.

I’m an equal opportunity gamer in that I will play any type of game at least once no matter the genre. In the end, the one  genre which I will always gravitate towards and I consider my first gaming love are role-playing games. I especially have a special place in my heart for Japanese role-playing games. It’s music from one of those Japanese role-playing games where I have chosen the latest “song of the day”.

The latest song chosen is from the Konami-published role-playing game series called Suikoden. This particular song comes from the third game in the main series, Suikoden III, and is the opening theme for the game. The song’s title is “Transcending Love” and is one of my favorite piece of game music ever produced. The song even gets a well-animated anime opening sequence which shows characters and events from the  game but doesn’t show too much about who they are and what the plot of the game is all about.

The song is part of a soundtrack which includes several Japanese game music composer that figuring out who was responsible for this particular song would be difficult to do. I’ve decided to just credit all of them for what I consider one of the best game opening themes and music ever composed.