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

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk8BDJLEHew

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

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

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfr_C429oBY

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ukmCm8QBrI

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3n_Qt6cgbs

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

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq4LGNGd5ik

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

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