Tag Archives: square

VGM Entry 31: RPGs in ’88

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 31: RPGs in ’88
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Nobuo Uematsu and Koichi Sugiyama were both at work in 1988, recording installments of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series respectively. They both maintained their own standards, remaining at the forefront of RPG and adventure style music on the NES.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeY26bH2Sn0

Final Fantasy II (Square, 1988) was actually a big improvement over the original. Nobuo Uematsu’s fundamental style hadn’t changed (and I would argue that it still hasn’t), but I feel like on this game he really mastered how to effectively arrange his works for the NES. I mentioned that Final Fantasy‘s arrangement felt like a finished product compared to some other genre-related games released that year, but in Nobuo’s later NES works you can start to get the feeling that the original Final Fantasy was also a sort of work in progress. It incorporated a number of slightly distorted tones which really gave his soft, subtle melodies an air of technological primitivism.

On Final Fantasy II you hear none of that. The overall sound is a lot more smooth. It’s immediately apparent in the “Main Theme” following “Prelude” in this sample. The main melody, here carried by a very soft and pretty tone, is precisely the sort of sound for which he employed a grittier, more mechanical tone in the first game. Since Final Fantasy II was released on the Famicom, not the FDS, I can’t imagine that there was any change in the platform’s capacity. I think, rather, he took some lessons from his earlier shortcomings on the production end of the spectrum.

Final Fantasy II was the first game to feature the famous “Chocobo” theme (1:40), and “Main Theme” (0:53), “Tower of Mages” (not here featured), and “Ancient Castle” (2:42) are all particularly noteworthy, but I think it’s the improved arrangement which really makes the soundtrack shine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afXJfo-7XRM

Dragon Quest III (Enix, 1988) is a little harder for me to assess, as I’ve somehow completely failed to acquire full soundtracks for this series. What I’ve heard seems like more of the same old, which is absolutely fine. Koichi Sugiyama seems to have continued to focus on rearranging earlier works rather than composing wholly new ones, and he had a decent amount of success in doing so. I’m not going to talk at length about a score I really know nothing about, but I thought it worth throwing out there again.

As I hope I’ve by now established though, the NES had by no means a monopoly on this style of video game music. Takahito Abe and Yuzo Koshiro’s work on Ys I is a soundtrack I’ve frequently cited, and its follow-up, Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter (Nihon Falcom), was yet another fine 1988 sequel.

But the music here is pretty hard to come by. Takahito Abe was not a part of the sound team this go around, and Mieko Ishikawa took on the bulk of the load, with Yuzo Koshiro providing some of the more up-beat tracks, such as the one here sampled. Ishikawa isn’t a musician I’ve come across too often up to this point, but she was credited alongside Koshiro and Abe on Sorcerian, and I gather she was involved in future Ys titles. I suppose I should have featured one of her songs and not Koshiro’s, but I can’t find enough of it out there to get a good feel for it. There’s a nice sample of the song Tender People up on youtube that might give you an idea. It lacks Takahito Abe’s gentle touch, but it’s quite pretty nevertheless.

A lot of the difficulty in digging out Ys II tracks (at least in the short period of time I can allot it) stems from a remake of the game having been released for PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16 in 1989, a mere one year later. That release, Ys I & II, featured some outstanding new arrangements from Ryo Yonemitsu, but its success denies us easy access to Ishikawa’s original PC-8801 work. As far as Koshiro is concerned, some of his upbeat tracks come off quite well, but I feel like he lacked restraint on this album and ended up with a sound that just didn’t quite suite the type of game he was composing for. It’s a problem which Koshiro would thoroughly overcome over the next three years, adding such stark stylistic distinctions to his name as ActRaiser (Enix, 1990) and Streets of Rage (Sega, 1991).

Above all else in the RPG/adventure world of 1988 though, I’m most impressed by how my new-found hero Kenneth W. Arnold manages to maintain the high standards he set back in 1983.

This guy’s music blows me away every time I hear it, and his work on Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (Origin Systems, 1988) is no exception. It’s atmospherically perfect. “Engagement and Melee” might be a simple song, but could it have been any more appropriate for a tense medieval battle? It doesn’t deliver with speed and aggression, but rather with a vision of the distant fantasy world it represents. The distortion sounds archaic in the best of ways.

There are a lot of different versions of it floating around out there, as best I understand because Apple II music is nearly impossible to rip and requires some creative liberty. But I did manage to nab a replica of the original Apple II sound as it was meant to be heard through a Mockingboard sound card, and I present these samples to you now. (Thanks again to Apple Vault.)

The aesthetics here never fail to impress me. The sound quality in “Greyson’s Tale” is exploited flawlessly, using every potential adverse limitation to the music’s advantage. The distortion and the fairly minimalistic, distinctly medieval compositions paint every ideal image you’ve ever had a of a fantasy world. There’s something not quite clear and not quite safe about all of it.

In “Dream of Lady Nan” the distorted bass is so forceful you can feel the vibrations, and the melody is crystal clear, creating an unnatural juxtaposition that’s completely haunting. I normally avoid encouraging the free download of potentially copyrighted material, but in consideration of the fact that the owners of this material have nothing to lose and everything to gain from it being distributed, I highly recommend you go download all of Kenneth W. Arnold’s works in Ultima III-V. You can find them in their ideal form at this link.

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny. It’s not quite on par with Ultima III and Ultima IV in my opinion, and the tracks don’t loop quite as flawlessly as they used to, but it maintains the series’ standing in a complete league of its own, beyond comparison to the contemporary best efforts of Nobuo Uematsu and company. If there were other soundtracks out there like it, well, I would very much like to hear them.

VGM Entry 27: PC-8801

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 27: PC-8801
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

If I want to cover every field, it would be a certain mistake to overlook the impact of the NEC PC-8801 during this time. I have incorporated a few titles into the mix already. Thexder (Game Arts, 1985) by Hibiki Godai was the first noteworthy soundtrack for the platform I’ve found making use of the Yamaha YM2203 sound chip. Xanadu Scenario II (Nihon Falcom, 1986), predominantly the work of Takahito Abe, and Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished (Nihon Falcom, 1987) by Yuzo Koshiro the following year were developed for various platforms, but the PC-8801 seems to have been Falcom’s flagship. Unfortunately I’ve found it nearly impossible, between the language barrier and the myriad ports, to find suitable examples of most of Takahito Abe’s other PC-8801 works, and Yuzo Koshiro’s pre-1988 works seem to be just as obscure. But were they the only composers making the system shine?

Silpheed (Game Arts, 1986) was another product of Hibiki Godai, at least as best I can tell. The only credits I could find were for the 1988 MS-DOS port by Sierra On-Line, which list Hibiki Godai, Nobuyuki Aoshima, Fumihito Kasatani, and Hiromi Ohba. Since the majority of the other names in the credits are Americans, it’s quite possible that all four of these musicians had a hand in the original composition.

In a way, the music feels a little bland compared to that of the European musicians I’ve recently discussed. This is certainly a product of differences in sound chips, but I am at least a little inclined to believe that both the distorted nature of Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum sound and the atmosphere of experimentation and bold composition that permeated European sound programming did in fact inspire better music than competing scenes managed to produce at the time. Even so, Silpheed has some exceptional songs–most notably the one beginning at 13:00–and it’s a good example of what Japanese computer gaming sounded like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aby9Upk3hQ8

Or so I like to believe. Sorcerian (Nihon Falcom, 1987) is yet another Yuzo Koshiro and Takahito Abe collaboration, with Mieko Ishikawa additionally credited. Kenji Kawai is listed separately as the 1992 PC-Engine arranger, so for once we can at least make some distinction in that regard. But so long as the same names keep popping up, I can’t help but think I’m only getting a very small sample of a much larger field. And furthermore, the significance of the PC-8801 for these titles musically is not a given. Almost all of Nihon Falcom’s games were released across an enormous spread of systems which typically included at least the PC-8801, PC-9801, Sharp X1, and MSX2. As has been shown with Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished, this entailed endless variation and reinterpretation of the central themes. “Dark Fact” almost seemed to evolve with every port, with no clear explanation as to whether Yuzo Koshiro changed his mind about how it ought to sound or port arrangers independently reinterpreted the music at every step, often basing their take on previous ports rather than the original.

If these composers knew that their songs would take so many forms, did they really write their music for the PC-8801 at all, or were they aiming for compositions which could function through a wide array of sound configurations? Or, if they were personally involved in the ports, did they perhaps gear their music towards a preferred system for which the game might not necessarily be released on first? No amount of exploring PC-8801 compositions has helped to clarify these questions.

The problem is compounded by a complete absence of credits for the vast majority of PC-8801 games. In the absence of a PC88 game library (I am eternally in debt to such sites as Lemon 64, World of Spectrum, and Lemon Amiga), I have absolutely no clue what Shinra Bansho (Nihon Telenet, 1987) is beyond the name of its developer. This is my second favorite PC-8801 soundtrack (after Snatcher, which I’ll be addressing later), but I haven’t a clue who wrote it. Perhaps Nihon implies Yuzo Koshiro and Takahito Abe, if they were the only house musicians, but since this is Nihon Telenet, not Nihon Falcom, and I have no idea what that distinction entails, it would be folly to ascribe any artist attribution.

I am entirely at the mercy of grad1u52 on youtube for finding PC-8801 music in the first place, as he is the only member taking active steps to preserve it, but the information he supplies for each game is unfortunately non-existent. Lots of other titles, the music for which is readily available, fall into this same boat.

The only substantial hint I can offer is that composers hardly ever freelanced at this time, and developers rarely boasted a large sound staff. If you can identify a developer’s house composer in the mid-80s, it almost always seems to be the case that they scored every release during their tenure. Square and Enix make a good case in point. Such obscure PC-8801 titles as Cruise Chaser Blassty (Square, 1986) and Jesus: Dreadful Bio-Monster (Enix, 1987) were composed by Nobuo Uematsu and Koichi Sugiyama respectively, not passed off to secondary musicians (not that Uematsu had succeeded in making a name for himself by 1986). Both soundtracks were second rate, with Uematsu sounding completely lost in a non-fantasy setting and Sugiyama cutting corners to the extent of including tracks from Dragon Quest, but that is quite besides the point. With the company consistently identifying the composer, there might still exist a means to figure these old, cryptically credited PC-8801 games out short of learning Japanese.

VGM Entry 22: Final Fantasy

Posted on by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 22: Final Fantasy
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Final Fantasy also lacks much of a kick. Nobuo’s decision to not use any drums might have seemed surprising, had Koichi Sugiyama not done the same thing. Much like Sugiyama, Uematsu was able to craft songs which were memorable and struck a pleasant balance among the available tones. Both artists successfully mastered the positive aspects of the Nintendo’s cleaner tones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8_0vY3Nvqk

Final Fantasy doesn’t need much of an introduction. It’s worth noting that it was fairly lengthy for its day, with nineteen full songs. Garudoh did a fine job of capturing all of the best tracks in this collection. The songs which appear here in order are:

(0:00) Prelude
(0:49) Final Fantasy Main Theme
(1:40) Overworld Theme
(2:17) Battle Theme
(3:08) Undersea Shrine
(3:46) Sailing
(4:33) Airship
(5:04) Gurgu Volcano
(5:49) Matoya’s Cave
(6:30) Temple of Chaos
(7:08) Funeral
(7:57) Victory!

I think it would be easy to be a little critical of Nobuo Uematsu’s work, considering how much better his later soundtracks became. One can easily point to later improvements in “Main Theme”, for instance, to say that the original was a little bland. But if you turn to tracks that were not improved upon in future games, “Gurgu Volcano” for example, you can tell that the originals were valuable in their own right. Where Zelda II felt to me like a prototype for a desired sound which the Nintendo was unable to produce, Final Fantasy feels like a finished project.

You will also probably get the distinct impression that Uematsu was inspired by Sugiyama. At least, I did, but this may simply be a consequence of the decision on the part of both musicians to not use a drum track. Uematsu actually had a slightly longer history of writing game music. Koichi Sugiyama started this career late in life, composing his first two game scores, Dragon Quest and Wingman 2, in 1986 at the age of 55. Uematsu’s first soundtrack, a DOS game called Genesis, came out in 1985. The difference is slight, but by the end of ’87 Sugiyama had only one more composition on the books–Dragon Quest II. In that same span of time Uematsu managed to accumulate a staggering repertoire of thirteen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VlFoVoqYQ8

I couldn’t find samples from either artist’s first soundtrack, but if you listen to King’s Knight, a Square game composed by Uematsu and released for the MSX in 1986, you can tell that Final Fantasy was no epiphany. It might have been his first recognized and highly acclaimed work, but it was not his first good one.

Uematsu and Sugiyama were acquainted at an early stage though. In an interview on nobuouematsu.com, he states that “Koichi Sugiyama is a big boss of game music. I think he was the first person to really pay attention to my works.” Whether this came before or shortly after the release of Final Fantasy, the two were certainly aware of each other’s work.

My best guess is Sugiyama did influence Final Fantasy, but not in regards to song-writing. That talent came naturally to both of them. Rather, I get the feeling Uematsu may have taken some tips from Dragon Quest on how to effectively arrange these types of songs for the NES medium. I suppose if you got an opportunity to interview Uematsu it would be a petty question to ask, but I’m curious all the same.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USfEmMXFD1k

Perhaps Nobuo Uematsu is still guilty in some capacity of letting the NES sound limitations get the better of him. The sort of stuff he made his career writing worked just fine in King’s Knight, but the NES just didn’t have the capacity to take it all in. Some of the best NES artists dealt with these limitations by allowing the system to dictate the musical style; they approached the NES as an instrument rather than a medium through which to present music existing independently of it. I suppose I’ve said that a lot at this point. Perhaps MSX2 version of Final Fantasy will make it a little more clear. Micro Cabin released the port in 1989, with their sound programmer Tadahiro Nitta handling the new arrangement, not Uematsu himself. Nevertheless, it sounds a lot better than the original in my opinion, and I think it might be a more honest interpritation of the music than Uematsu’s own finished product. If Uematsu had been composing for the MSX in the first place, his music would have made a lot more sense. But the counter argument is fairly obvious; if he hadn’t composed Final Fantasy for the NES the way he did, this MSX version would have never existed.