sunsoft | Through the Shattered Lens

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most impressive compositions faced an enormous burden in keeping pace with video game music at large on a hopelessly outdated system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhZwE1IPqkw

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ksme4TBFmMg

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1l4ourOqtY

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.

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.