Game info: Wikipedia, HG101
Listening/music info: 1997 soundtrack (very incomplete), 2002 soundtrack (somewhat less incomplete), 2020 soundtrack (complete?)
Info
Here’s the quirky, eclectic soundtrack to a quirky, eclectic PS1 adventure game. moon is a chill exploration/puzzle experience about all the people in an RPG who aren’t the hero, as they deal with the fact that they live in an RPG where there’s a hero tromping around Doing Quests and Killing Monsters. It got ported & translated for some consoles and PC a couple of years ago, so I just finished playing it last month and it was [checks notes] “pretty neato.”
I’m going to be talking in this post about the 2020 definitive(?) soundtrack, EX-PO ’97 In memoriam the moondays, which was self-published by two of the game’s sound staff, Masanori Adachi and Hirofumi Taniguchi. I’ve listened to the 2002 soundtrack before, which contains a lot of the game’s music, so I’m calling this a relisten even though there’s a bunch of tracks that I hadn’t heard before I played the game.
Disc 1 contains most of the game’s “normal” background music, which plays in locations with dedicated music and cutscenes; this disc was also the entirety of the first released soundtrack. Most of the music was written by the developer’s sound team of Masanori Adachi, Hirofumi Taniguchi, and Taro Kudo under the collective name THELONIOUS MONKEES (which Adachi and Taniguchi would continue using after leaving), but there are a few guest tracks by some of the external artists who also contributed MD songs (see next paragraph). A lot of the tracks do sound broadly like RPG music that’s kinda weird, but the game is tonally pretty broad and as a result you’ll hear jazz jams and vocals and weird electronica too. The 2020 release includes six previously unreleased tracks, and several of them are among my favorites in the game, so I’m deffo glad about their eventual inclusion.
Discs 2-4 are devoted to the game’s MD songs, playable through the in-game MD (Moon Disc) player. Most of the game’s locations don’t have dedicated background music, just environmental sound effects, so in these places you can play a custom playlist of songs you purchase from a store or find on the ground. While some of these songs were also composed by THELONIOUS MONKEES or their friends, the vast majority were just commissioned from random indie artists the staff liked. From a 2020 interview with Adachi and Taniguchi:
“I suppose you could say we chose people who were pursuing their own path,” [Adachi] says. "In other words, musicians who believed in their work and were composing out of love.
“At first, we had considered creating the MD music ourselves, but we wanted the music to be authentic, rather than just an imitation. A lot of the Love-de-Lic members were big music fans, and their tastes covered a wide range of genres, so in that respect, gathering a range of artists wasn’t a huge challenge.”
As I’d expect you’d expect, these are all over the map stylistically, from pop to jazz to funk to EDM to ambient to orchestral to Japanese traditional to Brazilian folk to—
Disc 2 contains the original versions of the MD songs that were modified in some way for use in the game, from slight mixing differences to more substantial changes like shortening/extension, vocal changes, and rearrangement. In the 2002 release these tracks were mixed with the in-game versions of the other MD songs, but on this album they were sequestered on their own disc with a couple of bonus tracks.
Discs 3 & 4 have the in-game versions of all 36 MD songs, including the ones that were omitted from the 2002 release because they used the original versions instead, as well as the five tracks that play in the dance club. Generally I find the original versions preferable to the MD versions, but I’m also a Radical Completionist when it comes to soundtracks so I think it’s cool that the in-game versions were finally all released.
Disc 5 is for the music that plays during the game’s intro, a Dragon Quest parody with a short chiptune soundtrack, only one song from which had been previously released. But this isn’t the original source audio but rather a greatly expanded recreation with additional layers, a lot of new material that stretches to several minutes in a few tracks, and even two new pieces without in-game analogues. And the result is, incredibly great??? It’s like if Dragon Quest was actually a chiptune prog rock album. This disc specifically instantly became some of my favorite music I’ve ever heard by Adachi and Taniguchi (and maybe Kudo, but there’s a possibility he’s only credited for original composition of one track) and singlehandedly tipped my rating from “good” to “extremely good.”
Recommended tracks:
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“REACH – AIR – BURST” (THE SLEEPWALK) is a cool EDM track by a shoegaze band (wait for 2:00)
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“Space Trip” (Adachi) is an ambient cutscene track that’s weird in a very “Masanori Adachi” way
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Don’t forget to listen to “KERA-MA-GO” (Adachi & Taniguchi, vo. Krysta Ashley Schulze) every day!
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“BLUE” (Taniguchi as Dioramic Phono Odor) is a weird, lo-fi synth piece that feels like a heavily disguised prog rock song sort of
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“SpoonJam2md” (Akira Ueda) is just some smooth jazz fusion that’s not weird, which I felt would be a good counterbalance in the middle of all these other weird tracks
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“Mask” (Son Calligraphie) is a free jazz improv by Masahiko Okura (sax) and Masaaki Kikuchi (bass)
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“The One Who Broke the Seal” (Adachi & Taniguchi) is one of the two original disc 5 tracks and is basically nonstop cool from the point the nice chord bit starts at 1:39 (6:03 in the video)
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“Hero, LASTSTAND” (Taniguchi) is an extension of the final boss theme from the intro, which was my favorite of the music from the DQ parody
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