Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (with music info), extracted audio
Credits
BGM: Hiroshi Tamawari, Ohamo Kotetsu, Akira Yamaoka Theme Songs: Yoshifumi Ushima, Yasuo Asai, Yasuhiko Fukuda
Info
Next up on the random radio is some Japanese-only fighting game for the PlayStation by Konami. While one track was done by Akira Yamaoka (a hard-rock piece completely out of place from the rest of the soundtrack), the rest of the BGM was done by two much less-known folks: Hiroshi Tamawari and Ohamo Kotetsu.
Ohamo Kotetsu is a very fake name that doesn’t seem to appear in any other video games, and no one’s been able to identify who they are. Very mysterious! They were the lead composer, writing almost all of the cutscene tracks and about half of the battle tracks, among others. They wrote in a bunch of different styles of music for the game—orchestral, dance music, funk, ambient, VGM town theme, etc.—and it’s pretty good! Some “video game music”-ass video game music with nice chord changes. Based on their music here, I don’t have any particularly strong guesses on what member of the Konami sound team this could be, assuming they even appear in other games under a different name in the first place. But I wish I did!
Hiroshi Tamawari’s an interesting guy who studied theater music while in university for a law degree, then worked at Konami for about five years or so, then went freelance to go write… theater music. So now he does stuff like the music and libretto for a Vocaloid bunraku opera. And I feel like that’s really cool, right? Like, extremely cool.
Even when he was at Konami, theater music influenced his work, as he talked about in this interview:
I also made the music [of Vandal Hearts II] match the speed at which the game’s text advances. The game waits for a bar to repeat and uses this as a signal to display the next line of dialog and the next bar in the song. As those who are familiar with the scores for musicals should know, the lines said by the characters during a play advance in real-time according to the timing given by the music cues. For matching the speed at which the players cleared the text boxes in Vandal Hearts II, I made several passages that develop sequentially without the music getting interrupted. This was thanks to the sound programmer making a special program for this purpose.
And one more point is that I tried using musical expression methods that hadn’t been used in game music up to that point. For example, the sound of the windmills spinning, the cries of the bugs and nightingales during the evening, the bewitching sound of the wind blowing through the windows, and the sounds of the waves and the seagulls at the harbor… All these sounds weren’t used as sound effects, but instead integrated into the songs themselves, which is a method of musical expression that’s widely featured in the music for operas and ballets.
As you might guess from this information, Tamawari’s music tends to be more orchestral, which he’s quite good at, though I think his later Vandal Hearts II score is a much better showcase of that than this. Even so, the orchestration in his tracks is definitely more complex than Kotetsu’s, and they have much more complex titles that come across to me like a goof, like “Fantasia on a Melody in a Japanese Scale ~For Orchestra~.” He did do a few non-orchestral tracks too, though I feel that Kotetsu’s non-orchestral tracks were generally better.
The soundtrack also includes the opening and ending themes performed by Yurica Nagasawa, which are both standard synthy pop songs of the kind you’d hear in every game from this era, as well as a couple of unused tracks by Kotetsu that aren’t in the game data.
Recommended tracks:
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“Choda Village (Daigo Raiou)” (Kotetsu) has a nice flying sound to it, like you might find in an airship theme, and I think is interesting to contrast with Tamawari’s orchestral style
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“Zehgo Village / Fine Winter Weather (Yuki Shirogane)” (Kotetsu) is some very pretty ambient synth music, like you might hear in the menu of a Phantasy Star Online game or something
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“Symphonic Toccata ~For Orchestra~ (Dragless)” (Tamawari) is the most aggressive & complex orchestral piece on the soundtrack
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“Ending 1” (Tamawari) was my favorite of Tamawari’s non-orchestral pieces, a cute li’l number with a few layers
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“Extended Stage” (uncredited) is some very weird jazz
(translations are unofficial)
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