Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube
Credits
Sound: T’s MUSIC
Sound Direction: Tomoyuki Hamada
Music: CHAMY
Effect: Yoshiyuki Kadooka
Info
Here’s a series of fishing sims by Natsume which go back and forth between a still photo of a real location edited to have a looping running water effect and then a rendered underwater environment where you catch fish, which is kind of a big vibe. I’m mostly interested in listening to the soundtrack for the third game in this series, but I’m going to listen to the first two as well because why not.
The composer here is CHAMY.Ishi (real name Masayoshi Ishi), who’s been doing game audio through the production company T’s MUSIC for more than 30 years but whom I’ve never really seen people talk about or share music from, even though he’s technically worked on (side) entries in the Mario, Sonic, and Megaten series. I first really got into his music through Wachenröder, a 1998 strategy RPG with one of the most insanely prog video game soundtracks of all time. I originally assumed that one of his co-composers, Takayuki Negishi, was largely responsible for that, as he’s been verifiably prog in other works (his magnum opus in that regard being Bloody Roar 3). Later, my friend Chimeratio found an incredibly good song from Sonic Rush that’s potentially by CHAMY, which made me do a random dive into his games and I came to the conclusion that he’s also an incredibly good composer. While a lot of the games he’s worked don’t have composer breakdowns, from the ones that do we can get a sense that besides prog he also has a fondness for surprising chord changes and unusual tonalities, and you can find tracks with those characteristics strewn about a bunch of different games he’s worked on. He’s cool!
But anyway, this is a fishing game with kinda generic slow, lowkey acoustic guitar + piano fishing music, with some slightly jazzy writing here and there. Mostly music to zone out to while having a nice relaxing day at the river, though a couple of tracks reminded me a little bit more of RPG music with their instrumentation and minor key.
Recommended tracks:
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“Seq 6” has a 5-note ostinato going the whole time but the flute kind of doesn’t care about that and just chips in random phrases
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“Aqua Room (after winning)” sounds like something from an old PC CRPG, or Ecco the Dolphin or something
(track titles are unofficial)
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