Game info: MobyGames, Mouse and Penguin Reviews
Listening/music info: soundtrack album
Credits
BGM: Soyo Oka, Keisuke Ito
Theme song: 山田和正, Atsushi Hirasawa
Info
The release of this soundtrack to an obscure, Japanese-only DS game in 2011 was kind of a big deal to a lot of us VGM oldheads, because not counting occasional compilation releases of her old Nintendo work, this album was the first new game soundtrack release of composer Soyo Oka in almost 20 years. If you’re not familiar with her name, she’s pretty beloved for composing most of Pilotwings, SimCity, and Super Mario Kart for the SNES. She did work on a few other games post-Nintendo, most recently before this one being Gakkou no Kaidan: Hyakuyoubako no Fuuin in 2004, but nothing that was ever released on CD until this. It was part of a semi-comeback to the broader VGM-sphere, if you will, starting in 2010: prior to this she also contributed some arrangements to miscellaneous remix albums and was also part of Yuji Takenouchi’s short-lived GeOnDan alliance.
Despite the minor fanfare this soundtrack got, a lot of us never actually listened to it: never bothered importing it, wasn’t widely fileshared, not available digitally overseas, no YouTube uploads, uses a weird music format that hasn’t been reverse engineered, etc. I happened to notice last week that Amazon US would import it from its Japanese side and send it to me for less than thirty dollars, with free international shipping??? So I impulse bought it lmfao, and now here we are
The soundtrack is mostly chiptune, with a few pieces (mostly for cutscenes?) written with realer instruments. A lot of the chiptune tracks feel to me like “Dragon Quest but quirky cartoon spooky,” seemingly very evocative of the sectional writing and instrumental timbres of Koichi Sugiyama’s NES soundtracks. Sometimes they feel like they edge a little closer to Game Boy Wario or Castlevania music. They’re cool! These tracks were mostly done by Keisuke Ito, a composer I honestly probably like more than Oka these days (don’t tell her I said that). He’s credited for about 2/3 of the soundtrack, though that’s slightly misleading because a number of his pieces (tracks 25-34) are just faster versions of earlier tracks with different titles.
Oka’s tracks are generally shorter, in the 30-60 second range, and about half of them feature tense or dramatic orchestra writing with the aforementioned realer instruments. She did write a couple of chiptunes too, as well as a couple of jazzier tracks (which is what most people are fans of her for) and some other Miscellaneous Music. Most of her orchestral tracks didn’t really grab me that much, but there was some good stuff in her other contributions.
Recommended tracks:
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“Prologue” (Oka) is a nice piano solo with jazz flecks
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“Our Ranch” (Oka) is Oka’s longest piece, a jaunty town theme(?) with a cool dissonant chromatic bit at 1:06
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“Noisy Zombie” (Ito) is one of the most Dragon Quest-like songs in its composition
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“Lost Zombie” (Ito) is one of the tracks that most sounds like it was just directly ripped from an RPG
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“The News!” (Oka) sounds like a racing game results screen
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“Space Zombie” (Ito) is very twinkly
(track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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