Game info: GameFAQs, YouTube
Listening: YouTube, CD audio
Credits
Sound Director: Shihomi Yamashita, Kenitirou Ueda
Music Compose: Nobuhiro Makino
Guitar: Jirou Takada
Info
So I was in the middle of finally listening to Fire Emblem Engage when my friend Chimeratio sent me a track he randomly found from an extremely obscure game that was so good I had to drop everything (plus I’m not going to finish Engage for a few days anyway, it’s beefy). Did you know that Konami made Windows games in the ’90s? They did! Did you know that Konami made original, exclusive Windows games and not just ports of their arcade/console games in the ’90s? They did! This is a mech combat game where you need to program your robot before it goes into battle, apparently similar to the Carnage Heart series, which I haven’t played either. There’s very little information about this game around anywhere in English or Japanese, but luckily the staff roll of this game is just in plaintext in a script file interpreted by the game, so we can find out who did the music at least.
While I have heard of Nobuhiro Makino before, I know very little about him. He did a few random games in the ’90s, as can be seen in his MobyGames profile, but his main compositional work seems to be in songwriting, a sampling of which can be seen in his VGMdb profile. I checked out the archives of his old website and found he maintained a comprehensive list of every time he performed keyboard for a live act, totaling over 600 performances over a span of almost 20 years (with almost all them occurring from 1983 to 1994), which I feel is so excellent that I had to mention it. A lot of musicians keep a list of artists they’ve performed in support of, but I’ve never seen a list this meticulously detailed before.
The reason I’ve heard of Makino is because one song of his happened to be randomly popular on a forum a million years ago: “Bay Side City” from Android Assault: Revenge of Bari-Arm for the SEGA CD, a super cheesy jazz fusion track with some smoldering sax. Frontier Brain’s soundtrack doesn’t have any sax in it and tends a bit more toward rock, with plenty of guitar, but it’s got that same ’90s synthy CD audio style that “Bay Site City” does so that track would have fit right in. There are still some fusiony tracks, plus there’s some whole tone abuse here and there to tick another checkbox on the list of things that make me go “awww yeah.” Pretty fun soundtrack, definitely got me in the mood to check out more stuff by Makino at some point in the future. Maybe starting with the rest of Bari-Arm…
Recommended tracks:
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Track 3 has some visual novel investigation music-ass riffs
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Track 4 is one of those whole tone abuse pieces, and also clearly the piece of music I heard first that stopped me dead in my tracks and demanded all my attention
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Track 6 has some light Pat Metheny vibes
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Track 14 has some electric guitar shredding over some jazzy chords
(tracks are referred to by their track number on the disc)
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