Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube
Credits
Sound Director: Yasuhisa Baba
Lead Composer: Yasuhisa Baba
Composer & Recording: Kazuki Komai
Composer & Mastering Engineer: Hiroki Morishita
Composer: Takeru Kanazaki
Lead Sound Designer: Daichi Aoki
Sound Designer: Daichi Ishihara, Joya Shioiri
Sound Supervisor: Yuka Tsujiyoko
Composer & Mastering Engineer: Fumihiro Isobe
Composer & Recording Engineer: Takafumi Wada
Arranger & Pro Tools Operator: Ryosuke Kawasaki
Arranger: Sumika Horiguchi
Sound Designer: Junpei Ikawa (TWOFIVE), Kosei Muraki (TWOFIVE)
Info
Alright I finally got around to listening to this thing. My preferred way of listening to game soundtracks without official releases is through their audio files directly rather than a game rip on YouTube, but the files for this game have yet to show up in the usual redacted place I go to (unknown format? encrypted data?). And INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS usually takes their time in releasing soundtrack albums, so I wouldn’t expect one for Engage until next year. So I put this off for a while.
The Fire Emblem series is I guess the company’s primary source of “serious” music for orchestra, and Engage is another pretty typical modern (starting with Awakening) Fire Emblem soundtrack with “serious” music for orchestra, with some incorporation of rock, EDM, and ambient sound design (mostly in battle tracks). I wouldn’t say it’s a signature instrument of the soundtrack because there are plenty of tracks without it, but there’s a healthier amount of guitar presence than there’s been in modern games, both acoustic and electric. If you like the music IS has been doing in Fire Emblem games for the past decade, then Engage is a lot more of that kind of stuff for you to chow down on.
I love INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS composer Hiroki Morishita a whole lot, and his primary musical output is for the Fire Emblem series, so I always check ’em out when there’s a new non-Warriors release. He’s the best orchestrator currently working on the series (the best of all time being Yoshito Sekigawa), but what I really love about him are his tendencies to sprinkle rhythmic complexity (particularly minimalist-style stacked rhythms), big jazz chords, modulation spam, and progginess into his orchestral writing. He’s not the only person to write music like that (which is good!), but those features are generally much more prevalent in his contributions, both in frequency and strength.
The sound director and main composer of this installment was Yasuhisa Baba, who I don’t know much about because there aren’t too many known specific credits to his name, but he did some cool ambient and arranged tracks for past Fire Emblem games, and he was also the sound director for the unbelievably good Super Paper Mario (for which I suspect he composed too). He seems to be the best guy at electronic sound production, or at least the one most willing to deploy it in this series, and I like his sound design. I’m pretty sure I like him a lot, and I’m looking forward to a future soundtrack release with credits to get a better sense of what he can do.
Morishita and Baba were joined by two other composers from INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS: Takeru Kanazaki, who’s kind of like if Morishita was about 1000% more anime and also threw EDM into his tracks sometimes, and Kazuki Komai, who I don’t know. Additionally, as is pretty standard, there were some outsourced folks as well: freelancer (or maybe TOSE employee?) Fumihiro Isobe and several people from music production company Dimension Cruise, both of which have been involved in previous Fire Emblem games.
Recommended tracks:
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“Engage…” (Baba) is the best statement of a recurring figure across the soundtrack that would make for a bomb-ass minimalist piece, but is unfortunately never really substantially developed in that way
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“Holy Land of Lythos” (Baba) has some really pretty piano chords & string writing, along with some subtle shortening of the phrasing as it progresses
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“Friendly Chat” (Komai) is a standardly cozy dialogue theme
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“Weary Confrontation” (Baba) is my favorite track in the game from a sound design perspective, unsettling and tense ambient
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“Faraway, Eternal Holy Land” (Baba) has the light vibe of an earlygame battle map theme; love the rhythmically & tonally clashing string stabs at 0:45 and 13 bit at 1:58
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“Last Engage (Prayer-Incantation)” (Baba) is a big mashup of like five different styles for the final battle of the game, arranging the vocal main theme (you may have noticed the melody at 2:51 referenced in the previous track)
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“Corrupted” (Baba) is extremely Super Paper Mario in the cartoony synth figure and overall rhythmic pattern, just with heavier and more sinister orchestration
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“Trial of Dawn” (Morishita) is a reprise medley of some melodies from Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn (“Bearer of Hope,” “Echoes of Daybreak,” and “Ascent”); the combat between the syncopated strings and synth at 0:50-1:19 is my favorite part of the entire soundtrack
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“Keeper of History (Frenzy)” (Isobe) is one of the most Yoshimi Kudo-sounding pieces I’ve ever heard by someone not named Yoshimi Kudo, this sounds straight out of Raiden V
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