Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube, mini soundtrack (only has ten tracks)
Credits
Sound Director: Jun Senoue
Assistant Sound Director: Teruhiko Nakagawa
Composers: Tee Lopes, Fumio Ito, Satoshi Oike, Takahiro Kai, Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Hideaki Kobayashi, Hidenori Shoji, Rintaro Soma, Iona Takashima, Yasuyuki Nagata, Ryo Fukuda, Mitsuharu Fukuyama, Tae Fujimoto, Tatsuyuki Maeda, Kenji Mizuno, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi, TORIENA, Yuzuru Jinma
Sound Editor in Chief: Kenichi Tokoi
Sound Editors: Keisuke Tsukahara, Hideki Abe
Movie Sound Editors: Eiji Nakamura, Chiharu Minekawa (Sound Racer Inc.)
Coordinator: Fumitaka Shibata (WAVE MASTER INC.)
Development Support: Yasuhiro Takagi, Haruyoshi Tomita, Naofumi Hataya, Fumiyoshi Shimohara, Teruhiko Nakagawa, Fumio Ito
Jun Senoue has also had music credited to him in a preview video.
Info
Well here’s a video game with at least nineteen different composers, half of whom have written for Sonic games in the past and half of whom are doing it for the first time. Everyone* but Tee Lopes, TORIENA, and Yuzuru Jinma is an in-house SEGA composer, with a healthy mix of newer folks, older hands, and extremely older hands. The result is, well, something that sounds like it was done by a bunch of different composers just doing whatever they wanted: you’ve got some older style pop and funk and new jack swing Sonic music and you’ve got EDM and Phantasy Star Online music, you’ve got full production music and you’ve got various chiptuney tracks that sound different because different composers used different chiptune sound sources, and so on. It’s very inconsistent, to an extent that’s actually a bit funny to me.
The inconsistency also extends to what I like from it: all over the place in terms of stuff I dig and stuff I absolutely can’t stand. Generally I liked the chiptune tracks, especially the ones pastiching Sonic 1 & 2, less than the rest of the music, though some of that can certainly be chalked up to me being a bigger fan of the electronic styles demonstrated in the non-chiptune tracks. I’ve seen a few comparisons between Superstars’s chiptune tracks and the pretty widely derided soundtracks to Sonic the Hedgehog 4, and there are definitely some boring tracks with bland audio programming and writing, but there are plenty of better ones too so I wouldn’t take the comparison too broadly.
I asterisked “everyone” in the first paragraph because there’s a special name in the middle of the big block of in-house SEGA composers: Ryo Fukuda. There’s no known past SEGA employee with this name, so there’s a good possibility that this is just a new hire. However, there is a composer Ryo Fukuda who has worked on a Sonic game before: experimental prog/jazz bassist Ryo Fukuda, who a long time ago composed some (maybe quite a bit) of the bizarre, extremely good soundtrack to Sonic Shuffle. However, Fukuda hated working on video games, like literally saying “I hate game music. … I hate the game industry,” so I have a hard time believing he would’ve suddenly taken an industry job. It’s possible that SEGA just found some leftover music of his that they reused, but I’m not sure they would’ve gone the distance and credited him for that—a lot of companies wouldn’t. There wasn’t really anything in the soundtrack that I felt sounded like him anyway, except possibly some jingles.
Recommended tracks:
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“Speed Jungle Zone – Act 2” (Hidenori Shoji) is some pretty standard Shoji breakbeats + transposing chords music
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“Pinball Carnival Zone – Act 1” (Rintaro Soma) is big cheesy funk with a fun mix of chippy and non-chippy instruments
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“Lagoon City Zone – Act 2” (Tee Lopes) has some chill CD audio vibes; I really like what the background chimes do at 0:57
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“Battle Theme” (Takenobu Mitsuyoshi) is a great fusion jam
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“Final Boss – Phase 1” (Hideaki Kobayashi/Mitsuharu Fukuyama?) is, to a hilarious degree, just a track from Phantasy Star Online 2
(track titles are unofficial)
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