Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album, YouTube, extracted audio
Info
A while back I listened to the arcade and console soundtracks of the first three Bloody Roar games, since I have great interest in a number of the involved composers (Manabu Namiki! Kenichi Koyano! Hitoshi Sakimoto! Jin Watanabe! Takayuki Negishi!), and I enjoyed them quite a bit. Especially Bloody Roar 2 arcade by the Raizing music crew, which is a video gamey mix of electronica/prog/jazz fusion, and Bloody Roar 3 by Takayuki Negishi, which is some excellent synth prog in the vein of like Planet X. I didn’t listen to either of the two later games because they’re by composers I’m unfamiliar with, but I just got a tip that the soundtrack to 4 is also good, so I checked it out. It is in fact also pretty good!
Almost all of Yoshihiro Tsukahara’s game credits are for games by Hudson Soft, though I’m not sure that he was ever actually an employee of the company; in his earliest games he worked at the company SATELITE which was evidently contracted, and in 2000 he set up his own company, Studio RICCIO, which is credited on the soundtrack album for Bloody Roar 4 and still seemingly exists to this day. His soundtrack is a bit proggy like Bloody Roar 3 but a bit more straightforward hard rocky with plenty of synths, more on the side of the “prog band writing normal music” kind of thing you might get from like ’80s Rush or something with an aggressive, fighting-game edge. It’s definitely not all “normal music” though, there’s some spice in there and some tracks get downright weird. A few tracks also feature Japanese instruments in a way that appears to be plot/setting-related, after checking the summary of the game on Wikipedia. Pretty fun, I think.
Recommended tracks:
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“Opening Demo” has a lot of rousing intro theme energy, with a couple of J-poppy chord changes slipped in there for good feelings
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“Japanese Garden” reminds me a bit of Dan Forden’s early Mortal Kombat soundtracks in its composition, instrumentation, and oppressive atmosphere
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“Aquarium Ruins” has a piano melody at 1:10 that hits some unexpectedly weird notes
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“Imagined World” sounds like it fell out of Resident Evil
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“Ending 4” is a jam with a chill but smokin’ electric guitar solo
(track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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