Game info: Sega-16
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube (missing unused tunes)
Credits
Back Ground Music Design: Hiromi Shibano (as Shiba)
Info
Next up in the pile o’ games I have played on stream entirely because I liked the soundtrack and wanted to check it out: the Genesis adaptation of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. Or, well, adaptation of half of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, as it ends up diverging quite a bit from the story of the anime. Possibly because the game was in production while the anime was still airing! It’s a pretty simplistic adventure game where you run around a bunch of environments talking to people, solving light puzzles, and blundering through the same identical-looking 50 rooms trying desperately to find the single one which contains the story progression.
Hiromi Shibano is a composer I’ve mentioned here before after listening to what are surely her best-known works to normal people: Klonoa 1 and Klonoa 2. For those games she did mostly a bunch of real weird tracks with odd time and warpy synth design, but what does she do when she’s responsible for all of a game’s music herself? Well, she still does a bunch of real weird tracks with odd time and warpy synth design, because that’s how she likes to write music. Which is why she’s one of my favorite Namco composers.
As cool as it would be, though, it’s not just an entire soundtrack of short atonal tension loops; there’s quite a bit of more normal music of a pretty or jazzy bent in there so as not to scare off the non-weirdos. The tracks are mostly all pretty short and the audio programming and arrangements are on the simpler side, but there’s a lot of weird character in the compositions and it’s fun hearing chiptune precursors to the sound design she’d deploy in her full-production work.
There are apparently four extra tracks hidden in the game data that aren’t present in the sound test; I don’t remember hearing any of them when I played the game so it seems like they’re unused. Two of them are just plain drum tracks that might’ve just been audio engine test tracks or something, but the other two are both pretty cool jazzy pieces, naturally both in odd time.
Recommended tracks:
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“The Paris World’s Fair” is a slightly bumbling, old-timey jazz piece with a nice transposing section in the second half
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“The Cave” is a pure Shibano tension loop
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“Heart-pounding Journey” is a cute and chill jazzy track in 7/8
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“The Royal Family Tomb” is soothing music for the final area of the game, after all the danger is gone
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“Unknown Track 4” is the fusiony-est track in the game
(track titles are unofficial translations from the fan translation)
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