Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (w/music info), iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon
Info
Been up to a lot of stuff in the last month and a half that’s really eaten into my focus-on-music time, as evidenced by the fact that I started writing this post two weeks ago and am only finishing it now! Unfortunately this means I won’t be able to crunch in a bunch of 2023 game soundtracks at the last minute, especially when I’m instead listening to something I’ve already listened to like ten times!
Just finished (*two weeks ago) playing 13 Sentinels, the game with one of my favorite soundtracks of 2019 and the reason I started adding honorable mention “game not released this year but I only listened to this year” music to my Cool VGM Of A Year lists. The soundtracks of this and mobile MMORPG CARAVAN STORIES were the big drivers in getting me to like the newer members of Basiscape; I didn’t have the best first impressions of Yoshimi Kudo, Azusa Chiba, and Kazuki Higashihara from their early works, but they’re all in fact capable of producing some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life. Always a pleasure to listen to a Basiscape video game original soundtrack.
13 Sentinels is divided into two separate modes which can largely be played independently of each other, though there are progress gates in each that require you to have reached certain points in the other mode, so you have to keep them balanced. Remembrance is the main story mode, where you control one of 13 high schoolers running around various places in a Japanese city, mostly talking to people while occasionally interacting with objects. Destruction is the battle mode, where you choose 6 of those kids to get into mechs and defend a computer terminal from a horde of giant robots in strategy battles by shooting them or punching them until they explode.
The bulk of the soundtrack is in Remembrance, with the pieces generally falling into the category of “plays in a specific location, possibly on a specific character’s route” or “plays during a specific event.” A lot of the music for this mode is either warm, chill acoustic-y stuff with synths mixed in or darker, more synth-heavy material, with some occasional emotional pieces or action songs or whatever the twisty sci-fi story required. It sounds like this:
Yoshimi Kudo: The visuals in 13 Sentinels greatly inspired my work. As I composed, I remember visualizing the façade of an old wooden school building lit dimly by the western sun and the nostalgic streets of the Showa era [1926-1989, the period of Japanese history corresponding to the reign of Emperor Showa], while also taking into account the science fiction elements at the core of the game’s story.
Destruction’s music are all the tracks with all caps surrounded by punctuation: the nine titles in (PARENTHESES) are normal waves, the two titles in [SQUARE BRACKETS] are boss themes (along with “Seaside Vacation” lmao), and “-{EDGE OF THE FUTURE}” is the final boss theme. Each battle theme except the last consists of an intro cutscene theme, two or three phase themes that swap in as the battle progresses, and then an ending/results theme (“-{EDGE OF THE FUTURE}” has no results). These are mostly all EDM tracks, with some orchestral and prog metal elements (Yoshimi Kudo loves Dream Theater).
Basiscape is one of the most consistently to-my-tastes sound teams out there; Sakimoto seems to have a knack of recruiting composers who have their own unique flavors but almost always have tendencies to do Weird Shit I Like, like prog nonsense or rhythmic complexity or bomb-ass chord changes. There isn’t as much of those first two things specifically as there is in other Basiscape works, but there’s still a ton of cool compositional bits and bobs mixed with a healthy amount of electronic music styles and sound design. I like this one a lot!
Recommended tracks:
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“In the Doldrums” (Rikako Watanabe) shimmers sedately like a calm lake; I really the synthetic variation starting at 1:41 in particular
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“-(ISOLEUCINE)-” (Yoshimi Kudo) starts with one of the all-time catchiest chord riffs; the weird part at 2:49 after the dubstep drop is also extremely good
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“The Sector Theorem” (Kazuki Higashihara) has a bunch of foreboding noises
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“Bright Days Ahead” (Azusa Chiba) has some cool chord movement at 0:58
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“Double Bind” (Mitsuhiro Kaneda) has this random, sinister melody that sounds like something malfunctioning
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“-(HISTIDINE)-” (Yukinori Kikuchi) is some slightly off dance music of a kind that I associate with Kikuchi in other works
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“-(TRYPTOPHAN)-” (Rikako Watanabe) might be my favorite battle track so it’s a bummer it’s exclusive to a postgame “infinite” battle mode so I never heard it in-game; this track has the highest concentration of chord changes that make me go “whoa,” deploying them like she got a bulk discount
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“-[RIBOSE]-” (Mitsuhiro Kaneda) is the least purely electronic battle track, going with a more hybrid orchestra/electronic approach like you might hear in Ace Combat or something
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“The Ones Who Were Plugged In” (Hitoshi Sakimoto) is one of a few tracks by Sakimoto where he just suddenly decided to drop some of the most stunning synth design I’ve ever heard; my highlight here is how much haunting emotion they carry into the 2:19 section
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