Game info: Steam
Listening: Bandcamp
Info
Hehe, what if I listened to one or two 2023 soundtracks at the last minute anyway, as a goof. This game is technically in early access on Steam, although apparently the work they’re doing there is just for postgame dungeons and a non-machine-translated English localization, so we can call that released enough for our purposes here.
hasu’s a musician specializing in FM, and FM’s what you get here. He’s clearly inspired by the works of other video game composers, with some pieces evoking stuff like Yuzo Koshiro’s Etrian Odyssey area and battle themes (this game is also a first-person dungeon crawler!), jazzier visual novel-ish music à la Keishi Yonao or Ryu Umemoto, and so on, but it never comes off as lazy pastiche. He’s got a nice harmonic sense too, CYBER SQUAD from a few years ago had some good chords in it already and I think there are even more good chords this time around.
A highlight for me in this soundtrack was the inclusion of two prog suites: there’s “Between God and Humanity,” a set of five related tracks spread across the album, and “Chaoschild,” a single twelve-minute track for the final boss. I wouldn’t say they get too super wild, but there are a bunch of cool moments and brutality across them.
Recommended tracks:
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“May God bless you” has a mystical vibe which I think is really helped by the interesting way the melody is harmonized
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“Into The Abyss” is a pretty smooth jam
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“Forbidden Sanctuary” reminds me at the start of Masaki Izutani’s score for Gunbird, which is a go-to for me whenever I need an immediate infusion of FM transposing chords
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“Between God and Humanity I” was my favorite of these due largely to the chords at 0:52
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“Chaoschild” is—haha, did you think I was going to let you get away without linking the twelve-minute track? Of course I wasn’t. Strap in, you’re locked in here with me now
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