Game info: website
Listening: Steam
Info
Hehe time for the funny Pókemon ripoff with exploitation and guns. This actually isn’t the first time this developer (Pocketpair) has gotten an internet game news cycle about ripping off a Nintendo game: their last released game, Craftopia, got called out for looking a whole lot like Breath of the Wild. I don’t care too much about all that and am definitely not playing either of those games; what I do care about is that they hire my dude Tatsuya Yano to do their soundtracks.
Yano is a composer who works for production company LOVE ANNEX, where he mostly does vocal composition & arrangement these days, though I discovered him back when he was a Gust employee working on the Atelier series. He’s a hit-and-miss composer for me and I find a lot of his tracks for the series to be pretty bland, but he also has a clear love of prog and jazzers like Chick Corea and Hiromi Uehara, and when he deploys that kind of stuff in his music like “Urgency” and “Impromptu” from Atelier Sophie I get all 😍😍. I can usually find a couple of tracks in everything he does that send me straight into outer space.
His soundtrack for Palworld is orchestral with piano and electronics, with some occasional electric guitar and drumkit mixed into there as well. This one is I think the most consistently cool of his Pocketpair soundtracks by a healthy margin, with rhythmic shenanigans, jazzy chords, and other prog nonsense spread across a lot of it. It seems that the game doesn’t have much, if anything, in the way of area music; I checked some videos and there was a lot of silence during exploration and building, and the music on the soundtrack all feels like either pretty active cutscene/event themes or battle themes. I liked this one a lot! Pretty easy recommendation.
Recommended tracks:
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“Fur-st Contact” has a lot of little things going at it in the start, including a couple of fun synths
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“Brutal Strike” has a bunch of cool piano and chromatic percussion lines
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“Bosses” was definitely most Atelier-battle-theme theme in the game, love the bit at 0:44 the most
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“Proto-Palworld” was one of the early trailer themes and caught my ear as obviously being by Yano before I had even checked if he was working on it; the slap bass jazz switch out of nowhere at 0:48 is still super funny
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