Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (discs 1~4), extracted audio)
Credits
BGM: Minako Adachi, Go Ichinose, Hiromitsu Maeba, Teruo Taniguchi, Hitomi Sato, Toby Fox, Yuri Habuka
Theme song: Ed Sheeran, Steve Mac, Johnny McDaid
Info
Now for this one, which I sort of forgot to ever actually listen to. Oops! Scarlet & Violet take place in fake Spain, so the signature instrument this time is some classical guitar in the occasional track. Other than that and the tracks by Teruo Taniguchi, the rest of the soundtrack has a pretty standard Pokémon sound. I never listened to this one because I got a pretty bad impression from some of the initial tracks I listened to, but it’s not that bad. I think it’s just that for me it’s really polarized between tracks I love and tracks I could do without, even moreso than Sword & Shield were. It still has Go Ichinose writing ludicrous battle themes and Hitomi Sato being weird so I can’t complain that much about it.
Toby Fox has a bigger presence in this soundtrack than he did on Sword & Shield, even though he’s only made three tracks himself (all battle themes). The difference is that he also wrote a couple of themes that ended up being arranged a bunch of times across the soundtrack by the other composers, the ones for the south provinces and Area Zero. I really liked Ichinose’s arrangements of his Area Zero theme in particular.
Teruo Taniguchi is a longtime composer with Shinji Hosoe’s company SuperSweep who has made small contributions to a couple of random previous Pokémon games for some reason. This time he got to flex a bit more with most of the music for an enemy trainer group, and his tracks stand apart with a mix of electric guitar shredding and some EDM leads which eventually escalate into hardstyle for the leader’s battle theme.
For this game they also decided to hire Yuri Habuka, a composer of mainly film and live action TV, to arrange the game’s title theme. I would assume the reason she got involved is that she wrote most of the BGM for the animated web series Pokétoon, her episodes of which aired in 2021. It’s an orchestral marchy version of the main Pokémon theme, nothing too out of the ordinary.
Recommended tracks:
-
“Battle in the Cave” (Maeba) adds tense strings and big percussion on top of the chill piano & synths area theme
-
“Battle! (Wild Pokémon in the South)” (Adachi, orig. Fox) is a sick slap bass solo with a little bit of mariachi-esque trumpet thrown in there to remind you that this is fake Spain
-
“Professor Sada / Professor Turo” (Adachi) sounds like a computer
-
“Battle! (Titan Pokémon)” (Ichinose) is a ludicrous battle theme
-
“Snow Slope Run” (Sato) is cutesy racing minigame music
-
“Pokémon League” (Sato, orig. Junichi Masuda) has nice chords and a bunch of cool random chiming thrown in there
-
“Battle! (Director Clavell)” (Maeba, orig. Fox) has a great weird bit from 0:16 to 0:29
-
“Area Zero” (Ichinose, orig. Fox) is instrumentally pretty unusual for Pokémon, really really cool atmosphere
(track titles are unofficial translations from Bulbapedia)
Leave a Reply