Game info: MobyGames
Listening: soundtrack album, extracted audio (most tracks shortened)
Info
A-Train, or A-Ressha de Ikou in Japanese, is the flagship railroad simulator series by developer Artdink, who’s made a lot of completely random and weird stuff over the years, like No One Can Stop Mr. Domino!, NOTAM of Wind, and Tail of the Sun (all of which have cool soundtracks). These days they mostly do licensed games and development support for other companies, while occasionally tossing out new train games. I hadn’t listened to any of the A-Train soundtracks before their latest one in 2021, A-Train: All Aboard! Tourism, which I checked out because excellent Basiscape composer Mitsuhiro Kaneda was involved. Except he only wrote the theme song, oops! It turns out that in addition to having new music, that game reuses a bunch of music from previous games in the series, and there’s some interesting stuff in that history. Most of the reused tracks I liked came from A-Train 6, so I finally got around to checking out the whole thing.
The soundtrack covers a few different genres like orchestral for the menus and cutscenes and bluesier tunes with harmonica and guitar for the rural areas, but most of the soundtrack is fusiony or funky jazz, with the daytime tracks generally being more toe-tapping and the nighttime tracks more chill or contemplative. It’s pretty good! The ensembles are mostly piano, synthesizers, bass, and drums, with some tracks featuring guitar and brass. There are fun jams and fun chords and one track with fun breakbeats in it because it’s a 2000 video game and you can’t have a 2000 video game without breakbeats in it at least once.
The composer of the vast majority of the soundtrack was Osamu Yoshida, a jazz pianist (figures) who worked at Artdink for a few years and is now part of the Latin jazz duo Club De Bonco with trombonist Mieko Ichijima. Three tracks were composed by two other Artdink staffers, Masami Ozawa and Daisuke Nakakaze. I’m not particularly familiar with any of the composers beyond this game, but all three of them worked on Zeus II: Carnage Heart (not to be confused with Zeus: Carnage Heart Second, which is a different game) along with Ryuji Nishida, and that game has some good music in it too.
For some reason, the in-game versions of many tracks are shortened from the full versions that appear on the soundtrack albums, some just fading out a little early and some missing whole minutes of music. Sometimes the releases of selected tracks on later compilation albums are also the shortened versions. Dunno why, it’s a bummer! The original 2000 soundtrack album is the only place to get the full tracks, and it’s pretty rare and mostly not uploaded anywhere.
Recommended tracks:
All selections composed by Osamu Yoshida, except where noted.
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“Another Moon (Rural: Night)” (Ozawa) is a pretty, modern-feeling piano solo with transposing chords; the in-game version of this egregiously starts a whole minute and twenty-seven seconds into the piece and is only a minute long
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“Morning Wind (Residential: Morning)” is some breezy fusion
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“On Line (Industrial: Daytime)” is that obligatory track with the breakbeats in it
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“Python (Industrial: Night)” is dark and funky with some chunky bass
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“Sandwich Shop on Park Avenue (Urban: Daytime)” was probably my favorite of the fusion tracks harmonically
(track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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