Game info: website (in Japanese)
Listening: YouTube, extracted audio
Credits
Music: Hisui, AMJ, Wataru Ishibashi (mirawi), M.Nakamura, Takao Suenobu
Performers for AMJ’s tracks:
Violin: Takuya Kon
Guitar: SBAL
Info
Here’s a real obscure one, a military simulation game where you manage and train a division of thousands of troops and then send them off into battles against other divisions in tournaments or an army of demons. Seems like battles mostly play themselves out automatically, and the gameplay focus of the game is more on the training and overall troop organization? It’s by GIW of StudioGIW, a solo dev who worked at a game company for a few years before going independent to make his own games for more than 20 years now (with the help of external artists and sound folks). I’m a little familiar with this dev because extremely cool guy Mitsuhiro Kaneda contributed a little bit of music to another one of his games, the tactical RPG KILLZVALD, but I’ve never really looked into his other works beyond adding soundtrack releases to VGMdb. If I had, I might’ve noticed that Wataru Ishibashi also wrote music for one of them! Shikou Shidan came out five months after he passed away, so it looks like it’s the last game he ever composed for (including his contributions to the Taiko no Tatsujin series).
GIW didn’t release a soundtrack album for this like he has for some of his games, and it doesn’t look like it has a music mode (though I don’t use Windows so I can’t tell for sure), so the only way to get at the music is to uhhhhhhhh, write a program that scans through the game’s custom data archive format and extract everything that looks like an Ogg Vorbis audio file, which are thankfully uncompressed and unencrypted. There’s very little useful metadata in any of the audio files, and I didn’t notice any obvious textual information about the music or even remnants of the files’ original filenames, so the titles and composers of most of the tracks are unknown.
Most of the soundtrack is orchestral, on the serious side of things though not especially militaristic aside from the occasional incorporation of marching percussion. For the most part I found the music rather bland, with my highlight being the block of tracks from #9 to #13; these tracks get a bit more interesting compositionally and incorporate more mallet percussion and synthy textures than the rest of the soundtrack, which make me think they’re mostly if not all by Ishibashi.
Of the other composers, I’ve never heard of three of them: AMJ, M.Nakamura, and Takao Suenobu. AMJ is specifically credited for using some live violin and guitar in his tracks, and the first three tracks all have pretty obvious violin performance in them (one of them is confirmed to be his from a video he uploaded). Suenobu wrote one piece of music, which I might guess is the last track because it’s instrumentally a bit different from the rest of the soundtrack and is a little similar to music he wrote for another StudioGIW game. M.Nakamura, I dunno???
So that leaves Hisui, a composer I know primarily through his excellent work for the Taiko no Tatsujin series, where his style tends to be synthproggy, often incorporating vocals and/or some elements of Japanese traditional music. He was responsible for the game’s theme song, and it seems pretty obvious he did tracks #7 and #8 as well because they use the same melody, have some instrumental similarities, and randomly have “Logic Pro X” in the artist tag like one of the versions of the theme song.
Recommended tracks:
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“vav@ (From a Faraway Land)” (Hisui, vo. Saori Terai) has a nice rhythmic layering bit at 2:00; the lyrics are written in a fake language made up by GIW for several of his games, so don’t try to make sense of them (I believe I’ve transcribed the title correctly in that language according to its pronunciation)
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Track 9 (Ishibashi?) is the thickest piece in the soundtrack
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Track 10 (Ishibashi?) busts out a 7/4 vs. 7/8 part briefly at 0:40
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Track 15 (Suenobu?) was my favorite track that I don’t think is by Ishibashi, it’s a little quirky and some of the chord movement is pleasant
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