Alterna Citizen Program M-00: Init (System Noise)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube, extracted audio

Credits

Sound Program: Kaoru Kita
Sound Director/Composition Lead: Yoshito Sekigawa
Sound Design/Sound Implementation Lead: Shiho Nishioka
Sound Effects Leads: Masanobu Matsunaga, Yuki Hisamatsu
Sound Effects: Kentaro Nakagoshi, Masato Nakamura, Kengo Hagiwara
Composition: Kazuki Komai, Fumihiro Isobe
Sound Implementation: Kiyo Tatehata, Matsuri Kinjo
Audio Edit/Score Transcription: Naoto Miyatake

Info

The remake soundtrack was lead by returning composer Yoshito Sekigawa, who’s still at INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS twenty years later, though he did leave for a few years before rejoining. He was joined by two composers from Fire Emblem Engage whose work I enjoyed: Kazuki Komai, who has nice chords and sound design, and Fumihiro Isobe, who dropped some of that good prog shit. It’s a pretty beefy soundtrack: about half (maybe a little less than half) of it are directly redone versions of nearly the entire original soundtrack that are used in the same way, and the other half is new music, a mix of original compositions and new arrangements used to pad out the variety of music in the game.

The arrangement approach is pretty similar to the soundtrack of Paper Mario: The Origami King, which makes sense since Sekigawa was the lead composer of that game too. The redone tracks all hew fairly closely to the originals in terms of composition, so if you like something the original piece does on that level, you can probably find that in the remake version too. Lots of the synths were replaced with live instrument performances, though many of the original sounds are still present in the tracks to varying extents. Lots of the tracks are also fleshed out a bit with fuller arrangements, be it more ensemble writing or just rock/metal guitar and drums added to most of the battle themes. A good amount of the tracks are also slightly extended, with an extra like 20-30 seconds added before the loop.

And the result is, well. If this was the only version that existed, I’d definitely say it’s a good soundtrack, calling it quirky cartoon rock mixed with good chords and nice synths. I like the soundtrack for Origami King, and I like this in a vacuum! But the remade tracks sticking as closely to the originals as they do is kind of a curse for me, because it means the vast majority of them don’t do anything that I can’t already get from the original soundtrack but with better sound design, so I’d rather just… listen to that instead. I also very, very dislike a number of them in a way that I don’t really dislike anything in the original Gamecube soundtrack, mostly when they added guitars to a track that I do not particularly feel needed guitars (mainly battle themes), but there are some other things that irk me, like replacing cool synths with some extremely blandly-produced “modern EDM synths.”

Also they took the tracks with layers in different tempos and made them all the same tempo??? Those remixes are not welcome in my household. The police will be called.

Alright that’s enough of being an unsatisfiable grump, there’s still a whole second half of the soundtrack to talk about! A number of the tracks are completely new compositions, but a bunch of them are new arrangements that don’t directly map onto a track is used in the original game; these are stuff like new normal battle theme arrangements for each chapter, new variations of tracks that are swapped in dynamically or as you progress, and ones just added to make the soundtrack bigger. I’m able to appreciate these more as their own thing, they pretty much feel like “more of the Origami King soundtrack” and that’s fine with me. They fit in very well with the redone tracks so if you’re not familiar with the original Gamecube soundtrack it’ll probably be hard to tell what’s new and what’s not; in fact, the tracks that stick out the most are the Gamecube tracks haha.

Recommended tracks:

Tracks marked with a ❖ are direct replacements of tracks from the original game. Unmarked tracks are original compositions or new arrangements without one-to-one analogues.

• “Wonky Knows Stuff” captures the spirit of some of the wonky cutscene tracks from the original game, though I can imagine it having more idiosyncratic sound design if it were actually from there

• ❖ “Boggly Woods” trades the emptier vibe of the original for a more maximal forest ambient sound, which I also dig

• ❖ “The Great Tree” has my favorite extension of all the remixes, with a nice new wind section in 7 at 1:06

• “Fahr Outpost (Outskirts)” is one of the tracks that I felt respected the sound design of the original piece the most, love outer space noises (not tagging this with ❖ because this is a new, slight variation with more effects; the one that would get a ❖ is this version)

• “The Cannon’s Location” is a solemn piece with some pretty good chords

• “Battle – Chapter 7” was my favorite of the new battle theme remixes that each chapter has; this one has some super JRPG chords and synths added to it

• “A Horde of Dry Bones” is your classic stab-heavy tension theme

• ❖ “An Awfully Long Time Ago…” is basically just the original track but orchestrated more fully (and very tastefully); Sekigawa is easily the best orchestrator that INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS has ever had so I’m glad he got to show off his skills in a few tracks in a way that he didn’t really in Origami King

(“Fahr Outpost (Outskirts)” has an unofficial subtitle)