Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube
Credits
Sound Creators: Hiromichi Furuya, Shohei Bando, Keita Hoshi, Katsunori Takahashi, Takayuki Iwabuchi
Music Composers: Shoji Tomii (JOE DOWN.), Minoru Endo (JOE DOWN.)
Info
Alright, we’re back to your regularly scheduled Virtual Boy posting. This is another game by Hudson Soft, and it draws from something else they were famous for back in the day besides Bomberman games: shmups. The 3D gimmick of this game is that there’s a foreground and a background layer, and both you and enemies can switch between them whenever. The soundtrack is, well, if you’ve been following along at home you’ll immediately notice that the sound programming here is much more basic and sparse than any of the previous 7 VB soundtracks we’ve covered, and the music doesn’t use the noise channel at all so none of the tracks have percussion. It sounds much more like an arcade game from the early to mid ’80s than anything else so far.
But despite that, it’s pretty good compositionally? I don’t remember this soundtrack being particularly great besides one track when I listened to it a few years ago, but I like quite a bit of it now. Lots of weird phrasing and unexpected rhythmic groupings, which the lack of drums make harder to grasp, as well as some interesting chord movement. A couple of tracks have definite minimalism flair. It’s pretty good! This is why I’m pretty much always willing to give soundtracks another shot, because sometimes it turns out that they’re good actually and I just wasn’t in the mood for or couldn’t appreciate what they were throwing down before.
This soundtrack was outsourced to JOEDOWN, a longtime audio company which did a good amount of work for Hudson back in the ’90s. The company was owned by Shoji Tomii, who usually had production/direction roles but was a composer here, until 2019, when it was taken over by engineer Takeshi Kawano and renamed to KawanoOnkyo, and now Tomii operates JOEDOWN as a sole proprietorship. Minoru Endo has many more composition roles than Tomii so I’d guess based on that that he did most of the soundtrack, but I don’t really know anything about either of their styles so I can’t say for sure.
Recommended tracks:
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“TITLE” is a pleasant little overture to get things going
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“STAGE 3 BGM” was the most minimalism-flavored piece in the game, this piece also makes some nice use of bends and crescendo so it’s not like the audio programming was phoned in or anything
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“STAGE 1 BOSS” has a weird angry syncopated bit at 0:33 followed by a part at 0:50 that honestly sounds like Dragon Quest music
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“STAGE 4 BOSS” was the one track I loved previously and it’s still my favorite now, weird 7/8 jazz fusion
(track titles are taken from the sound test)
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