Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube
Credits
Composition/Arrangement: Masahito Miyamoto, Senbei Ito
Sound Composer: Takane Ohkubo (BEAT MANIAC)
Sound Director: Hiroko Watanabe, Takuro Azemi
Sound Program: Kazunari Mimura (TOMCAT SYSTEM)
Info
This next one is a combat sports game set in the future, where robots battle each other in a 3D room by trying to knock a ball past each other to score points, or possibly clobber each other with the ball because it’s the future and the future is extreme. We’ve got a bit of a chunkier soundtrack here in terms of both length and instrumental variety; you can definitely tell you’re listening to Virtual Boy music again with this one.
I mentioned in the first post that I’m doing this because I’m reading the book Virtual Boy Works, and in the article for this game Jeremy Parish infers from repetitiveness and unpolishedness that development of the game was rushed to get it out there while people were still buying things for the Virtual Boy, and if that’s true, I think you can sort of tell that from the soundtrack? There’s a weird kind of sloppiness to some of the music in note timing and mixing and general composition “eh?” moments that makes it sound like it needed another polish pass or two. But I don’t know anything about the composers, so maybe that’s just their style and everything sounds exactly how they wanted it to. It’s mostly pretty chipper and easygoing music, sometimes a little cute but never super cute, and sometimes a little dark but never super dark. Sometimes some future robot and combat vibes come through, although sometimes it feels a little too chill for that.
The two composers here both appear to have worked for the developer, Coconuts Japan, almost entirely on games that were only released in Japan, with Masahito Miyamoto having worked on many more games than Senbei Ito. Miyamoto seems to have disappeared in the mid-’90s, whereas Ito, who was apparently at one point a live keyboardist for singer Sachiko Kobayashi, looks to have continued on a performing career afterward. Ito is credited in the game under his real given name of 永敏 (or possibly 永俊, as given in Color Wars), but as far as I can tell he was only ever credited in kanji, so the pronunciation of his name isn’t confirmed.
Recommended tracks:
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“Map” has a nice tremolo sound at 0:07
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“Area F” starts off with some funny-sounding slides that I enjoy
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“Area G” has this really syncopated phrase in the intro at 0:03 and then again at the end of the loop at 1:14 that makes it hard to keep track of the tempo
(track titles are unofficial)
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