Jack Bros. (VB, 1995)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube

Credits

All Sound Works by Hiroyuki Yanada

Info

Here’s a scrolling twin-stick shooter featuring characters from the Megaten franchise. The audio was done by Hiroyuki Yanada, an obscurer composer who showed up in Atlus games, Megaten spinoffs and Japanese-only arcade games no one’s ever heard of before, for a couple of years before vanishing into the void forever. Mysterious!

The art style in this game is pretty cutesy, so the soundtrack is a lot lighter in tone than you’d get in a mainline Megaten game, with some influence from oldie rock and romantic music here and there. This is definitely the best-produced Virtual Boy soundtrack that we’ve covered since Teleroboxer in terms of its instrumental programming and manipulation, though this one is a bit more interested in staying chiptuney than trying to evoke real instruments. Very video game-ass video game music.

Recommended tracks:

  • Pixie BGM” is in a sneaky time signature (15/16) disguised by all the delay echoes

  • Stage 3 BGM” is a chill groove, for a stage apparently called “Temple of Nightmare” which doesn’t seem super fitting

  • Stage 6 BGM” is the most haunted house-style spooky track in the game; the pitch and volume manipulation of the lead at the start is pretty nice

  • BGM” was my favorite battle theme, for bosses in hard mode; the title in the sound test is in fact just “BGM” which seems like a data mistake to me

(track titles are unofficial translations of the sound test by me)

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