Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: physical album (w/music info), iTunes/Apple Music

Info

Time for a fantasy tactics RPG! This one’s mostly by the good folks at Basiscape, with a few contributions by Denys Fontanarosa, a French composer who’s one of the founders of VGM label Wayô Records. This game was in development for quite a while so it features a few tracks by someone who’s since left Basiscape, Rikako Watanabe. (Another of the composers, Yoshimi Kudo, has also left the company since the release, which is a sad time.)

Unicorn Overlord has a fairly traditional-ish fantasy RPG soundtrack: primarily orchestra, with some occasional incorporation of folkier instruments to evoke that medieval feeling. The lead composer was Mitsuhiro Kaneda, doing about half the soundtrack himself, which is exactly the outcome I was hoping for when it was announced he was the sound director because he’s my favorite. He slips really energizing rhythms and chords into everything he writes and that’s pretty consistently on display here, so I like a lot of this soundtrack, though if you’re not generally a fan of this kind of music then I think it probably doesn’t really step outside of that box enough to convert you. Kudo’s and Watanabe’s tracks are also really quite nice, particularly Kudo’s slightly proggier battle themes and Watanabe’s delicate textural themes.

This was my first major exposure to Basiscape’s two newest composers: Toki Takeda, who initially worked on human-computer interaction at an IT company before realizing that game music is interestingly related to that and she really wanted to get in on it, and Richter, an Italian guy with a classical orchestral education who went on to get into the electronic music industry and now works at Basiscape for some reason. Their music is fine. It’s classically-informed and orchestrated fine and I don’t hate any of it, but I found it all to be less harmonically, rhythmically, and texturally interesting than the stuff by Kaneda, Kudo, and Watanabe. Denys Fontanarosa is also completely new to me and his tracks weren’t bad either, I’d say I liked them somewhere in between the newer Basiscapers and the older Basiscapers.

Recommended tracks:

  • Farde Mal Diavolo -Destroy Evil, then Come-” (Kaneda, vo. Eureka Republic) is a theme with vocals in a made-up language for the prologue battle and features the complete Mitsuhiro Kaneda harmonic experience

  • Secret Manoeuvre” (Takeda) is a sneaky theme that feels a little evocative of Hitoshi Sakimoto’s more atmospheric music

  • Battlefield ‘The Dark Place’” (Kudo) has a really cool mallet percussion part through most of it

  • Cornia -The Priestess, Abducted-” (Kaneda) has this dramatic syncopated part at 1:21 that sounds like the track is slowing down if I’m not paying close attention

  • Quarry” (Kaneda) is a quirky theme that starts changing time signatures at 0:35

  • Elheim Stage” (Watanabe) has a nice short funky bit at 1:39 right before it loops

  • Bastorias -A Fleeting Dream-” (Kudo) is very Kudo orchestral prog

  • Evil” (Richter) is a traditionally spooky theme

  • Rite of Covenant” (Fontanarosa) is some pretty “fantasy scene” music

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