Genso Suikogaiden Vol.2: Crystal Valley no Kettou (PS1, 2001)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (w/music info), extracted audio

Credits

BGM: Miki Higashino, Takashi Yoshida
Theme songs: Yuji Yoshino, Miki Higashino

Info

Get in losers, we’re starting a new VGM composer stalkingresearch project. We’re gonna look at Takashi Yoshida, an obscureish guy who’s been at Tecmo and later KOEI TECMO for more than 20 years now. He graduated from Kunitachi College of Music with a French horn major (not a specialty you see too often in VGM composers) and did ??? for two years before joining Konami, where he worked on a small number of projects before jumping ship to Tecmo in 2003. I’ve been familiar with one of those projects for quite a while, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, for which he did a few really good orchestral battle themes. I included one of those in the GameFAQs VGM contest guessing game since AoS made it into the contest this year, and that inspired me to finally actually look into other stuff he did. A quick skim revealed some promising material, so now I’m gonna check him out more fully!

His first work at Konami seems to have been Genso Suikogaiden Vol.2, the second of two visual novel side games in the Suikoden series that came out between the second and third main games. The game reuses a bit of music from the first Suikogaiden game, which is why its soundtrack album is only half as long. Aside from one track, all of the new BGM for this game are arrangements of music from Suikoden II; “Escape” appears to be an original composition, it certainly has nothing to do with the track of the same name from Suikoden II at least. All the reprises are noted as being originally composed by Miki Higashino, though this contradicts the original soundtrack releases in two cases, so just sloppy credits there I guess. Higashino also handled most of the arrangements herself, except three which were done by Yoshida.

Higashino’s arrangements are all pretty much identical to the original tracks, but with some slightly higher-quality instrument samples sometimes, since apparently they could splurge on memory for streamed audio in this game. I only think one of these is notably better or worse than the original: this version of “Labyrinth” has the weird chippy synth and percussion removed, which is a massive bummer to me because the original “Labyrinth” is the only track of the lot I actually liked and it’s because of those parts. The rest of her tracks are in fairly standard fantasy folk JRPG styles, nothing I found particularly interesting unfortunately.

Yoshida took more liberties with his arrangements, orchestrating them all more than the originals, which makes sense given that orchestral seems to be his dominant mode of writing, as we’ll see in future posts. These I liked a little more than Higashino’s tracks, though only just a little more. I think Yoshida’s orchestral music for Aria of Sorrow and Suikoden III is a lot cooler, but these have some decent parts to them. It also probably helps that I like the original sources that Yoshida handled more than the ones that Higashino did.

The game also has two vocal themes: an arrangement of “Barren Earth” by external musician Yuji Yoshino with a bunch of live Celtic instrumentation for the opening and a new composition by Higashino for the ending. Both feature vocals by Yumiko Takahashi, who worked at Konami at the time as a graphic designer and planner. She’s probably better known now as a vocalist through her collaborations with incredibly fantastic composer Saori Kobayashi in the band AKANE.

Recommended tracks:

  • Barren Earth (Opening Theme)” (Yuji Yoshino, vo. Yumiko Takahashi & Yoko Ueno, orig. Miki Takahashi) keeps the fun shifting phrasing of the original track while adding a bunch of instrumental shredding and AAAAHHHHHH vocals

  • Narcissist’s Theme” (Takashi Yoshida, orig. Hirofumi Taniguchi) arranges a quirky, dissonant character theme present in Suikoden II that’s actually originally from the first game into something more bombastic (but still quite quirky)

  • Escape” (Miki Higashino) is that seemingly original BGM composition that I couldn’t find in the Suikoden II soundtrack; it’s just an odd time tension loop so of course I like it

(track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)

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