Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: extracted audio, YouTube (very incomplete)
Credits
Sound Manager: Yutaka Fujishima
Composer: Riichiro Kuwabara, Takashi Yoshida
Datawork: Kouji Miyashita
-ABRIR co.,ltd-
Sound Effect: Serugenpu, Taroon
Info
Takashi Yoshida left Konami and joined Tecmo in 2003, but after that there’s a weird gap in his work history where he seemingly only worked on a single game between then and 2011 (by which point Tecmo had merged with KOEI), after which he started doing multiple games per year. No idea why! Could be he worked on things that just aren’t documented or got canceled, could be he used a fake name, could be he actually left Tecmo and rejoined later and his Facebook job history isn’t that granular. I considered not listening to this game because there’s no composer breakdown and I wasn’t super excited about the tracks I sampled, but as his first and only(??) game for Tecmo, Ltd., I figured it was worth throwing into the pile. And you know what, there were a few tracks I really enjoyed so I’m glad I did this.
This was the fifth and final numbered entry in the Monster Rancher series of monster breeding/raising games, though when they localized it in English they dropped the number and called it EVO for some reason. This is a chunkier soundtrack than I was expecting, over 100 songs and four hours of music, only about a quarter of which is uploaded to YouTube. It’s synthier and a bit lighter in tone than the previous Yoshida soundtracks, and it’s got space to explore a bit more styles as well, getting a bit deeper into jazz and bluesy stuff as well as a little bit of Asian and Arabic music (I assume for stereotypical environmental reasons). I wouldn’t say I was super impressed by the music but it’s definitely better than the initial impression I got while skimming it on YouTube, a number of tracks have some pretty good chord changes in them and there’s some decent orchestral writing here and there.
Yoshida’s co-composer on this game was Riichiro Kuwabara, who worked for Tecmo and KOEI TECMO for about a decade before going freelance(?). I haven’t heard anything by him before so I have no idea what he’s like. The vast majority of this soundtrack doesn’t sound like stuff Yoshida is known to have done at Konami, but that’s not a whole lot of music so I definitely don’t feel like I have a good grasp on his range yet beyond “Aria of Sorrow nonsensical orchestra prog” and “likes counterpoint sometimes.” Those do both pop up in a few tracks so there are some that I’d somewhat unconfidently guess are Yoshida, but maybe Kuwabara’s a really good composer too! I don’t think I’m going to hit any other games with Kuwabara music in this Yoshida dive, so we’ll never know for sure.
Recommended tracks:
-
“Town of Colno” (Yoshida?) is pretty quirky
-
“Tochika” is a calm and chill vibe with the winning combo of nice chords and fretless bass
-
“Grabad Factory” gets a bit bumpy in the rhythm when the drums come in at 1:29
-
MF5_00000021 (Yoshida?) was the only incidence of really sustained Aria of Sorrow-bosscore across an entire track
-
MF5_00000047 (Yoshida?) starts off as as a bit of a troubled-emotions RPG cutscene track before busting out the unnecessarily pretty background counterpoint at 0:33
-
MF5_0000004A (Yoshida?) is a fun little wind ensemble piece
-
MF5_000000058 is a pretty typical sad/contemplative RPG solo piano track but it’s got a few nice chord runs and a semi-Classical turn at 0:31
(track titles are a mix of unofficial titles and filenames)
Leave a Reply