Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: physical album (original release, box set), iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon, extracted audio
Info
Time for the first of several Warriors (Musou in Japanese) games that Yoshida has worked on at KOEI TECMO, originally a long-running series of historical fantasy games where you pick a Chinese warlord and then get attacked by a whole lotta dudes, whom you kill in flashy ways. They’ve also used the same mechanics to make these kinds of games for other properties, sometimes other game franchises and sometimes anime, and we’ll be looking at something in the latter category later, but first this thing.
In the distant past I’ve heard a bit of music from the Dynasty Warriors series, and my impression of it at the time was that it was largely hard rock with some occasional Chinese traditional instrumentation and that it largely did not interest me even the tiniest little bit. And the first two discs of this are largely hard rock that does not interest me even the tiniest little bit, so I guess they’ve been consistent in maintaining the series’s musical identity. A few tracks branch out a little bit, like the one with “ska” in the title that has a reggae skank and also some brass in it for like twenty seconds because those are the critical elements of ska. The vast majority of these tracks were done by either MASA or Haruki Yamada, and of those two my favorites tended to mostly be Yamada’s, which is probably just largely because he got a little math-y/prog metal-y in a way that MASA never did, and that’s a bit more to my taste.
The third disc seems to be non-battle themes and is musically quite a bit different from the first two: it’s almost all orchestral. Most of these were by Masako Otsuka, whose work on Atelier Ryza 3 I enjoyed, though I found her work here a lot less interesting; they’re all fairly somber and serious music, strings-heavy dark mood pieces, not badly written by any means but not a whole lot to most of them beyond tone-setting. Takashi Yoshida also contributed a few town themes that are a bit brighter in tone than Otsuka’s tracks; none of these are as complex as Yoshida’s gotten in other games, but there are a couple good chord changes and a little bit of counterpoint if you listen closely.
Recommended tracks:
-
“Isolation (Breaking the Enemy)” (MASA) has some fun metal syncopation in it
-
“Secret Strategy (Secrecy)” (Yamada) has the show-offingest bass in the soundtrack
-
“Withdrawal (Battle of Chibi – Wei)” (Yoshida) was one of two battle tracks Yoshida did and so of course it has the fuckiest prog rhythm of the game
-
“Confusion (Battle of Guandu – Shu)” (Yamada) has an end-of-phrase melody that shows up a few times like at 1:28 that reminds me of the start of Sagat’s theme from Street Fighter II, which is of course the best song in that game
-
“In the End of the Fight ‘Jin’ (Jin – Finale)” (Otsuka) has some pretty double wind line action going on at 1:13
-
“Village in Waterside (In the City – Water)” (Yoshida) has a real spicy ploonk at 2:00 leading to a sinister turn for eight seconds
(track titles have unofficially-translated subtitles from VGMdb)
Leave a Reply