Game info: Koei Tecmo Wiki
Listening: box set (tracks 18.23~32), iTunes/Apple Music (tracks 4.23~32), Amazon (tracks 84~93)
Info
At the tail end of 2013, a few months after the game came out, TECMO KOEI released some DLC for Dynasty Warriors 8 for “base themes,” which are cosmetic themes for your home base in the new Ambition Mode; there are five of these and in addition to graphics also provide new daytime and nighttime music. Takashi Yoshida didn’t work on the base game, but he did write the music for four of these themes, with the fifth being done by Masato Koike. These themes all came out after the original soundtrack release so the BGM wasn’t included there, but it was all later included in a 2018 mega box set and the digital releases that followed. I’m gonna use “they’re separate DLC” as an excuse to listen to just these ten tracks and not the whole soundtrack, because I have several other Dynasty Warriors soundtracks coming up that I’m not super looking forward to and I want to lessen the chances that I go insane by listening to 70 tracks I don’t want to just to listen to 5 by Yoshida.
You can probably make some pretty good guesses about what the themes are from the track titles, but in order they’re: Amusement Park (“IN THE WONDERLAND”), Military (“WARFARE”), Sci Fi (“MECHANICAL WORLD”), Tropical (“EVERLASTING SUMMER”), and Retro (“NOSTALGIA”). I wasn’t sure how stereotypical they’d get in using the usual tropes to evoke these moods, and the answer is: it depends? The Sci Fi and Tropical themes dive right into electronic music and steel drums + guitars respectively and therefore seem kinda unfitting for the franchise, the Military themes are fairly grand and dour orchestral music that definitely evoke an army, and then the last two are tonally appropriate but don’t otherwise incorporate like carnival instrumentation or chiptune sounds.
Some of the nighttime tracks are kinda pretty but I mostly wasn’t super enthused by any of the tracks here. The orchestration in the daytime Military theme was fine and it was nice seeing a side of Yoshida I haven’t yet in the electronic tracks, but there wasn’t otherwise much of the stuff I’m looking for in his music and not much else that caught my attention beyond a jazzy chord change here and there.
Recommended tracks:
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“IN THE WONDERLAND -Night-” (Koike) takes a rowdy theme played on Chinese instruments in the daytime version and gives it the ol’ calm-piano-winds-and-strings treatment
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“WARFARE -Daytime-” (Yoshida) as noted earlier I think is written fine for an imperial march kinda deal
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“MECHANICAL WORLD -Daytime-” (Yoshida) sounds like fashion game music or something and definitely not Dynasty Warriors music
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