Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album, extracted audio
Info
We’ve now found our way into a Warriors game for a licensed IP: The Heroic Legend of Arslan, a manga adaptation of a fantasy novel series by Yoshiki Tanaka, who also wrote Legend of the Galactic Heroes. I guess they decided that hard rock wasn’t appropriate for a medieval high fantasy series because nothing here gets close to a Dynasty Warriors level of intensity, though there’s still a good amount of electric guitar in the soundtrack and there are a few tracks that are either wholly or in part rock.
The setting of the series is based on ancient Persia, so there are a few real historical place names in the track titles, but it mostly doesn’t get into the musical traditions of the region beyond “we threw in like a sitar or something and also some wordless background vocals that sound vaguely Islamic, maybe used the Phrygian dominant scale too,” very stereotypical moves you’ll hear in VGM a lot. Aside from that, the main style of the soundtrack is more standard western orchestral with some fantasy folk elements, acoustic guitar and high winds typically. As mentioned in the last paragraph though, there is some rock influence in there too, mostly in the form of chugging rhythm guitars in an Ayako Toyoda track (she has a thing she likes!) though there are a handful of outright rock tracks in the mix.
The sound director was Masato Koike, who composed the most tracks out of anyone, including the main theme that shows up in a few different tracks; I haven’t liked his contributions to the Dynasty Warriors soundtracks I’ve listened to all that much, but his tracks here have a few nice chord changes in them, so I enjoyed them more this time. Takashi Yoshida’s job on this soundtrack was doing all seven of the game’s “event” themes and nothing else and this was probably my favorite section of music in the game, with a couple of the tracks also having some nice chord changes and also some of the non-prog Yoshida-isms I’m looking for in his orchestral music.
Recommended tracks:
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“Opening” (Koike) does that main theme thing of going through multiple different musical styles you’ll find in the soundtrack
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“Beneath the Royal Palace” (Toyoda) has some unsettling background noises in the 0:50-1:27 section that I enjoyed
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“Sindhura” (Igarashi) is the track I was listening to when I wrote the line about the Phrygian dominant scale (if this track immediately sounds to you like “Arabic” or “desert music” in the string melody, that’s why), there is some nice countermelodic writing in this I like though
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“In Secret” (Kinoshita) has kind of a spy theme jam going on at the start
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“Event: Cheerful” (Yoshida) was easily my favorite track, with some of that Yoshida counterpoint at 0:43 before taking a bit more of a classical turn at 1:03
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“Event: Clash” (Yoshida) is the jazziest track in the game
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