Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (w/music info), extracted audio
Credits
BGM: Masato Koike, Takashi Yoshida, Ayako Toyoda, Ippo Igarashi, Kosuke Mizukami
Theme song: Chiyomaru Shikura, Johnny.k, Tsubasa Ito
Info
We’ve come to the final Takashi Yoshida soundtrack for which we have a composer breakdown. This is the fifth installment in the Warriors Orochi series, which is numbered #4 in the U.S. and #3 in Japan, and I am once again pleading you to not worry about it. This is a crossover game between the Dynasty Warriors series and the Samurai Warriors series, which is similar to DW but about Japanese warlord history instead of Chinese warlord history. This game also dips into Greek and Norse mythology for some reason??? Quite a bit of the music is either arranged from previous games in either series ("TRINITY MIX"es) or straight reused from earlier Warriors Orochi games, including much of the battle music it looks like, but there are a few original battle tracks, and a whole bunch of “camp” themes and some other menu/etc. music.
We start with the camp themes, done mostly by Kosuke Mizukami and Ippo Igarashi. These are mostly orchestral with some synths and fairly chill as to be expected. Mizukami’s are pretty good, not bad orchestration and some nice chords. Igarashi’s are a bit more straightforwardly orchestral and I found them a bit less interesting, though there’s one I really liked. Takashi Yoshida did two camp themes and of course one of them is my favorite, some of the coolest sound design I’ve ever heard from him there.
After that is the big block of TRINITY MIXes, arranged mostly by Yoshida and Ayako Toyoda, with a few original tracks by Toyoda and Masato Koike thrown in the middle. These are in standard styles for them: Yoshida’s battle tracks are orchestra+choir focused with some incorporation of guitar and electronics, and Toyoda’s are fairly electronic with lots of screaming electric guitar and some piano sometimes. As is typical, I found this part of the soundtrack a lot less enjoyable than the rest of it.
The block of reused tracks from previous Warriors Orochi games is surprisingly electronic? I haven’t heard any other soundtracks from this series, so I was expecting stuff more in line with Dynasty Warriors music, but these get even more into the realm of dance music than Toyoda does, though of course with some guitar and Chinese/Japanese instruments thrown into there too. There are a couple of tracks that I thought were kind of cool, but nothing that made me want to check out the earlier games. There are also four new compositions by Yoshida and Koike stuffed in here for the new Greek and Norse mythology content, all similar in style to the earlier block of battle themes and not the reused dancefloor ones.
So that’s it for the scheduled Yoshida-posting. There are a couple of other games I might get to at some point that Yoshida wrote music for, but as mentioned they don’t have breakdowns and like nearly everything he worked on they have multiple composers I might not actually like, so they’re not high priority. My final takeaway is that he’s a really nice composer! He pretty much always ended up writing my favorite piece of music in all of these KOEI TECMO soundtracks. I kinda wish he displayed the kinds of orchestral writing he did much more often at Konami, but his later orchestral works aren’t bad and he found some neat sound design along the way.
Recommended tracks:
-
“A GAZE OF DOUBT” (Mizukami) was my favorite of Mizukami’s orchestral tracks, very pretty string section at 1:39
-
“DOJO” (Mizukami) is the least orchestra Mizukami track, a low-key upright bass and piano jam
-
“STATE OF THE WAR” (Yoshida) is that Yoshida camp theme with the banging sound design
-
“DISTURBANCE APPROACHES” (Igarashi) was the creepiest song in the game
-
“TERPOLYMERS” (Koike) trips me up every time I start playing it because it sounds like it should be some 4/4 dance music but it’s actually 9/8
-
“ELECTRIC VORTEX” (Toyoda) starts pulling from a slightly nicer bag of chords starting at 1:44
-
“SEVERE GOD OF THE NORTH” (Yoshida) is pretty bombastic
Leave a Reply