Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon
Credits
Composer: Chikara Aoshima
Arrangers: BIGYUKI, Kyoka, Ilpo Väisänen, Schneider TM, Stephen Molchanski, Nao Sato
Stephen Molchanski is listed in the game but not actually credited with any tracks on the soundtrack release. Not sure if the game has any unreleased music.
Info
Back with Chikara Aoshima’s second video game soundtrack, this time for a game Capcom just released a couple of months ago. Kunitsu-Gami is a tower defense game—with some action/RPG elements?—about protecting ancient Japanese villages from hordes of evil spirits drawn from Japanese mythology. Pretty cool art style, trippy and inspired by Japanese watercoloring. It’s apparently a much longer game than Shinsekai so the soundtrack album is also longer, clocking in at just under three hours.
The tone of this game seems somewhat darker than Shinsekai’s, so the music is as well; there is still some warmth in a few tracks, but the overall window of ambient music is shifted much further into the dark side. It’s even synthier than Shinsekai and a little sparser, with more drones and ominous metallic noises, and some tracks get into industrial noise horror game territory. There’s still a bit of vocals and piano incorporated here and there, as well as some Japanese instruments, particularly taiko drums. There are also a couple of prog tracks, this time in the form of progressive jazz, though since this game has more music there’s less of it as an overall percentage.
Overall it’s like, there’s still some very good sound design and composition in there, but it’s just spread out a lot more, both by doing less in the tracks and padding things out with big drums and metallic noises and so on. It’s still a good soundtrack, especially since I do like dark ambient, but it’s nowhere near as concentrated in mind-melting moments as Shinsekai.
There are also a few arrangers listed in the game, each except for one credited as the featured artist on one track on the OST. Aside from Nao Sato, who’s a Capcom employee, the others are all electronic artists living outside the U.S., mostly in Europe; Aoshima has been based in Berlin for a while, so he might actually just know all of these folks personally. These tracks tend to be a little bit more EDMy than Aoshima’s solo tracks, though they still feature similar percussion and dark noises so they don’t feel completely out of place. Certainly no more out of place than the random progressive jazz, at least! They mix things up a bit and a couple of them get pretty weird, so I appreciate them.
The soundtrack ends with four arrangements from Ōkami, an older Capcom game about Japanese mythology, because they couldn’t resist the crossover I guess. I’m not too big on that soundtrack and the arrangements don’t heavily depart from the originals, though Aoshima’s sound design turns “Theme of the Celestials” into more of a downtempo piece and I think that vibe works pretty well for it.
Recommended tracks:
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“The Frontier” is one of the less horror-coded synth ambient themes, some really pretty sounds in this one
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“The Tastes of Impurity” has some nice high-pitched clinking (piano??) that reminded me of one of my favorite tracks from Metroid Dread, the frozen Artaria theme
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“Human Dignity” reminded me a little of the sound design of Qbeh-1: The Atlas Cube, which is a pretty decent ambient soundtrack itself
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“Crawling in the Dark” (feat. Ilpo Väisänen) was my favorite of the guest artist tracks, that background synth at 1:07 is pretty weird
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“Home -Fall-” is one of several calm, piano-led “home” themes, presumably for moments of peace before everything goes to hell
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“Battle upon the Water” is one of the calmest battle themes, it’d be an incredibly chill track if not for the huge drums
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“Plague” was the first piece of music I heard by Chikara Aoshima and I was like “well alright then” at this progressive jazz monstrosity
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“The Seventh Woes Opus 1” is one of those “yeah a drummer definitely wrote this” tracks
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