Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: compilation album 1 (tracks 1.01~17, missing two jingles), compilation album 2 (tracks 1.01~19), emulated audio, YouTube (missing “Fade to Consciousness” and jingles)
Info
A fourth entry in the Famicom Detective Club series just came out a couple of months ago, and I decided that since I’d never really properly listened to the soundtracks of the remakes of the first two games, I should do that first. Which means I also need to listen to the original soundtracks of those remakes as well, so here we are.
This is a text adventure game of a fairly standard sort that Japanese developers made for PCs and consoles back in the ’80s: big text window, small graphic area that changes based on location and characters, and a small, fixed action list to talk to people and move and so on. We’d call these visual novels now, and indeed VNDB has this game cataloged so you know it must be true. Nintendo made a few others of these back in the day like Shin Onigashima, but this one stands apart a bit from the rest because of its somewhat more mature storyline about a murder mystery.
The soundtrack is pretty basic: mostly pretty short tunes without excessive development or particularly complex arrangement or sound programming. It ranges in mood a little bit but for the most part is either somber or uneasy, which generally seems appropriate for a murder mystery. I didn’t really like any of it that much, but some of the moodier dark pieces that sound like they could’ve come from a horror game were alright—not surprising that I liked these tracks the most, I suppose.
The composer is only identified in the game as “Hiromi,” and as far as I can tell she’s never been properly identified beyond that. Kenji Yamamoto, one of the sound directors of the game, said in an interview in Nintendo Dream magazine that the music was handled by a woman outside of the department, but it’s not even known if she just worked elsewhere in Nintendo or if she was outsourced from beyond the company entirely.
Recommended tracks:
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“Memory of the Accident” moves a spooky melody down a series of spooky intervals, with a little bit of extremely important delay echo
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“The Missing Heir (Opening)” has my favorite chord progression in the soundtrack at 0:22 when it recaps the game’s title theme
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“Kiku’s Hand Mirror” is very slightly tricky with its rhythm (it’s just your standard 3-3-3-3-4, but very slow so it feels like an extra beat)
(track titles are translations from the music player in the Switch remake)
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