Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: compilation album 1 (tracks 1.18~35, missing two jingles), compilation album 2 (tracks 1.20~40), emulated audio, YouTube (tracks 36~56)
Info
For the second game, a prequel case, the team wanted the music production to be more integrated with the development, so instead of having someone from outside the department do the soundtrack again, sound director Kenji Yamamoto took over as composer. I tend to forget that Yamamoto’s career didn’t just start at Super Metroid and he’s been at Nintendo since 1987, so he worked on a handful of NES games. Like this one!
Yamamoto’s score isn’t a particularly large departure from Hiromi’s score for the first game: mostly fairly short and simple tunes that are often of a darker or somber nature to accompany a murder mystery. I’d say that this soundtrack’s tone is slightly lighter than the previous game’s, with a decrease in scary tracks and increase in more neutrally tense tracks. Yamamoto leveraged the extra FDS wavetable channel to spice up the soundtrack a lot more than the first game did, so there’s a little more instrumental variety this time around, though he was perfectly content to be subtle about it and not just blast you in the face with a wavetable lead in every track. I appreciate the sound programming, but it doesn’t quite balance out the lack of scarier tracks for me, so I liked this a little less than the predecessor.
Recommended tracks:
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“The Girl Who Stand Behind (Opening)” does a cool-sounding clash of a 3-3-2-3-3-2 and 3-3-3-3-4 rhythm at 0:19
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“The Girl of the Legend” pulses the volume of the bass, a small programming detail but I like it
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“Approaching Footsteps” has some nice sound effects in it
(track titles are translations from the music player in the Switch remake)
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