Game info: HG101
Listening: YouTube (some isolated songs + full broadcast recordings)
Credits
Music: Kenji Yamamoto
Sound Effects: Kenji Yamamoto, Masaru Tajima, 廣瀬和樹
Only the final episode lists production staff; the staff rolls of the first two parts list only the voice cast.
Info
My interest in the music of the Famicom Detective Club series is almost solely because of Takeshi Abo’s involvement, so I wasn’t originally planning on covering the third game in the series, which has not been remade and therefore doesn’t have an Abo remix soundtrack. In fact, I’m already like 2/3 of the way through the soundtrack of the fourth game! But just as a matter of course I ended up looking up some stuff about the game last night and it’s kind of a curious artifact, and I’m still thinking about it today, and what is this blog for if not posting about curious artifacts? But before we get to the music, we need to talk about Satellaview Soundlink and episodic broadcast games.
I mentioned it over a year ago, but to go into more detail, the Satellaview was a satellite modem add-on for the SNES and associated subscription service created by St.GIGA, a satellite radio company, in partnership with Nintendo. The main draw was that you could download games and save them to cartridges, but you could also do things like read digital copies of magazines and listen to satellite radio broadcasts.
The Satellaview didn’t provide any coprocessors like the Super FX for SNES games to use for additional graphical effects or computing power, but there was one part of the system that you could do interesting things with: the aforementioned satellite radio broadcasts! At specific times on certain days, St.GIGA would schedule a radio show intended to be listened to at the same time as specific downloadable game, and access to that game would be unlocked during the program. This meant that you could have full-production audio with narration and voice acting while playing an SNES game, which you could only really otherwise do at the time on CD-based systems. These Soundlink broadcasts were an hour long, which is fairly short for a video game, so games that used it were split up into sequential episodes with their own programs; as an example, BS Tantei Club: Yuki ni Kieta Kako had three parts, each broadcast a week apart.
You may have realized the structural problem inherent to the Soundlink system: if you’re broadcasting a fixed audio program to accompany the game, it’s impossible to dynamically sync this program to the player’s actions. There are two ways to deal with this: either you can say “fuck it” and just have random music and voiced events happen no matter what the player is actually doing, or you can railroad the player by automatically advancing the game to ensure whatever they’re doing is synced with what they’re hearing. The Satellaview Zelda games took the first approach, and BS Tantei Club took the second.
So the way the game works is that you have a fixed amount of time in an area in which to do investigation things, and when the game clock hits a specific time, it interrupts whatever you’re doing to move on to the next location, usually with a voiced cutscene. This approach means that the background music is always synced with your current location, but the flipside is the game mostly just plays itself, with your interactions amounting to just seeing additional text in the game beyond what the game forces you through. It’s an approach that’s definitely more fitting for a visual novel like this rather than an action game.
Soundlink programs didn’t always have new music written for them: the Zelda games reused arrangements from a couple of ’80s and ’90s arrange albums, for example. As far as I can tell, though, the music used in the three BS Tantei Club episodes are all brand new arrangements and original pieces written for them, making it one of the earliest full-production original scores for a Nintendo-developed game (I’m not necessarily sure it’s the earliest, and I’m not going to go through every prior Soundlink broadcast to verify) and definitely the earliest full-production score by Kenji Yamamoto. So it’s an intrinsically interesting thing to exist, and that’s why I’ve been thinking about it.
Unfortunately, just because it’s interesting as a historical curiosity doesn’t mean I think the soundtrack is interesting, and like Yamamoto’s other scores for the series, I didn’t particularly care for this either. It mostly has fairly run-of-the-mill ’90s CD audio production, so to an extent I actually like the sounds he got from torturing the SPC700 audio chip for the SNES remake of the second game a little more. The soundtrack is about half arrangements of old themes and half new pieces, with there being a bit of a trend of more ambient themes in the new half; the atmospheric tracks tend to be my favorites in the retro games, so I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Compositionally I think this is my favorite of the non-Abo soundtracks, which is a really low bar, but that definitely counts for something.
Due the whole nature of the audio being a satellite radio broadcast, a clean version of this soundtrack doesn’t exist, but because it’s a visual novel, it’s pretty reasonable to skim through a VHS recording of a playthrough and listen to the 10-15 themes with a bit of menuing sound effects and/or dialogue on top. The game also has some sequenced music played through the normal SNES hardware and this has all been dumped, though it’s almost all jingles. The playlist I linked at the start of this post has all the isolated music uploads on YouTube I could find and some broadcast recordings to round it out if you feel like diving into the deep end.
Recommended tracks:
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“Download” played at the start of each episode while downloading the game data and is an electronic track unlike the rest of the soundtrack; you can kinda hear a little Metroid Prime in this in the synths, choir vox, and 1:36 section
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“Police Station” is a funky piece with slap bass
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“Kusano Residence” has some sneaky-sounding hand drums in it
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“Bloody Jacket” builds up into a decent track with a panning bell ostinato (important), fretless bass (also important), and my favorite chords in the soundtrack (of course important)
(track titles are unofficial)
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