Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: individual playlist, single video
Credits
Sound Design Lead: Naoya Ishida
Sound Director: Yuhki Mori
Music Composition: Satoshi Okubo, Rei Kondoh, Haruno Ito
Music Arrangement: Satoshi Okubo, Rei Kondoh, Haruno Ito, Shoma Murata, Chihori Yamada
Sound Effects: Tomomitsu Matsushita, Janjeff Aquinde
Recording and Mixing Engineer: Motohiko Maeda
Ending Theme “To the place I call home”
Song by Jolianne Salvado
Lyrics by Era Faye Sarcon
Music & Arranged by Rei Kondoh
Violin: Tomomi Tokunaga
Recording & Mixing Engineer: Motohiko Maeda
Info
The combined remake gives the games full 3D environments that you can run around freely in, making it play a bit more like a non-point-and-click adventure game, though the core gameplay of picking things up and observing environmental clues and solving puzzles is still intact. For the remake soundtrack, almost every single piece from the first two games was rearranged save for a couple of random ones. They also added around 25 new tracks, with the majority being for the first game to flesh out its smaller soundtrack a bit.
The arrangements from the first game I’m a bit mixed about, because some of them deemphasize some of the minimalist writing and spicier harmonic choices in favor of slightly more generic synthy piano ambience, which is a little disappointing. Others more outwardly embrace the things I like about the original soundtrack but then add electronics on top, and those tracks are pretty swell. There’s some similarity in the instrumentation they used for the arrangements, but generally there’s a lot more piano and synthy electronic production.
The arrangements from the second game generally stick closer to the originals more than the ones from the first game, maybe because Satoshi Okubo was involved with both and decided to just give them a coat of modern production? A lot of them have basically the same instrumentation with maybe a little bit more electronic touches, with compositional differences mainly just being additional layers. Some of the additions to the tracks are pretty nice, amping up the minimalism in a couple of cases, and the sound design direction of this soundtrack definitely does fit the more electronic pieces from the original game, so those sound great. I think these were generally improvements over the originals more than I think the arrangements from the first game were.
The new tracks aren’t too bad, as a whole I prefer the remixes but there are a few really good original compositions in there. For the first game, they’re used in a variety of situations so they’re kinda random in style—ambient electronic, slow piano, tense, etc.—a couple of which really stand out compared to the slightly more uniform style of the remix tracks. The new tracks for the second game are more concentrated at the ending, possibly because they changed it quite a bit from the original game, and they tend to be more emotional piano and strings tracks that don’t personally grab me that much.
The audio was once again done by T’s MUSIC, with second game composer Satoshi Okubo returning in what might’ve been his last game with the company (he’s now part of a company called COLIBRI, founded with a couple of other ex-T’s MUSIC staff). Three of the other composers are newer hires I don’t know anything about, and the fifth person is Rei Kondoh, who’s worked on Ōkami and the Bayonetta and Fire Emblem series and a lot of other stuff. I’ve heard a decent amount of music by him and some of it I like a lot, but I wouldn’t say that I know his stylistic tendencies particularly well at all.
There doesn’t appear to be a complete rip of this game yet; the two YouTube links at the top of the post are for separate rips that each have a few tracks that the other doesn’t. I’m not sure if you’ll get the entire soundtrack if you listen to both, or if there are still more tracks that aren’t present in either rip.
Recommended tracks:
Tracks marked with a ❖ are new compositions for the remake and have unofficial titles. Other tracks are rearrangements and are titled per the music player in Another Code: R.
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“Everything Comes Together” is one of the more minimalist tracks from the original and feels nice and glossy in the new version
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“Uneasy Feeling” adds in some nice detuned piano ploonks in the background
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“Second Another” also adds in some piano, this time prettier material that kind of reminds me just a little of the Lost Woods theme from Breath of the Wild
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❖ “ANOTHER” is my favorite new composition, lots of good electronic noises in this one
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“Secret Regret” also has some weird detuning in it that I like
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“Unkept Promise” switches in some clarinet for extra smoothness and also extends the track a little with a piano solo
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“JC Valley Theme” is a pretty mystical theme that reminds me a little of the SkyTown theme from Metroid Prime 3, which is actually appropriate because they’re both technological places
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❖ “Forgotten Grave” is the one new track from the second game that I really liked, naturally this one is some ominous electronic ambient
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