Game info: Steam
Listening: Steam
Info
I never ended up mentioning this on the blog, but last year one of the most unhinged Nintendo composers, Ryo Nagamatsu, left to go freelance. A lot of the music he wrote for the company was fairly normal, but he was also solely responsible for among other things the baffling electroacoustic avant-prog music for Salmon Run in Splatoon 2 and Splatoon 3, firmly cementing his place in my brain forever as someone whose music I will always listen to without exception.
Well, his first game soundtrack released since leaving the company came out, so I had to without exception listen to it. Technically this isn’t his first game period, since he’s one of the composers for TRIBE NINE (with Masafumi Takada), and that apparently had an open beta a few months ago, but this is the first game with a full release. And it’s, inarguably a video game that exists. It’s definitely impossible to exist more than this game exists.
The Strongest TOFU is a very short, shitposty platforming game by solo dev TomozoP (operating as Zounoashi Games) where you control a block of tofu and do typical tofu things like escape a collapsing tower while a gorilla in sunglasses dances in the foreground and defeat a bowl of miso soup in outer space, occasionally interspersed with real life footage of someone making tofu from beans to block (shot by Nagamatsu! He does video work too). What kind of music do you write for such a project? After thinking about it for a while, Nagamatsu decided to stop thinking about it and just roll with it and see what fell out, and a couple of the ideas that fell out were that “the texture should be like tofu, square but softer than you’d expect” and “it should be like your old family home.”
No, I don’t know what any of that means either. It’s not the first time he’s made an incomprehensible comparison.
The way he interpreted the “family home” part is pretty straightforward, thankfully: he used retro sounds. While there are a few full production orchestral tracks, most of the soundtrack uses SNES-ish sounds pretty heavily, though he didn’t bother restricting himself to hardware accuracy, so you’ll occasionally hear some instruments that stand out, like airhorns and extremely bitcrushed vocals. Both of those appear in the same song, by the way. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.
The orchestral tracks are fairly normal compositions, but the rest of the soundtrack, well, it’s unhinged Nagamatsu doing a bunch of goof-ass nonsense without a corporate sound director acting as a filter. So sometimes you get airhorns and extremely bitcrushed vocals (continue not worrying about it), sometimes you get a prog boss theme or cave theme straight out of an SNES JRPG, sometimes you get dollar store Drakengard, and sometimes you get Clown Core. It’s all very funny, and also legitimately enjoyable musically a lot of the time because Nagamatsu is a sick composer. Maybe also a sick composer in a different sense, but definitely a sick composer.
Recommended tracks:
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“A-GE A-GE!!” is the track with airhorns and extremely bitcrushed vocals (this features the only pitched airhorn part I have ever heard in a piece of music to date)
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“The song was abrasive against the X button that looks towf when you try to eat the boss, and faithfully followed the miso soup approval process that says grains of rice in the bowl.” is the track that’s a prog boss theme straight out of an SNES JRPG (the electrical zappy synth at the start is pretty fun)
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“They say beans soak and soak, but it’s hard to imagine.” is the track that’s a cave theme straight out of an SNES JRPG (I appreciate it getting a little spicy at 0:46)
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“Anarchism” is the track that’s dollar store Drakengard (the keyboard smashing at 0:59 leading into completely normal orchestra music sends me every time)
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“Tofu Crusade” is the track that’s Clown Core (maybe a better way to describe this is a cheap avant-jazz IDM remix of the infamous mansion basement theme from Resident Evil Director’s Cut Dual Shock ver.)
(track titles are official translations, don’t blame me I’m not the one who used DeepL)
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