Game info: website
Listening: Steam (very incomplete), YouTube (missing a lot of jingles and some miscellaneous BGM), extracted audio
Info
I skimmed through this soundtrack a little a few months ago and wasn’t super excited by it, so I wasn’t planning on doing a full listen, but then I listened to Another Code: R and suddenly got interested in both of the composers here and not just CHAMY.Ishi, so I figured I might as well give this thing a spin. And it’s not too bad, several tracks get a bit more interesting past the first fifteen seconds and there’s some unreleased music that’s pretty cool.
This is the first game with audio by COLIBRI Inc., a company formed in 2022 by staff from longtime audio company T’s MUSIC. It’s a 3D action platformer with that general kinda Goemon vibe of being a goofy, lighthearted adventure steeped in Japanese mythology and mixed with a bunch of random nonsense like giant robot fights. While the game only credits Satoshi Okubo as a composer, some of the music has been released on two different albums (a compilation album with two tracks and a soundtrack selection with fifteen), and both of those credit both Okubo and the sound director CHAMY.Ishi with music.
Naturally, the soundtrack is pretty heavy on Japanese instrumentation, particularly shamisen, flutes, and percussion. Some tracks play the “Japanese traditional music” angle straight, while others fuse the instrumentation with other styles like dance music, jazz, ska, orchestra, and so on. Pretty much the standard approach to a game with this kind of aesthetic, I think. Tonally it’s mostly pretty upbeat and colorful action adventure music, it’ll put a smile on your face and get your toes tapping.
I don’t remember if I mentioned this at some point during my Dynasty Warriors and adjacent listens, but Japanese instrumental fusion soundtracks like this tend to not land with me more often than they do because a lot of the time I end up not finding them super interesting compositionally, probably because the wacky kind of shit I like just isn’t really a part of traditional Japanese music. And that’s the case with a lot of this soundtrack for me, it fits the vibe but I find it a bit bland a lot of the time. There are a few tracks with some nice chord changes in them, though, as well as several more electronic, ambient, or jazzy tracks that I really like.
A fifteen-track album of selected music from the game was released on Steam, but the game has over twice that much music, so a lot of it is unreleased. There’s a YouTube playlist that’s more complete, but it’s still missing a few tracks from the game files that I’m not sure about the context of—cutscene and miscellaneous mid-stage music, or unused stuff maybe? The unreleased tracks tend to get further afield stylistically than the ones actually on the album, so most of my favorites are from those.
Recommended tracks:
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“Bunbuku Lobby” gets funky with it
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“Covert Operation” is some slinky crime jazz
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“Mayuge GP” is some synthy racing music with a bit of anime flair to the melody
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“Sensou” was one of my faves of the traditional Japanese instrumentation tracks, because it gets good with the chords
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SD_BGM_Doukutu01 is another sneaky theme, this time with some nice synth design
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SD_BGM_TEST01 #213 starts off with some sick mallet runs
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SD_BGM06 is the other traditional Japanese instrumentation track I really liked, in this case because of the sudden synth chord section out of nowhere at 0:43
(track titles besides “Covert Operation” are unofficial or taken from the filenames)
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