Game info: Wikipedia
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Now for another soundtrack with traditional Japanese instruments…!!
Mystery Dungeon is a long-running metaseries of older-school roguelikes by Spike Chunsoft that started on the SNES back in 1993 when they were still just Chunsoft. They make a lot of these for other companies’ properties; folks in the west are primarily familiar with the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series, but they’ve also made these for Dragon Quest (this is where they started!), Final Fantasy, Gundam, and so on. However, they also have an original subseries with their own IP: Shiren the Wanderer. It’s been 13 years since the last time they released one of these, but the sixth numbered entry came out at the start of this year, with a PC port just having come out a few days ago.
Music for the Shiren series was previously handled by Koichi Sugiyama and Hayato Matsuo, but this time they got one of the primary Pokémon Mystery Dungeon composers, Keisuke Ito, to do it. It’s a beefy one: just over five and a half hours of music, almost all done by Ito, save for one track marked with the original composer as Yasufumi Fukuda. I’m not entirely sure how that ended up happening; Fukuda has general sound credits in a couple earlier games, so maybe he slipped in a short piece or jingle and this is an arrangement of it? Or maybe he did in fact just write one song for Ito to arrange.
So anyway, five and a half hours of new Keisuke Ito music? God yes. Lower me into the vat and close the lid.
The Shiren series takes place in a fantasy version of Japan, back in the era when samurai wandered the land, and Sugiyama and Matsuo tend to be serious orchestral composers. You can add these up to figure out their broad style of music for the previous games: orchestral music mixed with some traditional Japanese instruments, with a general kind of stoic or placid nature to it to fit a lone wanderer. Ito didn’t change the formula too much from this abstract description, so you can characterize the majority of this soundtrack the same way, though the balance is much further in the direction of traditional Japanese. Every now and then he does break out of the mold a bit and drop some jazz fusion, or something with some electronics in it, or something approaching synthy ambient or whatever, but for the most part this is definitely samurai music.
That said, overall this is without a doubt a Keisuke Ito soundtrack, so much so that it feels mostly like a Pokémon Mystery Dungeon soundtrack with Japanese instruments and not a traditional Shiren soundtrack (though there are a couple of orchestral pieces that strike me as intentionally Sugiyama-esque). Which is a bit of a bummer if you’re expecting the latter, but if you want the former, then boy howdy this is the stuff right here. There are a ton of great compositions, generally because Ito puts sick chord changes into every track though there’s some other interesting stuff he does with rhythmic interplay, tasteful orchestrations, and mystical atmospheres. Tonally it’s about halfway between the two series, a little more serious than PMD but still a little more cute and quirky than Shiren with some whole tone shenanigans and other goofy stuff. Instrumentally it also incorporates bit of folk/world music feel beyond the traditional Japanese instrumentation with hand and tuned percussion and also some occasional wind soloing that gets into super new age territory.
It’s really good! Definitely recommend this one for all the Keisuke Ito enthusiasts out there.
Recommended tracks:
All selections composed & arranged by Keisuke Ito.
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“Mount Jingara Descending” starts off with a strong 3-3-3-3-2-2 rhythm and I love the super jarring chords on the 2s
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“Serpent’s Maw” is one of the more ambient tracks
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“Tunnel of Wishies” has a folky feel with acoustic guitar and double bass
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“Monster House” is the crowd-pleasing jazz fusion track that plays when you’re ambushed by 15 monsters at once
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“Cavern of Suiryu” has some huge new age vibes with the wind soloing in the first 45 seconds
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“Facing the Embodiment of Suiryu” is a big, dramatic boss theme
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“Between the Clouds” is funny, bumbling music
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“Ghost Ship” is understandably one of the darkest tracks in the game, some nice spooky sound design in this
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“Training Path of Extra Inference” is for the most part a straight orchestral piece with some nice string and wind writing
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