Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (w/music info), extracted audio
Info
It’s not in the title of the remake itself this time, but according to the name of the BGM set in-game, it’s once again time for another Boosted soundtrack! UNDER DEFEAT is an arcade shmup by G.rev from 2005 where you… play an anime Nazi pilot during World War II??? I never knew what this game was about until now, wow, alright. Well anyway, it had an HD console remake in 2012, and City Connection just remade that remake for modern console and (eventually) PC releases.
The original game has a pretty nice synthy jazz fusion soundtrack by Shinji Hosoe, with the HD version having a few new tracks by Yousuke Yasui. You may notice that I didn’t post about either of these in preparation for this new “Boosted” BGM set; that’s because it’s completely new music by Hosoe and two other folks at SuperSweep, Ayako Saso and Takahiro Eguchi. The music direction was completely different this time, as Hosoe explained in the liner notes: he said he completed his image for it with the original game, so he wasn’t sure what to do for the new music. The order he got was to theme it not for actual combat, but rather military exercises.
What the hell does that mean? Gabber. They decided to just make some hardcore music in a style they liked, and that means gabber. Hosoe himself apparently started to doubt whether this was the right approach, but he was assured (by the director, I assume) that everything was fine, and so here we are. Have you been waiting for a shmup with a Hosoe/Saso ’90s rave soundtrack? Well here it is, just for you.
I mostly don’t find this kind of hardcore music super interesting aside from the crusty, distorted sounds, though some of the later-game tracks branch out a little bit in terms of having weirder production or writing than typical music of this type would have. The soundtrack’s also bookended with more standard electronic shmuppy tracks for the select and result screens, as well as a couple of fusion tracks that are just reused directly from the original UNDER DEFEAT.
Recommended tracks:
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“Operation whiteout (Stage4)” (Saso) has a bunch of fun random sound layers at 0:36 and 0:59
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“The deviated game (Stage5)” (Eguchi) has a nice break at 0:50, would’ve been a great opportunity to drop some sick chords too but I’ll take it as-is
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“Massive armor (Boss5)” (Hosoe) is a weird progressive… downtempo… industrial??? thing, starting off with big drums before getting disassociatedly jazzy at 0:32 and then busting out a scraping metallic noise at 1:05 that spends thirty seconds erratically spiraling into the sky and crashing back down
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