Game info: website
Listening: Soundtrack album
Credits
BGM: Hitoshi Sakimoto
Theme song: Ruoqian Wang, Ross Casey
Info
2024 saw the return of Hitoshi Sakimoto to solo composing after a lot of years. It’s not entirely clear if something specific changed; maybe he just got a real big itch? Or maybe, since his company Basiscape has been slowly losing members over the past several years, he felt he had to step up? Who knows!
The monkey’s paw part of the bargain is that both of the games he scored last year are mobile gacha RPGs. Ah well.
The first one we’ll be listening to is Sword of Convallaria, which is a pixelly tactics RPG. It seems to take a bit of inspiration from the Ogre Battle series, so it makes sense that they got Sakimoto on it since he was one of the composers on all those games. The music’s in a pretty standard Sakimoto RPG orchestral style with a little bit of folk instrumentation here and there to check the “fantasy game” box, generally tending a bit more toward the dark and imposing side though there are plenty of calmer and more positive tracks too. It doesn’t really break the mold for him in any way, but Sakimoto’s of course a solid composer so he keeps things interesting with harmonies, nice bits of orchestration, and unexpected tonalities. Not too bad, I enjoyed this one for sure.
Recommended tracks:
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“Amidst the Battle” is a super Final Fantasy Tactics-esque throwback battle theme
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“Dark Waters” is one of the more imposing battle(?) tracks, you can tell it’s serious because it has a bunch of metallic clanking in it
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“Riding Through the Storm” starts off with some really fun string runs starting at 0:16 (along with more clanking)
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“Lost in the Fog” has a bit of a jazz sneaking music feeing to it with the vibraphone line at 0:28 and low piano riff starting at 0:40
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“Dreamscape, the Oasis” is one of the most prominently folk-leaning tracks in the soundtrack
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“Elysium Fields” is another one of those super classic Sakimoto tracks, this time of a calmer and more exploratory variety
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“Sea of Chaos” has a nice detuned chime part at 1:54
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