Game info: Nintendo Life
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube
Credits
Sound: Ryu Umemoto
Info
I just learned that Ryu Umemoto wrote a DSiWare soundtrack a couple of years before he died, so I had to check this one out immediately. Umemoto was a composer known primarily for his longtime work on adult VNs, especially ones in the ’90s for the PC-98 with FM soundtracks like YU-NO, though throughout his career he did slip in some RPGs, and pretty late in his life he finally started breaking out into action games by the developer CAVE, mostly shmups but also a platformer.
Snapdots is a puzzle game, though! It was developed by D4Enterprise, a company that Umemoto worked for for a few years as their in-house engineer in charge of recording and mastering the old game soundtracks they publish, so it makes sense that they’d tap him as a composer. It’s a remake of a GBA game called Guru Logi Champ by COMPILE; the goal is to place blocks in a grid to complete a picture by shooting them in from the outside of the grid, but blocks have to hit another block in order to attach to it (otherwise it’ll shoot out the other side of the grid), so the puzzle is figuring out a workable order to construct and maybe even deconstruct the picture to get every block in the right place. Guru Logi Champ’s audio was done by Ko Hayashi and Daisuke Nagata, though I think Snapdots’s soundtrack doesn’t remix anything from it and is all original.
The music’s pretty midlevel cutesy, not aggressively kawaii but at about the level of chipperness you’d expect for a puzzle game. Standard for the DSi download game, the music’s all sequenced; if all you’re familiar with is Umemoto’s chiptune and electronic work, you might be surprised by the more MIDI-ish instrumentation here, though he does sample some FM instruments, including his signature slap bass, so that’ll remind you who you’re listening to. I didn’t think this was especially remarkable as far as his catalog goes, but it was fun to check out.
Recommended tracks:
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“Puzzle” has some fun rapidly-panning FM mallet accompaniment
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“Clear” shows off that bass
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“Time Attack” was the track I liked the most, this is the one that gets the furthest into what he does harmonically in other works
(track titles are unofficial)
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