Game info: Wikipedia
Music info (w/purchase links): VGMdb
Info
A new year brings us a new Like a Dragon spinoff game with a couple of new tracks by Phantasy Star Online 2 composers, so I gotta listen to this one too. This one features a major rival character from the series getting stranded with no memories on an island near Hawaiʻi and becoming a 17th century-style pirate captain, because that’s just how Like a Dragon games work.
I described my impression of the series’s music on my last post about it as “largely aggressive action music with loud drums, angry synth noises, electric guitar, and strings,” and that’s certainly the case here as well. A couple of differences with that previous game are that this soundtrack is more vocal-heavy, largely because of chorus vocals in a bunch of tracks, and there are a couple of tracks with string writing evocative of the style of the Pirates of the Caribbean scores, which is a fairly obvious reference point.
My thoughts on this are very similar to The Man Who Erased His Name: I’m not super into most of the electronic styles here to begin with, and most of the tracks here don’t otherwise do much I find interesting to compensate for that, aside from some production here and there that I find pretty nice. Unfortunately, this soundtrack has less of the synthy ambient pieces that the last one did, which might be more appropriate for the setting, but I liked it less overall as a result. Seems like this series’s music isn’t really my kind of thing!
Recommended tracks:
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“Power Unleashed” (Kenichi Tokoi) gets kinda nice at 1:17 when the piano comes in
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“Wild Fire” (Kenji Mizuno, orig. Yuichi Kanatani) is by a SEGA composer who contributes to their rhythm games a lot and I think you can tell from this track
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“Perilous Hollow” (Ryo Fukuda) is really crunchy in a way I enjoy
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“Cut Scene:Crossroads of Fate” (Etsuko Shimada) is mostly just some real big drums with some synths, and that’s all I need honestly
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“Glacial Surge” (Hideaki Kobayashi) definitely just sounds like a PSO2 boss theme, not among my favorites in this style but it does have a couple of good chord changes hidden in there
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“The Power of Goro’s Pirates” (Mitsuharu Fukuyama, orig. Yuri Fukuda) was my favorite track with the soundtrack’s choral “whoa-oh” vocals in it
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“For Your Eyes Only” (Yasuyuki Nagata) is a super cheesy chill island theme, though the syncopation in it is pretty fun
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