Game info: HG101
Listening: YouTube, extracted audio
Credits
This game has no staff roll, so the audio staff who worked on it are unknown.
Info
Longtime fans of the blog might remember that last year I was helping curate music for a VGM guessing game, during which I wrote posts about some of the soundtracks I selected from and then saved them to my draft box until after they showed up in the game, just to make sure I didn’t accidentally spoil anyone on one of my picks. Due to life-related circumstances, it took us eight and a half months after part 3 in order to run the final part, but we finally did yesterday! So now I can unlock the last two posts from the high-security vault.
Do note that when I say “several months ago” in the next paragraph, that was from when I wrote this post in the middle of 2024.
RINNE is a weird one, one of the most obscure Falcom games and a rare one that’s not one of their original properties. I learned this game existed several months ago when I was reading about the Relics series of unsettling sci-fi body-swapping games by Bothtec for mostly Japanese PC systems; this was apparently started as another installment but, due to Bothtec collapsing financially, it was taken over by Falcom.
The soundtrack is kinda weird in comparison to Falcom’s other work at the same time, in part possibly because development of the game was so bumpy, and also in part possibly because this game is quite a bit different tonally and mechanically from Falcom’s usual offerings. It’s kinda dark (though usually not oppressively so) and sparse, sometimes mysterious and sometimes mystical and sometimes both. It mixes acoustic instruments like piano, strings, guitar, and winds with light or no percussion and a good amount of synth sounds and effects, with some occasional normal orchestral music and a few other outliers. You could classify different parts of it as new age or dark ambient. It’s quite nice, actually! It has a kind of lowkey, atmospheric JRPG vibe that I enjoy, and some consistently good chord progressions are always appreciated.
I’m not particularly familiar with the potential Falcom contributors to this soundtrack besides Wataru Ishibashi, but the people who are really deep into this stuff generally believe that the lead composer on this is Maiko Hattori, with possibly a few contributions by Ishibashi and Hayato Sonoda. The extent to which I know Hattori is that I’ve heard her tracks for Ys VI, most of which were arranged by other people, but you can definitely see some similarity in the moods and harmonic writing in stuff like “ULTRAMARINE DEEP.”
Recommended tracks:
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b03 has a spooky modulated synth in the intro that I think sounds really fun
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b10 is one of the more mystical tracks, starting off in a driving 7 before going full “SkyTown” mode at 1:35
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b20 is a relaxing theme with the nice fretless bass
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b40 is just some unsettling, dissonant piano
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b60 is mostly just a bunch of ambient noises, the subbass adds some really good texture to this one
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b72 has a bunch of mallet percussion and a synth in the intro that sounds like a cat yowling or something, both important
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bD0 is the one track that seemed to me like it’s Wataru Ishibashi, the percussion and instrumentation here are a bit different than the rest of the soundtrack and the super weird bit at 0:43 rules
(track titles are taken from the filenames)
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