Game info: Gradius Fanon Wiki
Listening: YouTube (missing the game over jingle), extracted audio, Czk’s liner notes (includes unused tracks)
Credits
BGM: Czk, Kousuke Matsuoka (eki)
Sound Effects: Yuurei Kurage, Kenji Ogawa (Ro Moetsuki)
Czk says he wrote the title, stage 1, stage 1 boss rush, and stage 1 boss themes. The four remaining tracks are almost certainly all eki’s work, as Czk referenced a gameplay video that includes all of them and so had ample opportunity to claim he did them too, but the only one he explicitly denies writing is the weapon select theme.
Info
We’ve reached the last video game that Kousuke Matsuoka wrote music for that I’m aware exists and that we can listen to (he did do at least one mobile game for Alpha Secret Base that might be lost to time, Life Game), and it’s finally the one that introduced me to his music. Storm Assault is a shmup that started off as a Gradius fan game before switching partway through development to a more Gradius-inspired original game. It was originally released in 2008 with one stage, then received a version 0.2 update in 2009 with a second stage.
The original composer of the game was Czk, an electronic artist I don’t really know anything about. His tracks are inspired by shmup music like the Gradius series and Radiant Silvergun, so they’re a mix of electronic, rock, and orchestra in various proportions. They’re all pretty standard for the styles they’re in, nothing I found especially remarkable. In a blog post in which he commented on his contributions he also dug up some unused tracks, five of which he talks about (though one doesn’t have the song attached and another seems to just accidentally have the stage 1 boss theme again).
Czk left the project partway through for reasons he doesn’t clearly remember after 17 years, and it seems that afterward eki joined to finish off the soundtrack with four new tracks. They feature slightly more advanced production than the General MIDI tracks we’ve been hearing in Alpha Secret Base games, though the instrumentation is still similar. Three of them—the weapon select, stage 2 intro, and game over themes—are under a minute long and likewise I didn’t think they were anything particularly special, though the weapon select theme does have some nice tense slap bass in it.
And then—I get to say it for the last time—eki’s stage 2 theme drops in with some random prog out of nowhere. You can definitely hear in his earlier works where this came from compositionally, but this is the crown jewel of his prog nonsense, and it comes with some synthy sound production to boot.
I do have more eki works in the listening queue, but we’re gonna take a brief break here until next week probably. I finished the Outer Wilds DLC a couple of days ago and I want to listen to that soundtrack while it’s still fresh on my mind, and then on Wednesday Toby Fox releases parts 3 and 4 of the one game I need to play when it releases if I want to be able to exist in several online spaces.
Recommended tracks:
-
“Main Menu” (Czk) is in that chill, slightly ambient electronic style you might expect from a menu theme
-
“Stage 2: Awaking Ruins” (Matsuoka) I feel like I’ve said enough about already, track rules
(track titles are unofficial)
Leave a Reply