Music info: VGMdb
Info
Moving ahead to 1986 and the shmup series that started that year: Darius! From this point on, Kousuke Matsuoka was responsible for the vast majority of OLD GAME☆Maniacs arrangements, with each album only having one or two tracks contributed by someone else.
This album covers a bunch of tracks from the first two Darius games, both originally composed by Hisayoshi Ogura. These soundtracks are a bit more stylistically diverse and strange than the early Gradius games we saw last post, particularly Darius II, being less melodically uplifting and featuring more elements of jazz, ambient music, and dark, bizarre nonsense. Matsuoka’s arrangements are correspondingly a bit more diverse, mostly forgoing rock of any type in favor of jazz, orchestral, and tense electronica, though like his arrangements on the Gradius album they stick to a lot of the original partwriting rather than departing super far from the originals structurally. I think I liked these slightly less than than the Gradius arrangements, mostly because I like the original tracks and their weird sound more and I thought these had a little less to offer me over the originals; of the arrangements, I definitely liked the boss remixes and their darker, more chaotic sound more.
It is perhaps worth noting that Matsuoka’s arrangement of “MAIN THEME – CHAOS” includes voice clips of a Hitler speech for some reason. Y’all ever be listening to a Darius arrange album and randomly get Hitler-rolled, or is that just me? Maybe it’s just me.
The two non-Matsuoka tracks on this album were done by returning arranger Akiaajyu, and they’re in the same synthy style they deployed on the Gradius album. Even though they picked two of the more melodic tracks from Darius II, I don’t think these covers were entirely as successful, which in part stems just from the inherent weirdness of the original pieces.
Recommended tracks:
All selections arranged by Kousuke Matsuoka.
-
“CAPTAIN NEO” (orig. from Darius) is one of the jazz tracks
-
“THE SEA” (orig. from Darius) adds in some odd time at 1:16 that I think fits the original composition pretty well
-
“BOSS SCENE 4” (orig. from Darius) was the most chaotic of the boss arrangements
-
“Planet Blue [Earth Scene]” (orig. from Darius II) deploys some plucky strings and a wind lead, neither of which I was expecting, but they work
Leave a Reply