Music info: VGMdb
Info
The final OLD GAME☆Maniacs album (released at the same time as R-TYP30) broke the trend of the rest: instead of covering an arcade shmup series, it was dedicated to a console RPG series. Way before we had Phantasy Star Online music to obsess over, there was just Phantasy Star back on the SMS, composed by Tokuhiko Uwabo. The original soundtrack of it and its Genesis sequel (also by Uwabo) are fairly simple and melodic, generally pretty peppy and easygoing, and the arrangement approach of this album embraces that with a straightfoward, synthy style similar to what we saw on the Gradius album.
That includes the tracks by Kousuke Matsuoka! There are a few moments here of the cool sound production we saw on the R-Type album, but for the most part this is easily the most normal OLD GAME☆Maniacs album.
… which naturally means that this is my least favorite OLD GAME☆Maniacs album, haha. While I liked the arrangements just a touch more than I did on the earlier Gradius album, largely because they’re longer and more developed, they don’t really have either my favorite parts of eki’s style or super interesting source material to fall back on. It’s pleasant enough, just not exciting to me personally.
So that wraps up my planned eki posting! We made it through all the game soundtracks and arrange albums he worked on that I could track down, though as I mentioned at the start of this series, he doesn’t publicly maintain a comprehensive works list, so I can’t be sure there’s not more secret music out there. If I end up running across more, you can be sure I’ll post about it, because my conclusion is that the guy is pretty dang cool! Guy likes freak prog shit and later grew into some cool electronic sound design, and I for sure love both of those things.
Recommended tracks:
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“Motavia” (くろうま, orig. from Phantasy Star) is funny to me because it’s a strings and brass arrangement that stands completely apart from everything else on the album, except it’s not Matsuoka’s fault this time; the partwriting isn’t as good as eki’s orchestration, but I think the source material does work well in this style
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“Phantasy Sprite” (Matsuoka, orig. from Phantasy Star II) is mostly just a bunch of synthesizer soloing, so that’s fun
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“The Place of Death” (Matsuoka, orig. from Phantasy Star II) is the weirdest and proggiest arrangement on the album, so of course it’s my favorite
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