Music info: VGMdb
Info
Back to 2025 game soundtracks? Wrong, back to obscure 2000s Japanese MIDIs.
A thing Japanese hobbyist composers used to do was post MIDIs of game-inspired original compositions on their websites: fake RPG area themes, battle themes, shmup music, etc. This definitely wasn’t an exclusively Japanese thing; back on cohost I remember helping track down a MIDI from a game demo project that ended up being a Final Fantasy-inspired piece from 1998. And of course, people keep making VGM-inspired tracks to this day, posting them on YouTube, SoundCloud, and so on.
Project OMEGA, which would later rebrand as a more general music circle called CreAce, was a group of seven composers that wrote a bunch of music in the image of an imaginary RPG called OMEGA; they posted these as freely-downloadable MIDIs on the website and released recordings of a lot of them on a series of three self-published albums sold at events. Of the seven participants, only two of them seem to have gone on to continue doing audio stuff. One, Yoshiki Ara, has a pretty thick catalog of other fake game soundtracks, fan arrange albums in various styles, and some real game soundtracks. The other, Koichi Kyuma, would join Nintendo as a sound engineer and compose some unknown part of the Metroid Prime soundtrack.
So I assume my interest in OMEGA just instantly snapped into focus for some folks. As far as I know, we don’t have any confirmed pieces of music Kyuma is known to have written at Nintendo, so his pre-Nintendo MIDI works are really the only way to get a definite glimpse into the man.
The three albums are organized with a little bit of narrative flow, in that this first volume starts off with a couple of opening-coded tracks and the tracks alternate between town themes, dungeon themes, battle themes, and so on without just dumping eighteen of one kind on you in a row, although they don’t necessarily trace the complete arc of an RPG from start to finish (possibly that was never the intent, possibly they wanted to do more but never finished). The music generally has a pretty classic JRPG sound to it: strings- and winds-heavy orchestral with some extras like piano, choir, and chimes in there to evoke your standard vibes, along with rock battle themes featuring synth leads, organ, and drumkit. I have a feeling the music the music is going to be similar enough across all three albums that I should review these all at once rather than make three separate posts, but we’ll juice the post numbers a bit.
My highlight of this album was definitely Kyuma, which is what I remember from the last time I listened to this years ago; his orchestral tracks have more complex partwriting than the others’ and he messes around with unusual rhythms more (this is one reason I’m inclined to believe he wrote “Metroid Prime (Core) Battle,” since Yamamoto very rarely seems to do odd time). The tracks by the other composers are a big mixed bag for me, in that I don’t especially like a lot of them, though I definitely enjoyed them more than I did the last time I listened to this. A few other composers also got in on the “fucked up proggy battle theme” train, which in this house we love and respect, and occasionally some of their dungeon themes also include a cool tuned percussion riff or some compositional thing that caught me off guard. I found Munegon to be the composer most consistently to my taste after Kyuma, and he’s the most prolific contributor to every album, so I’m hoping I keep enjoying his pieces as we move on.
Recommended tracks:
-
“an omen of the omega” (Kyuma) starts off with some spooky noises before turning into the most serious orchestral piece on the album; 1:55 in this with the low piano part feels a little Metroid to me
-
“Stalker from Darkness” (Ikki) gets weird tonally at 0:22 and metrically at 1:10
-
“DANCE with Moon” (mi-do) has an offset vibraphone riff in the left channel and chime riff in the right channel, two for the price of one; also there are a couple of extra beats slipped into the 1:10 section
-
“Brightness edge” (Fuwaw) gets pretty hammy with the JRPG battle fiddle
-
“Forest of the Gods” (Kyuma) is mostly in 11 because why not, and also has an organ solo because why not
-
“Access to the axis” (Munegon) was easily my favorite non-Kyuma track with some nice chord changes, mechanical noises, and the whole part before the loop starting at 1:44
(“Forest of the Gods” is an unofficial translation by me)
Leave a Reply