Alterna Citizen Program M-00: Init (System Noise)

Game info: download page
Listening: Nicovideo (single video), extracted audio

Credits

Music Compose: QMA (Koichi Kyuma)
Music Compose Assistance: Ruriko Azuma, Yamamo (Yukiko Yamamoto), KEN, 100W

Here are all the MIDIs from the game split into two lists, new tracks and ones reused from the first Mackle Story, along with the composer and track title from the metadata when available. Track titles ending with “(仮)” come from the MIDIs but are placeholder titles that were likely intended to be replaced later.

Info

In 2002, in between the original and remake versions of Mackle Story, Yamu released a sequel. Mackle Story 2 reuses a few tracks from the first game, but the majority of it is new compositions, the majority of which were written by top-billed composer Koichi Kyuma. His music is fairly similar to that of the first game, though a little less orchestral and a little more keyboard instrument-heavy. A few of his pieces for this game got more into the Dragon Quest zone than they did in the first game, which was fun to see, though other tracks of his and the other composers still definitely draw from other RPG series music archetypes. His music doesn’t really get as weird here as it did for Mackle Story 1, so I didn’t enjoy it quite as much, but there are still some nice bits of writing here and there.

I’m of course not privy to internal details about the game’s production, but based on the timeline, my guess is that Kyuma was hired by Nintendo during development and ended up being logistically or contractually unable to finish the soundtrack, which is why four other people assisted. There are six tracks without Kyuma’s name in the metadata; four of them can be attributed to either Yukiko Yamamoto or Ruriko Azuma, so presumably the other two composers (KEN and 100W) did one apiece of the remaining two. The text on one of the help pages could suggest that some or all of these pieces may have been pre-existing and not specifically written for the game, but I couldn’t verify it either way. I mostly liked all these tracks a little less than HIDE’s contributions to the first game, mostly in that their arrangement/orchestration tended to be a touch simpler.

Of the four other composers, the most noteworthy is Yukiko Yamamoto, who began participating as an arranger and vocalist in fan arrange albums for Square games under the name Yamamo in the early 2000s. In 2006 she got hired by BANDAI NAMCO, where as a composer she mainly worked on the Taiko no Tatsujin series before going freelance in 2014. Since then she’s done a couple of other games but most of her music output has been original, a lot of it being Celtic folkish or otherwise hitting the world music/easy listening checkboxes. That’s probably not a super surprising development, given one of her tracks here for Mackle Story 2 is a mystical-sounding cave theme featuring dulcimer and chorus vocals.

I just want to pause here for a sec and let it soak in that this random shareware RPG from 2002 features pre-professional music from both a Nintendo sound team member and a Bandai Namco sound team member.

The other composer of the four who didn’t apparently vanish from the internet a few years later is Ruriko Azuma, who’s now a streamer with more than five times the hunter rank in Monster Hunter Wilds that I do, so that’s cool I guess. Since the 2000s she’s prided herself on being a female metal composer, and she still posts tracks on her YouTube channel that sound like 2000s Japanese doujin HR/HM, which makes it a little funny that one of her two pieces is extremely not metal but rather a calm, folk-ish ruins piece that wouldn’t be out of place in a western medieval RPG or something. Her other piece is faster and has electric guitar chugs in it though.

Recommended tracks:

• “Battle 1” (Kyuma) has a nice descending flourish sequence at 0:58

• “Dungeon 1” (Kyuma) is very plucky and the piece that reminds me the most of Koichi Sugiyama’s Dragon Quest music

• “Sea of Trees” (Kyuma) is in 11/8 and has some quirky percussion writing

• “Glacial Cavern” (Yamamoto) is my favorite track by a non-Kyuma composer, naturally it’s the one with a pseudo-polymetric mallet figure in it

• “A Distant Memory” (Azuma) has some honestly pretty decent countermelodic writing from 0:26 to 1:01, nothing super fancy but it feels nice

• “Town Theme” (Kyuma) has some subtle but nicely-written string and wind accompaniment

(track titles are unofficial translations by me)