Game info: vndb
Listening: soundtrack album, vocal single
Credits
BGM: Takeshi Abo
Theme song composition & arrangement: Toshimichi Isoe
Info
Alright, back to the very important work of listening to music from dating sims. Memories Off is a long-running series of romance visual novels that I have not heard a single piece of music from until now, but “it’s VGM from the current year” seems like a good reason to listen to this soundtrack! Almost all of the series’s BGM is by Takeshi Abo (with one(?) game co-composed by Katsuhiro Hayashi), and that continues here, which is of course the real reason that I’m listening to this.
After starting off with the main theme, the first half of the album switches back and forth between character themes, which are mostly upbeat, cutesy tracks with pop melodies and occasionally fusiony chords, and arrangements of those themes which are generally slower and more emotional. After that it gets a little less peppy and there’s very slightly more variety, along with a couple of classical pieces for solo piano, but for the most part there’s not a dramatic tonal shift and it continues hitting much of the same stylistic and emotional beats. Which makes sense, right, I wouldn’t expect sudden gameplay or story shifts in a VN like this, so I wouldn’t expect any sudden shifts in the soundtrack either.
The instrumentation is pretty heavy on piano or keyboard as the melodic lead, along with drums, bass, strings, and miscellaneous synths for accompaniment, fairly standard stuff for the game genre and musical styles. There are a handful of more synthetic tracks, and these were most of my favorites, as they tended to be a bit darker as well, which is my preferred mode of Abo music. As mentioned, there are some fusiony chords in the cutesy tracks though, since Abo loves those, so a lot of those tracks are still fun to listen to.
The opening and ending themes were handled by Toshimichi Isoe of ZIZZ STUDIO, whose work on vocal tracks I often find myself enjoying, though I didn’t like these two very much unfortunately. The opening theme is an energetic rock piece while the ending theme is more of a power ballad; I did like the ending theme a little more because the chord progression in the chorus isn’t too bad.
Recommended tracks:
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“Insane” is the dark ambient track in 7 that isn’t automatically my favorite track in the game for that reason shut up
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“KAZUNE” was my favorite of the heroine themes, a little chiller and less bubble gum than most of them
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“TSUBAME” was the most stylistically unusual of the heroine themes, it’s got a lot of that “JRPG town theme in 3/4” vibe to it
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“Uneventful days” is one of the funkier tracks, it’s not super funky but it do be groovin’ a little bit
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“Behind the mind” is pretty dramatic
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