Game info: website
Listening/music info: soundtrack CD
Credits
BGM: Daisuke Nagata & Ko Hayashi (k.h.d.n.)
Theme song: KushitaMine
Info
Mado Monogatari is a series of cutesy, colorful dungeon crawlers, originally first-person with fixed layouts but more recently top-down roguelikes. They typically feature young students of magic—sometimes in their teens and sometimes as young as preschool age—going through trials and stuff as part of or related to their magical education. I think only the two most recent games in the series have been officially localized in the west, including the one I’m posting about right now; the main cultural cachet the series has over here is that Puyo Puyo began as a spinoff of it, so that’s where those characters like Arle and Carbuncle originated. Nowadays SEGA owns the rights to all the original Mado Monogatari characters so they can keep putting them in the new Puyo Puyo games they keep making, so the most recent two Mado Monogatari games have featured all new characters.
The soundtrack to the latest game, Fia and the Wondrous Academy, was handled by Daisuke Nagata and Ko Hayashi, two folks who are much better known for writing EDM like techno and house and DnB for shmups than they are for working on cutesy, colorful games. That said, they started their careers working at the original developer of Mado Monogatari, COMPILE, and while there they both worked on multiple games in that and the Puyo Puyo series, so they actually did this kind of thing first!
A few months ago I ended up listening to the final boss theme while looking for the staff roll for VGMdb reasons, and it was completely insane, so I had to listen to the rest of this and see what it was like. Unfortunately, the rest was nowhere near as good as that, but it’s not bad! There’s a bunch of random stylistic and instrumental variety, so you might go from a calm harpsichord + orchestral piece straight into a synthy disco piece and be like “ah yes, I see that I am listening to a video game soundtrack.” To the extent that there’s an overall theme, a lot of the tracks could fit into the general “JRPG” umbrella with some folksier- and fantasy-sounding music. The dungeon/area and battle themes at the start of the soundtrack are generally a bit more serious sounding, saving the cuteness for the event themes that come after.
A decent number of tracks gave me the impression of like, “EDM artists straining to contain themselves while writing JRPG music.” This honestly might just be me subconsciously setting that expectation for myself because that’s what I know Nagata and Hayashi for and hyperfocusing on irrelevant details, but it felt to me like every third or fourth track would be randomly synthy or have randomly electronic percussion, just trying to sneak some elements in here and there. A lot of the tracks also have one or two surprising chord changes, nothing overwhelming or excessively fancy but nice as an occasional “ah!” moment.
The game’s theme songs are by Kiminone, a group of a vocalist (Shachi Tsumugi), violinist (Mai Ohtani), and composer/producer (KushitaMine). They’re both pretty standard pop songs with understandably more violin presence than usual; I liked the opening theme “ASOVENTURE” due to having spicier chords and a few random bits of nice electronic production.
Recommended tracks:
-
“Mage’s Tower Theme” (Nagata) sounds like it’s stylistically referencing the first floors theme from the original Mado Monogatari, “TRY OUT”
-
“Dragon’s Sanctuary Theme” (Hayashi) is an ambient grotto-y theme with mysterious-sounding chord movement
-
“Spirit Village Theme” (Nagata) is a calm, folky 6/8 track with some chippy percussion that comes in halfway through
-
“Last Boss Theme” (Nagata) is mostly likely going straight into the “best song from 2024 that I only listened to this year” slot in my end-of-year post, wtf actually is this Shadow Hearts bullshit
-
“Happy Event Theme” (Nagata) is a happy event theme, very visual novel heroine theme energy once the melody comes in
Leave a Reply