Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube, extracted audio
Credits
Audio Director: Ryo Koike
Sound Design: Takumi Saito, Michihiro Sato, Hiroyuki Akiyama, Makoto Hosoi, Shunichi Shigematsu
-Cinematic Team-
Music: Kuniaki Haishima
Sound Effects: Yukimura Yazawa (ALIVE Co.,Ltd.)
Sound Mixing: Kazumi Inamura
-Music-
Musical Performance: ARIGAT-ORCHESTRA (Tokyo Session), Asian Philharmonic Orchestra (Beijing Session)
Music Programming & Manipulation: Tadashi Yatabe
Orchestration & Arrangement: Sachiko Miyano
Recording & Mixing: Toru Okitsu
Music Preparation: Yoshiko Uchida
Sound Coordinator: Tsutomu Satomi
Recording Studio: AVACO CREATIVE STUDIO (Tokyo)
Mixing Studio: e-mixing (Tokyo)
Beijing Session Coordinator: Yuesong Li (Hear Heart Studio)
Translation: Yan Fung
-Sound Effects-
Sound Mixing: Hirokazu Kawamoto (ALIVE CO.,Ltd.)
Sound Design: Takashi Kaneko, Shunpei Arai, Kota Matsubara
Info
Other M is one of the three Metroid games I haven’t actually played, along with Pinball and Federation Force; the instant terrible reputation it got somewhat deprioritized it for me and I never got around to picking it up, and Wii emulation is somewhat problematic for my computer so I’ve never played it in that way. And since the composer was Kuniaki Haishima, a non-Nintendo composer I was unfamiliar with until right now, I never bothered to listen to its soundtrack either.
The Metroid series has had a bit of a space horror cinematic bent in it from the start—the original game was pretty heavily inspired by the movie Alien—and Other M is the game that tries the hardest to be a space horror flick in its plot, characters, and cinematics, so of all the games in the series, it makes a lot of sense that this is the one they got movie dude Haishima to score. This is a much more orchestral score than Forbidden Siren 2, featuring live performances in a lot of the tracks, and the orchestrations and some amount of arrangement therein were done by his primary orchestrator over the years, Sachiko Miyano.
You can divide the soundtrack up into four major parts by in-game usage, which also ends up grouping the tracks stylistically:
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The area themes are generally synthy dark ambient with some incorporation of orchestra, similar to Forbidden Siren 2 but a little less unhinged (… more hinged?) in their composition and sound design.
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The boss themes are generally in a more stock action horror orchestral style with plenty of odd time and scary stabs and wailing, often mixed with clanking metallic percussion and electronics.
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The prerendered cutscene music, which unfortunately is mixed with sound effects and voices in the movie files and so can’t really be listened to cleanly, is understandably the most “film score” section of the soundtrack with a lot of cinema-style underscoring, though there’s electronic and action music mixed in too.
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The realtime cutscene music, which tends to be synthy dark ambient like the area themes but sometimes more driving or otherwise narrative-feeling (well duh), though there are some boss theme segments and variations mixed in there too for cutscenes around boss battles.
So the end result is that this a little more normal-sounding soundtrack than Forbidden Siren 2’s, a little less strange and hostile, but I think there’s still a good amount of interesting music here; Haishima definitely had room to flex with sound design in the area themes and weird tonal shit in the boss themes and so on. This is honestly probably a top 5 Metroid soundtrack for me now, it’s pretty nice!
A really interesting and surprising thing about this soundtrack is that a lot of the composition and electronic sound production is a bit reminiscent of Dread’s soundtrack, which was done 11 years later by actual Nintendo staff. It makes me really curious about to what extent this kind of stuff was already formalized by Nintendo internally and provided to Haishima as part of a reference package… and also to what extent Sayako Doi and especially Soshi Abe might just be directly influenced by Haishima.
Recommended tracks:
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“Title” is one of a small number of series remixes in the game and I felt like I should include one, this is a more sound design-y version of the original Metroid title theme without ever getting to the main melody (good)
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“New Mission” is one of a few area themes that sound like they’re intentionally trying to use some Prime-style instrumentation, though there are still Haishima-style random noises occurring throughout
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“Bio Sphere Experimental Floor” compositionally reminds me of “Waterfall” from Super Castlevania IV with its repeated figures and chime melodic fragment that comes in at 0:50
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“Looking for Madeline Bergman” is one of the more driving cutscene tracks, feels a bit like tense VN music at times
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“Vs. Space Pirates” was the battle track that reminded me most of Metroid Dread’s boss themes
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“Sector 2 (North)” has a really nice crunchy sound in it at 0:26
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“The Burning Lava Fish” is a bit Rite of Spring-ish and I’ll always be a sucker for boss themes that crib off that
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“Vs. Desbrachian” is one of the more electronic boss themes, it feels like Drakengard but EDM
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“Staff Roll” is the one movie track that exists cleanly, it’s not a bad orchestral piece honestly
(track titles are unofficial except for “The Burning Lava Fish”)
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