Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube, extracted audio
Credits
BGM: Masafumi Takada (lead composer), Jun Fukuda, DekaDai, Tomoaki Oga, Kanon, Satoshi Iwase (instrumental arrangement for one track)
Theme song: Yuichi Ohno (composition & arrangement), Atsushi Masuda (composition)
Full credits available at VGMdb
Info
I decided I should probably listen to one of the three big Masafumi Takada games that came out this year, and I picked this one because I’d already heard a couple of tracks from it that were really good. Turns out the whole thing’s really good! This is one of my favorite soundtracks of the year now, it’s not as baffling on the regular as Shadow Labyrinth but there’s still a lot of weird in it and it’s consistently very to my tastes.
I don’t know too much about the Digimon games but this one (and the Story series in general?) looks like a pretty normal monster-collecting turn-based RPG. The lead composer was Masafumi Takada, who did the (good!) soundtracks for the previous two Digimon Story games solo, though this time he was joined by a bunch of additional composers: Jun Fukuda and DekaDai (both of whom we saw on RAIN CODE), freelance composer Tomoaki Oga, and the mysterious Kanon who does not otherwise seem to exist beyond being thanked on the RAIN CODE soundtrack album.
Takada’s previous soundtrack for Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth was almost all electronic, which makes sense given the franchise’s core concept is digital creatures, with some occasional dips into jazz or electronic rock; it doesn’t necessarily show off his maximalist “all the synths at once” sound design approach a whole lot compared to other works, but here and there you can see his tendency to throw electronica and other rando instruments in a blender just to see what happens. Time Stranger’s soundtrack is also very electronic, but it’s also less afraid to just have a straight orchestral or sad solo piano track in there, so instrumentally and stylistically it’s more varied than its immediate predecessors. (Having multiple composers is also certainly a factor for that point; the production also feels fairly different for some of the more straightforwardly rock tracks for example vs. the electronic ones.) Across the soundtrack there are a bunch of randomly good chords or unexpected tonal movements, which I generally expect from Takada works, and some of the non-electronic tracks do still include some interesting synth bits for added texture, so all in all it’s pretty nice.
Well, that’s the takeaway if you’re a normal person who reacts to music like a human would. Now, if you were me instead, what you’d notice right away is that this soundtrack has way more weird ambient shit than its immediate predecessors. It’s absolutely not mostly ambient, not even close, but there really weren’t any tracks in the “no melody, deep pads, and metallic noises” genre before and now there are several, and since I feel that all video games that exist should have at least one piece of music in this genre, this is obviously an objective improvement. There’s also some stuff that’ll make you say “excuse me, what are you doing” out loud because of distorted noises or taking an earlier piece from the soundtrack and slapping a bunch of spooky noises on top of it.
Recommended tracks:
-
“A World of Dreams” is really twinkly
-
bgm946 obscures a loungey keyboard jazz theme through a distorted haze of ambience (I didn’t immediately recognize if this is a defaced pre-existing piece or completely original)
-
“Looming Threat” starts with a nice irregular synth riff and then gets really good at 1:10
-
“Urban Warfare” is a pretty VGM-y synth rock track with some big bass
-
bgm123 has swirling noises and clanking, my favorites
-
bgm214 has electric guitar screaming in agony
-
bgm304 starts off pretty emotive and Vangelis-y before busting out the drumz at 0:44
-
“An Encounter with Deities” uses what sounds like a window breaking in the distance as percussion, I think the syncopated rhythm guitar in this is really nice too
(some tracks are referred to by their filenames because I didn’t find them when skimming through some sound test uploads with titles)
Leave a Reply