Game info: website
Listening: iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon
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It’s an auspicious day! Today we get to listen to a new Hitoshi Sakimoto soundtrack that isn’t a gacha game, truly it’s a Christmas miracle. Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree is one of those arena combat roguelites where you get a random series of rooms where you need to kill all the enemies and when you clear the room you get a choice of rooms to pick next… do we have a name for this yet? Are we just calling them Hades-likes? Anyway it’s that kind of thing, with an ancient Japan mythology coating for the aesthetics and characters and storyline.
Half of the soundtrack is made up of area themes for nine different zones/floors/whatever they’re called, each of which have three variations that are dynamically switched between: “Stillness” for when you’re just wandering around, “Motion” for when you’re engaged in combat with normal enemies, and “Calamity” for when you’re fighting the boss. The first two of these are pretty much what you’d expect from Sakimoto writing music for a game like this: folk-inflected orchestral music, with the “Stillness” variations being more stripped down and intimate in their instrumentation. Several of these have a little bit more of a new age-y flair to them than Sakimoto’s work usually does, which is fun. I genuinely like these a good amount, they’re not the most complex orchestrations in the world but they do keep things interesting in the partwriting and harmonies; I think it’s a pretty common sentiment that modern Sakimoto doesn’t have quite the same magic as his earlier SQUARE soundtracks, though, and I expect these pieces won’t really convince the people who think so otherwise.
But the real attraction here are the “Calamity” pieces, which are all EDM corrupted versions of the area themes, drawing from both the “Motion” and “Stillness” variations in parts. These tend to be fairly weird, shattering the acoustic originals with harsh, dark electronic noises and slightly glitchy production into pieces that are alternatingly chaotic and peaceful, and I think most of them are sick as hell. One of them is going straight into my best-VGM-of-the-year list!
That’s only half the soundtrack, though. The other half, particularly a lot of the tracks following the area themes which seem to be more battle themes, are more straightforward electronic/orchestral/folk instrument fusions that sound like they were intentionally composed like that from the start, so there’s less of the “wtf” factor, but there’s still a good amount of weird in them. There are also some calmer tracks that seem to be either town or cutscene pieces, orchestral though with a little bit more of a presence of folk/Japanese instruments and quirkiness than the main gameplay loop music has; these were my least-favorite part of the soundtrack, generally I thought they were a little less interesting than the acoustic area themes, but there wasn’t anything I found objectionable and some of them were pretty nice too.
I was originally planning on giving this soundtrack just a “good” rating, but the more I listen to these tracks the more I actually really like this thing. It mixes a lot of what I like about Sakimoto’s compositions with world-y/new age-yness, good electronic sound design, and corroded nonsense, and that’s the good shit right there to be honest.
Recommended tracks:
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“Grass & Furrows – Calamity” starts off with some nice distorted sounds before trashing some delicate piano with a dance track
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“Boisterous Woods – Motion” is one of the few tracks where I do prefer the original orchestration over what the electronics have to offer
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“Mountain Ascetic – Calamity” has some sick synth work at 0:18 and 0:55, and the climax with all the erratic gated synth interjections at 1:08 rules
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“Whispers from Beyond – Stillness” was my favorite of the “Stillness” variations, mostly because of the winds writing at 1:05
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“Fight on a Prayer – Akazu” suddenly reminds me of The Thousand-Year Door in its instrumentation and composition, I’m just realizing now as I write this blurb
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“Sudden Close Encounter” is very loud noises
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“Shinju Village – A Bright Future” was my favorite of the four versions of this theme, mostly because of the cadence at 1:04 that’s not in the others
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"The Forge was one of the quirkiest themes, it’s funny
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