Game info: GameFAQs
Listening: extracted audio, YouTube
Credits
Music Composer: Naoyoshi Yamamoto
Info
Well here’s a kid-friendly RC helicopter sim game for the Nintendo Wii home entertainment gaming console. It was developed by Sonic Powered, a fairly obscure developer that mostly makes sim games, particularly air traffic controller (I am an Air Traffic Controller: Airport Hero series) and train driver (Japanese Train Sim series) sims, but they occasionally do other games too, like that ActRaiser remake that came out a few years ago. I covered one of their random other games a few years ago, the Vita golf-ish game @field.
Judging by the credits that have been cataloged online, Sonic Powered seems to have had four main in-house sound staff: Shuji Ishiguro, Tadashi Okada, Yuya Ogawa, and Naoyoshi Yamamoto. None of them seems to have a musical presence under those names outside of the company, and most Sonic Powered games credit some combination of three of them together for sound or music, so it’s difficult to figure out anything about them. This game is a solo work for one of them, though! So that’s a reason I’m checking this out.
This soundtrack does have some similarities to @field’s; I guess they decided that an occasionally cutesy electronic style would work for an RC helicopter game too, and you know what, they were right. It’s a little more varied in both the electronic styles and non-electronic influences, like of course the music for the Japanese House map has shamisen in it, though if you listen to both back to back, you’ll find the occasional commonality in the slightly sparser production and jazzy harmonies. It also reaches a little deeper into the instrumentation and electronic production bags, pulling out some different synths, chiptune noises, and instrumental chopping to mix things up even in the more purely synth/electronic tracks.
This is another reasonably solid soundtrack by this dev! There were only a couple of tracks that I really liked, though most of the other tracks in the game had at least one part I enjoyed. Maybe I should look into their music more deeply.
Recommended tracks:
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“Title Screen” is the most anime track in the game by a country mile
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“Mission Select / Multiplayer Menu / Options” is the most GNOSIA track I’ve ever heard in a game that’s not GNOSIA; weird coincidence that I chose to listen to this right after an original album by that game’s mysterious composer, anyway moving on
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“Hamburger Shop” is easily the best track in the game, gimme that jazz fusion and time signatures
(track titles are unofficial)
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