Game info: website
Listening/music info: soundtrack album
Info
I’ve listened to the last two Like a Dragon/Yakuza series side game soundtracks, The Man Who Erased His Name, and Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii, because they’ve featured music by two of the three main Phantasy Star Online 2 composers. But I haven’t really thought their contributions were among their strongest work, and I mostly did not otherwise like the predominant angry electronic/rock action music style, so I was very strongly considering just skipping this latest one.
But then they went and got the third main Phantasy Star Online 2 composer, the one who happens to be my favorite:
*sigh* At some point I’ll stop falling for this, right? … right?
So anyway, this is another predominantly angry electronic/rock action music soundtrack, and the handful of contributions by Phantasy Star Online 2 composers aren’t among their strongest work. A lot of the usual suspects from inside and outside of SEGA are here, no real surprises in the composer list (and even Horita isn’t really that big of a surprise). It’s possible I’m misremembering the older soundtracks a bit because I put them out of my mind after listening to them, but this one felt a little more varied than its predecessors—not just stylistically and instrumentally (it’s definitely noir/lounge jazzier), but also emotionally in there being more happy music, particularly on the first disc. There was also a little bit of a return to more ambient themes in the cutscene music after Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii moved away from that, which is a very welcome development for me.
Yakuza’s always had vocals, but in addition to what I assume are the opening and ending themes, this soundtrack includes an entire hour-long disc for both extra songs and karaoke "Mobile Phone mix"es, which is a bit indulgent. A few of them look like they’re either completely new or new versions of older songs from the series, but there are also a bunch that look like they’re just reused directly from earlier games (my source for this is searching VGMdb for the song titles). The songs by the guys are mostly either in rock or kayoukyoku/enka styles, while the songs by the girl are in more cutesy pop. My favorite of these was probably “I Wanna Change myself,” which is straight from the original Yakuza 3 (more on that in the next paragraph); it was composed by Hideki Sakamoto and so it has a couple of randomly good chords.
This game is a combined remake of Yakuza 3 (that’s the Kiwami part) and an additional side story (that’s the Dark Ties part), so it features some “KIWAMI ver.” remixes of pieces from Yakuza 3, though it seems that most of the soundtrack is original. I didn’t listen to the original soundtrack before this, though, so I don’t know if there happen to be more remixes that are just not explicitly called out as such.
Recommended tracks:
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“Howl of the Dragon and Kirin” (Yasuyuki Nagata) is ambient with some nice distorted guitar squealing
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“Wild Scent” (Keitaro Hanada) is some solid enough electronic metal
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“Heart-Pounding” (Kenichi Tokoi) is the most active jazz track in the game
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“Start With What We Can Do…” (Hiro) is a bit insubstantial but it was my favorite of the quirky tracks
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“Cut Scene:Inside the Ride” (Yuri Fukuda) has some nice synth sounds in the first half
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“Dark Alley” (Keitaro Hanada) is by far the jazziest of Hanada’s contributions, it starts off alright but starts bringing in better and better chords from 1:10 on
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“Pride of Steel” (Hideaki Kobayashi) has the most Phantasy Star Online 2 moment at 1:01
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“Call in the Fog” (Homari Kawazu) is some sneaky noir music with some nice flute licks and synth accents
(some track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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