Game info: Sega Retro
Listening: physical soundtrack (missing jingles and one track), digital soundtrack (tracks 11-30, missing jingles)
Credits
Sound Director: Hirofumi Murasaki
BGM/SE: Junko Shiratsu
SE/MA/Fight Songs: Hideaki Kobayashi
MA: Takashi Endo
Engineer: Hirokazu Akashi
Assistant Engineers: Yoshitada Miya, Sawako Sogabe, Hiroshi Sato (Power House Studio), Hiroshi Shiono (Studio Take One)
Full credits available at VGMdb.
Info
Next up is the Sakatsuku game that until recently was the only one to receive a proper soundtrack release. The first Dreamcast entry in the series has the same title in Japanese as the original game for Saturn, though it’s its own installment with a brand new soundtrack and not just a port or remake. Like the last game, the music here is again all synthesized aside from some live performances in the opening and ending themes, though it’s a little higher quality this time around, and the tracks are generally a bit longer as well. It’s still predominantly jazz fusion in the styles we’ve already heard, though it’s slightly more varied than the first two games, featuring a little bit of rock and going for one or two moods besides “action” and “chill.”
This one’s the peak of Junko Shiratsu’s soccer game scores! Occasionally the compositions get a bit more frantic/chaotic in a way they didn’t before, which I always appreciate in my jazz fusion, and in addition to the added harmonic complexity we saw in the second game, there’s a little bit of added rhythmic complexity beyond jazzy syncopation in messing around with odd time and metric modulations in a couple of places. I’m not especially knowledgeable about Shiratsu’s other works so I can’t say if she was developing into writing music like this over her career, or if she was writing music like this the whole time and just found more freedom to express it in the Sakatsuku series specifically as it went on, but either way it’s fun to see the progression.
A mostly-complete soundtrack for this game was released in 1999, crediting all of the music contained therein to Shiratsu, though it’s missing a track that was included with no composer credit in the later digital compilation release (“Unleashing”) and some jingles (some nice jazzy stingers in there again). In addition to Shiratsu, Hideaki Kobayashi is credited in the game for “fight songs” and had “music” explicitly listed as a responsibility on some old SEGA profiles. There aren’t any fight songs in the released soundtracks (except for maybe some crowd chanting in “Unleashing”…), but the game apparently has a system where you can write your own fight songs to be chanted during matches, so maybe he wrote some default songs for that system?
Recommended tracks:
All selections composed by Junko Shiratsu.
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“Break Through” hits us with more of that egregious soloing, we’ve got some trumpet this time
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“Starter” seems real perky and cheesy but then gets nasty out of nowhere at 0:29
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“Anxiety” was my favorite of the two “sad” themes as notated in the sound test, naturally it’s the one that’s in 7
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“The Green Wind Blows” has a real nice, smooth first section
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“Fast And Furious” has that jazzy stinger energy in short loop form
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