Game info: Sega Retro
Listening: physical soundtrack (tracks 22-27, incomplete), digital soundtrack (tracks 35-40, incomplete)
Credits
Sound Technical Director: Masaru Setsumaru
Sound Director: Takayuki Aihara
The physical soundtrack release includes an overall list of composers for the entire music selection and Takayuki Aihara is among the composers listed, and on his website he explicitly states that he composed for this game.
Info
SEGA consoles are dead! All the Sakatsuku installments from now on are going to be for other systems, like this first entry for the PS2. The audio for the 2002 Sakatsuku entry Sakatsuku 2002 was once again outsourced, this time to Takayuki Aihara in one of his earlier freelance works after leaving game developer Arika in 2000. Aihara is a composer I tend to underrate because he frequently works with composers I like a lot more than him (particularly Shinji Hosoe and Ayako Saso), so even when I enjoy his contributions they tend to get overshadowed in my mind by those of others. But he’s a good composer! After all, he wrote more than half of the legendary Drakengard soundtrack, his place in history is secure just from that alone.
I didn’t mention this explicitly before, but the sound tests of sequenced music in the Dreamcast games all give the songs functional titles referring to their use—cities of various sizes, pre-match jingles, news broadcasts, etc.—and they reused those same functional titles in every game, despite the music changing from game to game and the pieces apparently having real titles as given on the soundtrack releases. This first PS2 game also follows suit in having a sound test of presumably sequenced music with most of the usual titles, this time having about a bit under 20 normal pieces and jingles apiece (a couple of tracks are duplicated, not sure if this is an error or not). However, this soundtrack also has 36 streamed tracks in a STRM.BIN archive file, though it’s really only half that many distinct compositions because every piece has two versions with very slightly different orchestration. Did the Dreamcast games also have this much streamed music, and I just didn’t know because I couldn’t extract it before? I sure hope not!
The soundtrack this time around is very different from its predecessors, largely eschewing jazz music of any sort in favor of a mix of orchestral pieces that’re a little stodgier and less library music-feeling than what we heard in the first game and some much synthier, generally chill tracks that are way more “video game music” than anything we’ve heard in the series by being more cute, or pop melodic, or dancier, etc. I think there are some similarities to Aihara’s Arika works before this game in their instrumentation and composition, though less intense and complicated because this is a soccer management sim and not a fighting game. There’s also bagpipes in several tracks. Is that a sports thing? I feel like that can’t possibly be a globally-recognized indicator of sports, but maybe this game gets more European than previous ones did and bagpipes are from somewhere in Europe right.
Two of the streamed tracks are original compositions by Aihara that were included on the soundtrack releases, both of which are versions of the main theme that also appears in a few other tracks in the game; they’re both orchestral with a little bit of bagpipes and drumkit, with one featuring crowd chanting and the other getting a little synthier. The other streamed tracks I believe are all country anthems, though I didn’t recognize a lot of them so there’s a chance that not all of them are; if they’re not all anthems, they’re in similar enough stately, lyrical orchestral styles that they sound like they are. The anthems that I recognized are European, which is why I suggested Europeanness as a possible explanation for the bagpipes in the last paragraph. I dunno, maybe it doesn’t mean anything and the man just wanted to hear some bagpipes.
I didn’t care for this soundtrack altogether that much, though it’s not objectionable. I tended to like the synthier, non-orchestral tracks because I think they generally had a little better chords and a couple of them have a synth that sounds like punching in numbers on a telephone, but there are some decent moments in some of the orchestral pieces and the combinations some of them have with some synth textures can be nice. The jingles are also way better than the last game, a lot of them are pretty video game-y in having sick synth riffs or random modulations that hit me right in the dopamine producers. I’ve kind of written myself into a corner by mentioning the jingles in my posts for the first games so now I have to keep bringing them up every time.
Recommended tracks:
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“Office” is about as jazzy as the soundtrack gets, very chill and also one of the telephone noises tracks
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“Unhappiness 1” had my favorite overall synth noises in it, some slightly tense VN dialogue vibes in this one
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“Club Establishment” is pretty short but I liked the orchestration in this the most of all the orchestral tracks
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“Beginning of the Month” is bagpipes EDM, which I guess is a genre now? Thanks, Aihara
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“Fantasia 2002” is the ending theme and it turns out it was truncated by about a minute and a half to fit on the original physical soundtrack release, though as you can hear from the full version the extra material is just continued rehashing of earlier material and a somewhat abrupt ending
(track titles except the last are unofficial translations by me of titles from the sound test)
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