Game info: Steam
Listening: soundtrack album
Info
Takeshi Hama is a composer I’ve been meaning to get into for ages, and he just released a new game soundtrack, so you’d better believe I’m gonna put this sucker on. Hama is a composer of mostly anime and more recently virtual idol songs, though he had brief stints doing game music at both noisycroak and Nintendo, and he’s done some occasional mobile stuff since then apparently. The works I’ve heard by Hama before are What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord!? 1 & 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and he did some sick-ass music for all three: lots of tunes with interesting harmonic, tonal, and/or rhythmic bits, plus some nice orchestrations in Skyward Sword specifically. He’s just a cool guy, and I like listening to music by cool guys.
Viractal is a deckbuilding board game RPG that I’m learning just now as I write this is by Sting, which is neat because I was somehow under the impression that all they’ve done for a while was just publish remasters of their old RPGs. Anyway, Viractal is a fantasy game with the aesthetics of a board game, using simple, shiny models that look like plastic miniatures, and the soundtrack matches that pretty directly. For the fantasy part of the equation, there’s plenty of folky instrumentation—particularly recorder, accordion, and guitar/lute—mixed with some string and brass orchestration and occasionally some synths and other stuff. For the board game miniatures side, the recorder and tuned percussion in a bunch of tracks go a long way to giving the music a pretty cutesy feel to it. The overall style is pretty similar to the music Hama wrote for the What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord!? games, but with slightly less of a toy instruments feel and a bit more of a fantasy tavern feel.
The soundtrack starts off with a few calm, more lyrical tracks, and there’s some pretty background orchestration in the field themes, though for me things really start to get good with the battle themes. These get a bit proggy both compositionally and through the inclusion of some rock organ; occasionally it’s reminiscent of stuff Nobuo Uematsu wrote for Final Fantasy because of a random riff and occasionally it’s reminiscent of stuff Koichi Sugiyama wrote for Dragon Quest because of some random bit of phrasing, but it always still sounds like Hama because of the sound palette and because he slips in some of the modulations and minimalism stuff that he likes to do. It’s pretty great! It ruled when he wrote music like this for What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord!? and it rules again now.
Following those tracks up are a vocal ending theme, a few shorter event themes that each feature some detuning, and a couple of tracks with synth pads for more of a textural sound than the rest of the soundtrack. It’s all pretty enjoyable, this is a nice soundtrack.
Recommended tracks:
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“Field #1: VIractal” ends with a progression that reminds me of Hirokazu Ando I think
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“Battle #5: Shadow Incarnate” is the most ridiculous of the battle themes, particularly at 1:13
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“Calling for Me” (vo. Zaeli) is the track in the game that most sounds like Skyward Sword
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“Room” is the more active of the two synth pad pieces, still pretty ambient though
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