Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio (missing two jingles and one ambient track), YouTube
Credits
Sound Director: Nazo Nazo Suzuki
Music Composer: Aki Hata
Sound Effects: Satoshi Murata
Artist Hiroshi Iuchi revealed on his old website that he also composed two pieces for the game, one of which he later revealed on his blog was the town theme. In the blog post, he also revealed that sound effect designer Satoshi Murata also composed some “ambient music.”
Info
Had a hankering to relisten to this soundtrack after a couple of recent revelations about the music. Light Crusader is a weird outlier in Treasure’s catalog, being an isometric perspective medieval fantasy swordguy dungeon crawler that looks and sounds much more like a western game than a Japanese one, aside from some occasional Treasure-isms like this random rotating 3D cube platform that I think about all the time. I had fun with the game when I played it a few years ago after it was added to the Switch Online library.
The soundtrack was mostly composed by Aki Hata, a singer-songwriter who these days writes the lyrics to every single anime theme song. No, really, like actually all of them. She has nearly 2000 lyrics credits on VGMdb. It’s a lot.
But back in the day, she also wrote a good amount of game BGM, always as a freelancer contracting out to companies like Konami and Treasure. And she kicked ass at that, like damn. She constantly fucked around with rhythm, writing proggy tracks and subtly mixed meter tracks and tracks with polymeter or weird syncopation. She also refused to allow herself to be shackled by preposterous human rules of tonality, slipping in random lines from the Whole Tone or Atonal Dimensions whenever she felt like it. She’s legitimately one of my favorite composers and I selfishly really wish that she had continued to do BGM rather than pivoting to songwriting, but she’s presumably doing what she loves and that’s great for her.
While we don’t have a breakdown for Light Crusader, judging by comments by Hiroshi Iuchi it’s probably like 80% her, so it’s the Konami or Treasure soundtrack with the most Aki Hata music by volume. That makes it one of the most direct looks into her compositional mind from this time period, and the result is that it fucking rules. As a fantasy game soundtrack it tends to evoke baroque and medieval folk music with its instrumentation, forms, and melodic writing, though that’s mixed with the complex rhythmic and tonal nonsense I mentioned in the last paragraph, so the pretty counterpoint-ish track has subtle mixed meter and the Castlevania-ish action theme has a randomly prog intro, stuff like that. And then there’s a bunch of completely bizarre music, just baffling alien nonsense that defies all logical explanation, bearing only brief hints of a baroque source that was shattered into incomprehensibility by a hell mirror. It’s super distinctive, constantly surprising, and just damn cool; it’s one of my favorite Genesis soundtracks and there’s just not a lot out there besides… other Aki Hata soundtracks.
I’ve only been talking about Hata, but this game is also notable as the composition debut of Ikaruga director/composer Hiroshi Iuchi, who at the time was a graphic designer (that was his main role in this game, in fact); he’s said in the past that he wrote two pieces of music for the game, recently revealing one of them was the town theme (I’m inclined to believe the other is the pub theme, though I could buy it being the ending theme). At the same time, Iuchi also revealed that sound effects guy Satoshi Murata wrote some “ambient music” for the game without specifying what that means; Murata was mostly credited with sound effects through his career at Konami and Treasure, but he is confirmed to have written music for a couple of other games besides this one. There are three amelodic, pad/drone/SFX-y atmospheric tracks in the game that I would imagine are the ones Iuchi was talking about.
Recommended tracks:
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“A town with a castle in view” (Iuchi) I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for, the bass movement is a little strange in places and gives the piece a bit of crunch I like
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“The Merchant” (Hata?) is the pretty counterpoint-ish track with subtle mixed meter that I mentioned earlier
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“Grave Matters” (Hata?) is the Castlevania-ish action theme with a randomly prog intro that I mentioned earlier
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“Orbs of Power” (Hata?) is one of the most nonsensical pieces in the game, legitimately what’s going on at any point here
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“What Lies Ahead” (Murata?) kind of has a Mystlike ambient vibe to it, I’m realizing now
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“Fight for the Light” (Hata?) is also really nonsensical, this time in a slightly more cartoony way
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“Unused Song 2” (Hata?) is one of two unused tracks in the game, both of which are a bit jazz fusiony in a way the rest of the soundtrack isn’t; these sound the most like they could’ve appeared in another Treasure game like Dynamite Headdy or something
(track titles are unofficial except for the first, which Iuchi gave to an arrangement of it he just did)
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