Exhibition info: blog post (Japanese)
Listening: soundtrack album
Info
Here’s the second soundtrack for a live exhibition that I’m posting about here. Does that mean I have to make a dedicated tag for it now? No! But it’d be a little funny if I did.
It was announced yesterday that Terranigma’s getting a rerelease on PC and modern consoles (maybe with some remastering or other adjustments, not much info right now), so I decided to relisten to a short collection of arrangements from the game. In 2021, the game’s character designer, manga artist Kamui Fujiwara, held an art exhibition in Tokyo featuring a bunch of concept art and design documents made during the game’s development. The game’s two main composers[1], Miyoko Takaoka and Masanori Hikichi, wrote a few new arrangements of the soundtrack to be played as background music at the exhibition.
The style of the Terranigma’s original soundtrack is mostly orchestral with a pretty standard SNES limited-voice kind of orchestration; it’s also got a bit more of a melancholy and introspective tone to it than a lot of action RPG music typically does. Takaoka and Hikichi didn’t depart too far from that, since I guess that tone also fits an art exhibition pretty well. The biggest difference instrumentally is that there’s more piano here than in the original soundtrack, particularly in the two arrangements by Hikichi that are solo piano pieces. Takaoka’s arrangements are a bit more involved, with the final two being more rousing orchestral pieces; her arrangements also feature some live violin, winds, and guitar performances alongside some synthesized instruments.
There are a couple of pieces in the original game I like but I’ve never really been a big fan of the soundtrack, and I mostly don’t think the arrangements are substantially more interesting than their source material. So I’m pretty lukewarm on this, but there’s one arrangement that’s really good and I do appreciate the light new ageyness that’s in a couple of tracks. And honestly it’s just nice seeing how passionate Fujiwara, Takaoka, and Hikichi are about Terranigma all these years later.
“Two main composers” because there was a secret third composer; it was revealed a couple of years ago that Yuzo Koshiro wrote one piece of music at the request of one of the game’s producers, Masaya Hashimoto, with whom Koshiro had previously worked at Falcom. ↩︎
Recommended tracks:
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“Wind-swept Hills” (Miyoko Takaoka, orig. Hikichi & Takaoka) is probably the most new age-y track on the album, some of the partwriting here is very pretty
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“One Who Opens the Door” (Masanori Hikichi, orig. Hikichi) starts off with a minute of sick ambient sound design and chords before getting into more mystic minimalism territory when the source track starts to kick in
(track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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