So in July, exactly one year after the game came out, Bandai Namco finally released a standalone digital soundtrack for Shadow Labyrinth, which is pretty swell. It’s also got two and a half times more music than was present in the original DLC music player, which is extra swell because that soundtrack ruled and it’s great to have more of it.
The original soundtrack DLC release was about half fucked up electronic/orchestra/rock action themes and half a mixture of synthy ambient tracks and miscellaneous things like jazz and solo piano. It turns out that the original release was fairly heavily weighted towards the fucked up action tracks; it seems like they focused on releasing a most of the weird battle music and left a lot of the area and cutscene themes unreleased until now, so a large majority of the new material here falls into the second category, particularly the synthy ambient bucket. A lot of it’s really nice! Lots of good sound design and good chords here.
… but, it turns out this latest soundtrack release is still incomplete! There’s a ton of music in the game’s audio files that’s still unreleased, some of which could plausibly be unused but I would assume not all of it because we’re talking at least like sixty pieces of music here. Most of it is pretty similar stylistically and instrumentally to the rest of the soundtrack, with some occasional random outliers (the released soundtrack does have random outliers too of course). I think these tracks as a whole are a little bit less remarkable than what’s been released—a little sparser and less interesting—though there’s still some very very good music there too, including a couple of pretty flashy guitar tracks that I feel like people would like.
Also, the new soundtrack release has composer/arranger credits! So now I finally know who to obsess over. For the released tracks, at least. (The game’s audio data includes the filenames for the music before they were imported into the project, and some of these for the unreleased tracks include codes that probably correspond to the piece’s composer in most cases, though there are a few discrepancies in the filenames for the released tracks.[1]) Here are some notes on the composers who really stood out to me:
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Kayoko Naoe: she was responsible for pretty much all of the truly fucked up action themes, which is a truly stunning revelation because her career otherwise is, like, entirely just plain old orchestration or playing the piano. I skimmed through a bunch of her stuff and couldn’t find anything even remotely close to this shit. Where did any of it come from??? Anyway she owns I guess
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Katsuro Tajima: given how much good music the game has and how he was credited as the main composer, I assumed Tajima did some good stuff, and he did! He did the really gnarly prog tracks that own and also a bunch of the ambient tracks that own, and he’s also credited with arranging every single one of the tracks provided by the two COLIBRI composers (CHAMY.Ishi and Satoshi Okubo) and a lot of those own too.
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CHAMY.Ishi: speaking of CHAMY. He ended up doing entirely low-key tracks and they’re great. In terms of their composition and sound design they remind me a lot of the music of another game he worked on, Spectrobes: Origins, if it was slightly more evil; if you like his work here, check that soundtrack out because it’s great too!
But most of the other composers I didn’t mention also banged out at least one tune that kicked a whole lot of ass, it was a pretty impressive group effort! Since most of the sample tracks I picked in my original post ended up being by either Naoe or Tajima, who combined to write more than half of the DLC soundtrack release, I’m going to add a second set of recommended tracks here entirely by other composers; when a game has multiple composers I like to include pieces by most/all of them if I can, and since I wasn’t able to do so the first time, I’m going to take the opportunity to fix that oversight now!
I usually counsel against treating composer codes in filenames as a source of truth that directly map onto a single role like “composition”; they aren’t a vetted source of information intended for external or internal reference that explicitly state a person’s relation to a piece of music, but are rather artifacts of development that we can’t be sure were assigned in a consistent or well-formed way. ↩︎
Recommended Tracks II: Return of Samus:
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“The End of Sorrow” (Mei Osawa) starts off with a slightly uneasy RPG feeling and then gets weird and unsynced
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“Bosconian Hill” (CHAMY.Ishi, arr. Katsuro Tajima) is one of the lushest of the area themes
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“In the Dense Forest” (Kanaya Oki) is pretty standard forest vibes with the tuned percussion and winds, crossed with a bit of an ’80s synth/new age sound
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“Under the G.A.I.A.” (Satoshi Okubo, arr. Katsuro Tajima) is some nice dark ambient with glitchy sounds
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“Lava Cave-Variant” (CHAMY.Ishi, arr. Katsuro Tajima) has a little more of a mechanical sound to it than I’d have expected from the title, so I looked it up and it plays in a mechanical area called the Broken Smelting Furnace so I guess that checks out
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EventBGM_37(Satoshi Okubo?) is one of those random outliers in the still-unreleased tracks, have some EDM jazz because why not
(the last track is referred to by its filename)
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