Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: CD audio, YouTube
Credits
All Songs Composed by Akira Ishiguro
Sound Produced by Keiichi Ito (Kim Co., Ltd.)
Info
Akira Ishiguro is a jazz keyboardist who’s been in a few different bands, most notably W.I.N.S with Akira Wada (guitar), Toshimi Nagai (bass), and Kozo Suganuma (drums), though he works more often as a session and live support musician. He does sometimes compose music too; besides songs for W.I.N.S, he’s done some anime songwriting too and some soundtrack work in the ’90s. His best-known game is L’Empereur, a strategy game by KOEI for which, in their usual fashion, they released an arrange album (it’s mostly orchestral and I didn’t find it super interesting).
Ishiguro first came to my attention years ago because of the songs he wrote for drummer Akira Jimbo’s 1992 instructional VHS tape Metamorphosis. This tape features a ten minute lesson with instructions from Jimbo, but most of it is video of him performing songs written by himself, bassist Tetsuo Sakurai, and Ishiguro from various angles so you can watch how someone drums the jazz fusion music. Ishiguro’s compositions stand out as being notably proggier than the rest, particularly “Aerobics of Alien” which is insanely insanely good. He was super into prog rock in high school, so much so that it inspired him to attend a music university, so even though he pivoted to jazz afterward it makes sense that prog would still show up in his music.
So when someone in the VGMdb Discord randomly posted a picture of the manual for the FM Towns version of Operation Wolf showing the tracklist for the CD audio, and that page also listed Ishiguro as the composer, I instantly had to check out the soundtrack to see if, unlike L’Empereur, it happened to be jazz fusion. And it turns out—it is!
Operation Wolf is an arcade light gun game by Taito from 1987 that features a very small amount of music by outsourced composer Shizuo Aizawa. For their FM Towns port, developer VING decided to get Ishiguro, who had also composed some original music for their earlier port of Taito’s Final Blow, to write five new tracks to go along with one reused one from Final Blow (“Over The Cinematic View,” which is noted as being “VING’s theme” and is in fact reused in several other VING FM Towns ports too). The first CD audio track is made up of most of the original arcade soundtrack with voice clips on top, different parts of it seem to be used in the game at various points like the level select and mission clear and game over screens? After that are three proggy fusion tunes, which are followed by three smoothier/cheesier fusion tunes.
The smoother tunes are fine, but a lot further on the cheesier side of things than I usually like; my favorite was the last one, “Not Cassiopeia,” which it seems is titled a bit cheekily. But the three proggy ones are all sick as hell, hot damn. They’re not sick just because they have time signatures in them; they also have cooler chords, cooler soloing, and slightly more varied rompler sounds too. None of them are quite as insane as “Aerobics of Alien” specifically, but you can see the same DNA in them and they all still kick ass. Great music!
Recommended tracks:
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“Condition Red” was later covered on W.I.N.S’s first album in extended form under the title “IN SPIRITUAL ECHOES -yahhoo~!-”
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“Battle of Jasmine Tea” had the most prog energy for me so it was my favorite track
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