Alterna Citizen Program M-00: Init (System Noise)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: enclosure soundtrack selection (very incomplete), YouTube (slightly incomplete?), extracted audio

Credits

Main Composer: Keiki Kobayashi
Composers: Mitsuhiro Kitadani, Sho Okada, Rio Hamamoto, Ryo Watanabe, Yusuke Yamauchi (mifumei), Shin Sazaki, Junichi Nakatsuru, Shogo Nomura, Yusuke Kudo, Nobuyoshi Kobayashi, Qing Yan (Ao Tsubame)

Full credits available at VGMdb.

Info

Alright, now we can get to the latest anime-storyline dogfight simulator. Four of the composers from ACE COMBAT 7 and two of the additional SP MISSIONS composers returned to work on 8, and they were joined by six others, making this easily the biggest cast of characters to score an ACE COMBAT. Of those six who didn’t work on 7, a whopping five of them debuted in the series here, though four of them previously worked on Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion so it’s not like they were completely devoid of practice in electronic orchestral music or anything.

Through the singleplayer campaign there’s I think slightly more of a sprinkling of rock than 7 had, both in similar and in different flavors. Instead of the bluesy twangy guitar that a few tracks had, this time there are some straight up rock band songs; among the allied characters are a rock band, so some of their songs are played diegetically at various points in the game. A good amount of the other guitar in the soundtrack comes in battle themes against the enemy Lux Lunae squadron, where it’s technical guitar soloing that 7 didn’t really have. There’s also some random miscellaneous guitar elsewhere in the soundtrack close to the end of the game, more often in a more uplifting style than it was in 7 but there’s some heavier stuff with more of a metal edge in there too.

The main thing that’ll stand out to everyone who listens to this, though, is the short, sports cheer-esque male choral theme that also appears in every Lux Lunae song, which can be heard on its own as “Ad Terram Promissam.” Throughout the course of the game, it’s revealed that the nation they hail from, Sotoa, was until somewhat recently mostly nomadic herders, and this starts to be reflected in the music at the very end of the game. The first sign is in “Nightmare,” which in the intro has the folky sound of a mandolin (or something mandolin-adjacent) strumming and a wind instrument taking the melody, and then there’s some brief throat singing-esque delivery at 2:25. The culmination is in “Hortus Regis Alti,” which is straight up a folk song that recasts the sports cheer as its wordless refrain at 3:26. This development of lore through the music, showing that the war chant is actually just a perversion of a more traditional song they adopted as they turned aggressively martial, is a kind of thing I don’t really remember the ACE COMBAT series ever doing before, and I thought it was worth talking about a bit just because it’s neat.

Aside from that it’s moooooostly just more ACE COMBAT music, no other super surprising departures from the formula. The electronic production here I think is the most interesting and cool that it’s been since the series’s switch to the orchestral sound, which I’d assume is attributable to the newer composers who snuck in. I also thought the soundtrack was generally a little more harmonically interesting than 7’s, not massively so but definitely an increase in the amount of times it made me go “oh!” So overall I liked this soundtrack more than I did 7’s.

The game also includes an online mode, straightforwardly called ACE COMBAT Online, which is mostly multiplayer PvE missions but apparently it’ll have PvP too on special occasions. This mode has a whole, whole lot of music from past games that you can unlock/buy, we’re talking like 100 tracks, but it does also have about 15 new tracks for menus and missions and such. Three paragraphs ago I specified the rock I was talking about was in the singleplayer campaign because THIS part of the soundtrack is almost entirely geetarz music. Half of it is nu metal with varying amounts of orchestra, electronics, and female vocals mixed in, and the other half is less thrashy and more funky/groovy rock, verging a little bit on Southern rock sometimes. It all feels very much like Rio Hamamoto trying to will ACE COMBAT ASSAULT HORIZON 2 into existence, and he’s one of my least-favorite Bandai Namco composers, so I did not really enjoy anything from this part of the soundtrack. None of it’s, like, objectively bad in composition or performance though.

Bandai Namco is working on DLC for this game, and it sounds like some of that is going to be additional story missions like there were for ACE COMBAT 7, so I wouldn’t expect a full soundtrack release until they’re done with that some time next year. Zaptroxix’s YouTube uploads of the soundtrack seem fairly complete, including not just the music from the music player but from Online and cutscenes as well, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s missing some cutscene tracks.

Recommended tracks:

• “Frostwave” (Mitsuhiro Kitadani) is I guess the prog metal-est the Lux Lunae battle themes get

• “Over the Rainband” (Qing Yan) is the track that made me look into her other work because it’s the best mission theme in the game, 0:50–1:39 is very Hirogami harmonically

• “Maximum Payload” (Mitsuhiro Kitadani) had my favorite orchestration in the game

• “Basement of Fort Grays” is some weird glitchy dark ambient from a cutscene in a murdery-looking area

• “Lost Country” (Sho Okada) has an electronic/world style that feels a little more like Panzer Dragoon than ACE COMBAT

• “Debriefing II” is in this archetype of “odd time + chill chords hangar theme” that ACE COMBAT likes to have once per game (sadly there weren’t any of these in 7)

• “The Star-Bound Bird” (Ryo Watanabe) is the most uplifting of the uplifting rock tracks

• “Gambler” (Junichi Nakatsuru) has a dark and dramatic style that gives me feelings of like a Batman movie or something

• “General MVP Theme” has this dinky-ass synth solo that makes me lose my mind every time I listen to it, what on earth is it doing in this song it’s so spit-takingly funny

(“Basement of Fort Grays” and “General MVP Theme” are unofficial titles)