Game info: website
Listening/music info: soundtrack album
Info
In an early Christmas present for me, we get to slip a new Takashi Yoshida soundtrack with a composer breakdown into our traditional end-of-year catch-up listens. This is the second RPG adaptation by KOEI TECMO of the manga/anime series Fairy Tail, of which I know pretty much nothing about. I didn’t even skim that Wikipedia article I just linked in the last sentence. Is it about fairies? Is it about tails??? There’s just no way to know for sure.
The soundtrack was split pretty evenly between three composers, Yoshida and then two newer KOEI TECMO folks I’ve never heard anything by before: Saki Shimura and Hiromu Akaba. You can tell this is a fantasy game because a lot of the music incorporates Celtic instrumentation, particularly live fiddle, tin whistle, and acoustic guitar. There are generally three styles of music on display here: folk (mostly written by Shimura), rock with occasional folk accents (all written by Akaba), and orchestral with occasional folk accents (mostly written by Yoshida). Predictably I found all the rock tracks to be really boring, and predictably I liked Yoshida’s contributions most because his tracks are the most complex in terms of orchestration or harmony or other weird shit, so rather than having this post end up like every post I write about a KOEI TECMO soundtrack, let’s talk about Shimura instead.
Saki Shimura is a really new composer at KOEI TECMO, with this quite possibly being her first work there, though she was at mobile dev COLOPL for a few years beforehand. She’s also active outside of game music as a jazz vocalist and flutist; it’s her flute and tin whistle performances you’ll hear throughout this soundtrack, in fact. I mostly didn’t find her straightforward folk tracks super interesting, although a few of them did have some nice ensemble writing that reminded me a little of Yoshida’s tendencies toward counterpoint. She did however get much synthier than the other two composers, not aggressively so besides one track but she did mix in synth textures and electronic drums with her folk instrumentation in several places, and that’s always a good sonic combo in my experience. These tracks also tend to be a little more out there compositionally than the rest of her music, with her honestly getting as weird as Yoshida in a couple of places. I liked these! They’re the only credited compositions by Shimura we’ve got at the moment, and I’m genuinely hoping for more in the future because it seems like she has the potential to be pretty cool.
Recommended tracks:
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“Evil Wizards” (Yoshida) breaks out the spooky haunted house compositional techniques
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“Daily Life” (Shimura) was the most instrumental interplay-y of Shimura’s tracks, very cute
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“Hollow Heart” (Yoshida) was Yoshida’s folk contribution, very emotional
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“Dungeons” (Shimura) has a real nice bit at 1:10 with a little bit of microtones in the plucked instrument
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“Universe One” (Shimura) is the Shimura track that’s aggressively electronic, though it’s still got some winds blowing throughout to keep you grounded in the fantasy setting
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“Battle with Zeref” (Akaba) was the one rock track with a part I liked, the short prog transition part from 3:34 to 3:44
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