Game info: website
Listening: soundtrack album
Info
The other Sakimoto score we’ve got queued up is Wizardry Variants Daphne, a throwback 3D dungeon crawler in a 40-year-old franchise. These games were originally made by the U.S. company Sir-Tech, but they’ve always been weirdly popular in Japan, and several different developers there licensed the IP for a whole bunch of random side games as well. Sir-Tech closed in 1998 in the U.S. and 2003 in Canada, but the IP was bought by a Japanese company in 2006, so that didn’t stop the series from getting new games on consoles and mobile phones. And now we’ve got a new game in 2024 on mobile phones!
As mentioned two posts ago, this is also a gacha game, which affects items and new party members you find in dungeons. So I can’t legally recommend you ever play this game, but at least we can check out its music.
This soundtrack is again a little darkish fantasy folk orchestral music, with the darkness generally being a little less imposing and aggressive and a little more unsettling and ominous (though there are still a bunch of aggressive pieces). The big difference with Sword of Convallaria is that this soundtrack is quite a bit more electronic, with many tracks incorporating some synthetic sounds and distortion effects. Sometimes they’re there just to give more oomph to an action track but often they’re there for creepiness, to enhance the unsettling vibe of the soundtrack. Sometimes the audio design of the electronics feels a bit cheaply produced, especially if you compare it with Sakimoto’s stellar work previously on 13 Sentinels, but it’s interesting and usual for Sakimoto in its offputtingness and outright noisiness at times. It’s nice to see him experimenting with some just real nasty-sounding stuff, and I like the end result.
Recommended tracks:
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“Tales of the Abyss” is the version of the game’s main theme with my favorite sound design
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“Royal Capital Luknalia” is one of the most directly folk tracks, starting off with some nice partwriting between the strings and winds
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“Battle Cry” starts off as pretty standard Sakimoto orchestral like you’ve heard in his many RPGs, but we get some nice deep clanging at 2:27 and then the Electronic Shit happens, ending in a hoovered recapitulation of the main theme
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“Roar of Malice” has a really high pitched buzzing at 2:03 for some reason
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“Distorted View” is a spooky one, getting a bit into haunted house territory with the piano ploonking that starts at 1:12
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“Great Calamity” is perhaps the soundtrack’s greatest cacophony
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