Game info: Steam
Listening: Steam
Info
Here’s a mech combat action game by NITRO PLUS, a company which for 25 years has primarily made adult visual novels, though obviously they branched out a bit for this one. The soundtrack was handled by ZIZZ STUDIO, a longtime collaborator that does a lot of their scores. There are three credited composers: Yoh Ohyama (ZIZZ’s primary composer, to the extent they have one), Lurtz69 (a pseudonym that showed up about the same time Osamu Hata, born in 1969, disappeared), and Kyle Booth from the UK; ZIZZ president Toshimichi Isoe is also credited as an arranger. Unfortunately we don’t have a breakdown for this, though Booth has revealed the three tracks he composed.
The first thing you’ll notice listening to this soundtrack is that most tracks feature wordless vocals by Noriko Mitose, sometimes more choral and sometimes in a more scat style (though none of the tracks have actual lyrics I don’t think). They give the music a softer and more melancholy feel than you might expect from a mech combat action game, especially given there’s a lot of slower music with a cappella moments, though there’s definitely some action bits with electric guitar and aggressive electronic noises too. There’s a vein of gothic action vibes in the soundtrack too in some of the composition and inclusion of stuff like pipe organ and harpsichord, so completely out of context I might’ve guessed this was from something like a Castlevania, although some of the more overtly electronic tracks do hint toward the more futuristic setting of the game.
It’s alright. I like Ohyama a lot as a composer, he’s good overall but I vastly prefer him when he’s in prog sicko mode, and he tends to do that less in his game soundtracks like Dolls Nest than as part of his Asturias prog projects; there’s really only one especially prog track in the game, an electronic metal piece that’s very easily my favorite song, and the rest of the soundtrack plays it a little more standard with the aforementioned Castlevania-ish ambient and actiony evocations of faded glory. The tracks of Ohyama’s that I like when he’s not being prog tend to have some combination of odd time, nice chords, mallet percussion, and/or cool sound design, and those are all scattered about a few tracks in the game, so there’s more than just the one metal track that I enjoyed listening to.
Recommended tracks:
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“Dolls Nest” (Ohyama?) starts off sounding like it’s from a fantasy game before the electronics blast in at 1:26
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“Reverse Babel” (Ohyama?) starts with a nice mallet figure in 5 before activating the Fiddle Protocol at 1:21; it’s nice when the track switches back into 5 at 2:41 but now with piano and drums
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“Call to Multiply” (Ohyama?) is the electronic metal track that rules, it’s very similar to “EXEC_DESPEDIA/.” from Ar tonelico II (plus it’s the same vocalist!)
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“Maze of Fog” (Booth) is one of the more haunted house-type spooky tracks
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“The Daydreamer” (Ohyama?) definitely sounds like it’s from a VN
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