Game info: MiloScat
Music info: VGMdb (tracks 1-7)
Listening: soundtrack download (click the “ETC.” tab and then the “がんばれ！菜月さん！ オリジナルサウンドトラック” link in the soundtrack section)
Info
Time for another composer dive! The organizer of the GameFAQs VGM contest and I managed to track down the composer of the Storm Assault track I posted about here last month, and not only did it happen to be someone whose game works I already added to VGMdb years ago, but it also happened to be someone whom I made an entry for their real name on VGMdb years ago (though this was unlinked to their earlier game works under a different name until now). Oops! A good reminder that one of the reasons I do a bunch of cataloging stuff, besides being a massive dweeb of course, is so that when I randomly get obsessed with a composer in the future, there’s already an existing discography I can jump right into!
Kousuke Matsuoka, also known as eki and docomokirai, is a composer who doesn’t maintain a public list of works, but it seems like the bulk of it is score work for small orchestras and ensembles: transcriptions and arrangements of popular tunes. I’m not sure he’s done any games recently, but he did them in the past! In addition to Storm Assault, he also was one of several composers on five games by small doujin group Alpha Secret Base (maybe more, the documentation on a lot of them is a little iffy), three of which had soundtrack releases. Alpha Secret Base made a ton of small games in the 2000s and the primary composers of them were Q (later known as Kyu Sendou and currently known as Vocaloid producer AwakenP) and Dong, but Matsuoka did chip in a few songs occasionally, so let’s check ’em out. We’re starting with one done by all three!
Ganbare Natsuki San is a platformer highly inspired by Umihara Kawase that was originally released for PC in 2006 and later got an Xbox Live Indie Games port in 2009. The Umihara Kawase series has very chill, summery pop music, though the music in this game doesn’t follow that strictly and instead is generally a little higher energy rock, with a little bit of pop flavoring. And then Matsuoka’s first track comes completely out of nowhere with orchestral prog nonsense, and it’s great; this will be a trend we’ll keep seeing as we continue. His second track closes out the game with a sweet orchestral finale, which feels like it might give a sense of what his score work is like; I didn’t think it was anything super special, but the MIDI orchestration is decent, enough so to be more interesting to me than the pop-rock tracks.
A physical compilation soundtrack was released for this game and two others, though Alpha Secret Base was kind enough to put up free digital downloads of all their albums a year or two later. The digital version of this album doesn’t include the three arranged tracks, two of which cover Ganbare Natsuki San, which seems like it might just be an oversight because the bonus arranged tracks from the other physical albums are in fact included in their digital downloads. There’s a lot of distortion in two of the three tracks by Q in the download; I don’t know if they’re like that on the actual CD too.
Recommended tracks:
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“School Swimsuit Coffee Shop” (Dong) was the track that most sounded like it could’ve been in Umihara Kawase instead, and I’m definitely not just posting it because it starts off sounding like a cover of “Never Gonna Give You Up”
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“100 Consecutive Natsuki San Adventures” (Matsuoka) ends with a nice mallet figure and synth bwomp that I really kind of wish the track continued developing
(track titles are unofficial translations by me)
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