Game info: Sega Retro
Listening: soundtrack album (disc 1)
Info
This is an emulated collection of multiple versions of four Taito games: Operation Wolf, Operation Thunderbolt, and Space Gun, which are all light gun shooters, and then also Night Striker, which is a rail shooter. For Night Striker specifically, they produced a full remix soundtrack which can be swapped in for the original music. The remixes were done by four folks who all have other Taito works: MASAKI, who’s been an employee for about a decade, Yoshimi Kudo, a now-freelance composer who wrote a few tracks for alice gear aegis when he was still at Basiscape, and EniGmA, a guitarist/bassist duo of Hirofumi Miyabe and Yosuke Ide who won a Taito arrangement contest a few years ago and have also written music for alice gear aegis.
The arrangements all stick very close to the originals, largely reinstrumenting them while keeping the compositions and structures intact; you can kind of verify this without even listening to any of the music just by comparing the track lengths between the original and remix discs of the soundtrack release, most of them are within a couple of seconds of each other if not identical and that’s because they’re the same pieces with the same tempos. This means that, given I wasn’t the biggest fan in the world of the original arcade soundtrack, I didn’t especially like this either; the new remixes mostly didn’t offer much besides new instrumentation over the original FM sound, which I did appreciate in a few cases but that’s about it.
The artists were all fairly consistent in their arrangement styles. MASAKI’s were mostly EDM, and in his pieces what I liked most was usually some of the electronic sound design he got to slip into the weird parts of the original tracks. EniGmA exclusively covered all six of the boss themes and did them all in an electronic rock style, which checks out given the instruments they play. Kudo’s three tracks were also electronic rock, though in his more synthy prog style than EniGmA’s more metalish covers; his covers departed the furthest from the originals in that he decided to actually reharmonize them a little, which was definitely nice to hear.
The soundtrack includes two arrangements at the end of disc 1: an extended version of “URBAN TRAIL” by MASAKI with a new bass and guitar solo (and some crowd noises that I think are fake), and a boss medley by EniGmA with a new section or two.
Recommended tracks:
All tracks originally composed by Masahiko Takaki.
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“BRAIN WORKER [Underground Factory Theme]” (arr. MASAKI) is the most “weird electronic noises” cover of the remixes
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“FLY AWAY [Sky Theme]” (arr. Yoshimi Kudo) is the most directly electronic of Kudo’s covers, though he does bust out the lead guitar for this one too eventually
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“BOSS 4” (arr. EniGmA) was the boss theme that I think worked best in the new style, the composition definitely fits the synth and guitars
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“ma-gu-ri-vu [Temple Theme]” (arr. MASAKI) was the most unusual track from the original game instrumentally, being a choir and orchestra piece, and MASAKI decided to go full temple on this with monk-like chanting and gamelan-ish percussion
(subtitles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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