Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube
Credits
Music Director: Teco Studio
Music Composer: Takaaki Oka
Sound Design: Chikara Yoshida
Info
Last one! This game was apparently almost entirely if not fully completed, except too late to go into physical production on account of the Virtual Boy’s financial collapse. We have two developmental ROMs for this game: one compiled from source code which was also leaked(!!) and one dumped from a slightly later prototype cartridge. These came out in 2010, a few years before Niko-chan Battle, so I was thinking about posting this first, but I decided it would be better to close this series with a soundtrack that’s actually on YouTube.
Bound High! is a top-down… platformer? where you bounce up and down off a 2D stage with the floor tiles disappearing as you land on them, and you have to kill every enemy by bouncing on them without falling into the abyss. The music is all fairly cute and chill stuff, with a little bit of swingy jazz flavor to give it a nice jaunty feeling. Pretty standard stuff for a cutesy platformer, doesn’t do a whole lot for me but if you like happy music, you’ll definitely come out happier after listening to this soundtrack. The instrumentation is also pleasantly warm and cuddly for this kind of music.
The composer for Bound High! was Takaaki Oka, who was a friend of the game’s designer, Hideyuki Nakanishi. Oka seemingly has only two other credits: Star Saber, a slightly earlier X68000 game made by Nakanishi in university, and Chalvo 55, a side-view maze-y platformer featuring the same main character of Bound High! which I’ve actually randomly played somehow (it’s not that interesting). A lot of Bound High!‘s soundtrack was reused in Chalvo 55; the instruments are obviously different because of the different sound chips and the Chalvo 55 versions are almost always faster than the originals, but otherwise the arrangements are mostly very similar, with a couple of tracks having some slightly altered drum parts or slightly expanded writing. Purely a vibe preference for which one you’d like more, I get along with the VB instruments and chiller feel a bit more.
Recommended tracks:
-
“Title” had the spiciest chord progression of the soundtrack in the turnaround at 0:14
-
“World 2” has a classic melody
-
“World 3” is the fastest stage theme, having the more energetic feeling of the Game Boy soundtrack
-
“Final Boss Battle” has some pleasantly spooky background arpeggios at 0:14 that sound like they’re out of an RPG dungeon theme
(track titles are unofficial)
Leave a Reply