Game info: Sega Retro
Listening: digital soundtrack (tracks 31-34, incomplete), YouTube, emulated + extracted audio
Credits
Sound Director: Teruhiko Nakagawa
Sound Creator: Naofumi Hataya, Taihei Sato, Tadashi Kinukawa, Hideaki Kobayashi
Nakagawa, Sato, and Kobayashi are credited for composition for the four selected tracks on the compilation soundtrack. It’s not clear whether Hataya and Kinukawa also composed here, though they have for other Sakatsuku games.
Info
From here the Sakatsuku soundtracks I’m going to listen to get real sparse, for two reasons. One is that the listenability goes way down: most of them are neither released nor ripped without a boatload of missing tracks, and I’d prefer to not write a post and later find out it was based on only 20% of a soundtrack. The other is that of the ones that have been released, a couple of them are by a composer I very much do not like, and I’d prefer to just not write about them at all rather than make a post saying “this sucks.” So we’re going to skip ahead to the two DS installments, which we’re going to pray the rips of are complete due to the presence of both streamed and sequenced audio files, and the finish up with the most recent game. A bit of a shame since Let’s Make A Soccer Team!, another PS2 release that was the first game in the series to make it overseas, comes completely out of left field with a super electronic soundtrack, but most of that game’s soundtrack seems to be locked in the sequenced music vault, so it is what it is.
By the time Sakatsuku DS was released, SEGA had moved sound production for the series back in-house, so all five credited folks were SEGA employees. I’ve heard music by all of them but I couldn’t really tell you much about any of them besides the obvious one, Kobayashi. Some of the stuff I’ve heard by Sato and Kinukawa specifically has been rather good, though!
The soundtrack is broadly similar to what we’ve heard before: there’s a bit of orchestral, mostly some fanfares in the streamed tracks, but most of the soundtrack is jazzy like Sakatsuku ’04 was. The jazz flavor of choice here is Latin jazz again, sometimes overtly in genre and sometimes just in the rhythmic writing and percussion choices, though unlike Sakatsuku Tokudaigou’s soundtrack, the music here is a bit more upbeat and quirky. It’s mostly not super raucous and carnaval-y, but it’s definitely the most happy and festive soundtrack that I’ve listened to in this series marathon.
My favorites in this soundtrack were the couple of tracks that were the most directly bossa/samba/etc., since true to their forms they had the best jazzy chord changes in them. Aside from that I didn’t find this soundtrack super remarkable, though I did appreciate that there were a couple of tracks that got a little weird. Not, like, excessively weird, but just a little weird in a “well I wasn’t expecting that” way.
Recommended tracks:
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“Dye into the Soccer” (Taihei Sato & Hideaki Kobayashi) does several different random things for no reason in it, honestly I think this sounds a lot like what Phantasy Star Online music would be if it was instead extremely sports
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“Title” sets the Latin jazz tone early
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“Data” was my favorite piece (it’s the one with the best chords)
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“League” was the most “well I wasn’t expecting that” track
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“Select” has some background sax honking in it that I really like for some reason
(track titles except the first are taken from the filenames)
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