Program info: website
Listening: extracted audio, soundtrack album (missing jingles, some tracks fade out before looping), YouTube (missing jingles)
Credits
NIS America previously credited a few tracks from this to Yuka Tsujiyoko on YouTube, but I couldn’t find any staff list or official statement attributing all of the music to her. I don’t have any specific reason to believe anyone else was involved, but who knows.
Info
It’s now randomly time for my first post about a Maker product, a long-running series of construction tools for various things; some of the earliest Japanese entries in fact had “construction tool” in their names before they settled on Tkool/Tcool as the series title, which is a combination of the Japanese verb “construct” (tsukuru) and the word “tool”. There are a lot of Maker titles for not just games of various genres but also music and 2D/3D graphics, but their flagship line is definitely the RPG Maker series of, uh… RPG makers. They provide graphics, music, sound effects, map editors, event scripting, and a standard engine for runnin’ around and fightin’ things, and you can use all that to make an RPG of your own and send it to your friends. Well, not any more in the case of this specific installment because the servers are dead, but you used to be able to!
RPG Maker Fes was the first and only entry of the Nintendo 3DS series of handhelds. There was no built-in music sequencer, so musicwise all you had available was the library of 42 default songs (and 12 jingles), at least some of which were composed by Yuka Tsujiyoko. Tsujiyoko’s an old-school composer who started at INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, where she invented Fire Emblem music, so now that she’s a freelance composer, grabbing her to do some RPG stock music makes a lot of sense. I’ve never really been a huge fan of her Fire Emblem music compared to the works of several of the later composers, but she’s done some good tracks, and she was of course involved in the legendary soundtrack of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.
The graphical assets all seem geared towards standard medieval fantasy RPG games, so the music follows that: it’s mostly fairly straightforward and slightly folky orchestral music with a little bit of synthiness here and there. The tracks are all on the shorter side and pretty by-the-numbers in terms of how they fit their intended usage: the castle theme is a march, the church theme has pipe organ, the comical theme has chromatic movement and staccato instruments, you get the picture. It all definitely feels like an “RPG music asset pack” kind of deal.
The orchestration level is a touch more complex than her work for the Fire Emblem games, which might just be because the music is streamed so there aren’t any voice limits, so she could get away with throwing in more stuff like multipart string writing and intertwined wind lines than she was able to before; it’s still never really super intricate or lush, but there’s a decent amount of care put into it. There are also occasionally some good chords, not in every single track but they felt a little more frequent than my recollection of her Fire Emblem scores.
So I thought this soundtrack was pretty decent from Tsujiyoko, I’m not super wowed by it but there’s a good chance it’s my favorite orchestral work from her now. My favorites are the tracks that sound less like “old Fire Emblem but slightly more Advanced” and have more Thousand-Year Door vibes; there are a couple of area and dungeon themes that are a little synthier, have tuned percussion, and are compositionally quirkier. They’re not as insane as TTYD in either the writing or sound design, but they’re good.
Recommended tracks:
-
“Boss Battle 2” has a nice short minimalist section at 0:14
-
“Field 3” is one of the most actively-orchestrated tracks of the bunch
-
“Celestial world” is the synthiest the soundtrack gets
-
“Flying ship” is super Nobuo Uematsu-coded in the first fifteen seconds or so
-
“Dungeon 3” was the track that most heavily reminded me of Thousand-Year Door
-
“Unrest” was my favorite of the event themes, naturally it’s the most dissonant one
Leave a Reply