Game info: AUTOMATON
Listening/music info: soundtrack album
Info
Here’s a party board game about competing with your friends over who gets to reincarnate and who doesn’t—you know, just like in real life. Board game games like this are pretty popular in Japan, there are a bunch of them for miscellaneous IPs and sometimes you also get standalone ones like Tensei Game.
The soundtrack is rather goofy/cutesy and throws a bunch of random sounds into a blender, so you can tell it comes from a pretty lighthearted kind of game just by listening to it. The most common style present across the majority of it is cartoony haunted house music with organ or harpsichord or choir or theremin or church bells, all the common signifiers of ooooh spooooooky [wiggles fingers]. But there are also some elements of dance and world music mixed in, and you’ll also be bombarded with cartoon sound effects, chiptune sounds, orchestra, EDM synths, shamisen, and so on, so you’ll never know what nonsense you’re going to hear until the track starts. It’s funny.
The first time I mentioned two of the composers on this blog, Toki Takeda and Richter, was for Unicorn Overlord, and I said then that I wasn’t especially impressed by their contributions to that game, but I liked their music more here! Both of them got a bit more out there harmonically and tonally, especially Takeda, which was nice to see and made this soundtrack enjoyable for me to listen to even though the comical spooky style doesn’t really do a whole lot for me.
Recommended tracks:
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“The Realm of Rebirth Menu” (Mitsuhiro Kaneda) reminds me a bit of The Thousand Year Door in its instrumentation and tonality
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“The Realm of Rebirth Gateway” (Toki Takeda) was my favorite of the spooky tracks, this has a little bit of a classical style to the writing
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“Zombie Poli Girl” (Denys Fontanarosa) has a cool jazz intro before turning into… whatever it turns into I don’t know what to call this
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“Karma’s Fountain” (Richter) has nice calm RPG town or beach vibes with good chords, the part before the loop at 0:55 is weird though
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