Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube
Credits
Sound & BGM: Katsuya Yamano
Info
Here’s the not-technically-a-Punch-Out!! game which plays a lot like a Punch-Out!! game, except it stars fightin’ robots. The music feels pretty standard for a boxing game: you’ve got a bunch of individual fighter themes in different styles to fit their different characters, like the stock pentatonic melody for the Japanese robot, and then music of a few different sorts but generally of a rock/bluesy bent for the menus and results and interstitials and so on. For the most part the compositions don’t really interest me, but the sound programming is pretty good; this soundtrack has a much wider set of instruments than did Mario’s Tennis or Galactic Pinball, with some tracks having pretty clear evocation of guitar, strings, etc.
The game solely credits Katsuya Yamano with all audio, which I’ve always found suspicious because he was a programmer (later a project manager/supervisor) and this is literally the only game in which he’s credited in an audio role. The game does also credit composer Hirokazu Tanaka in a generic “Virtual Boy Staff” section, but he’s never said he worked on this game and based on some of the other names in there being hardware folks, those may in fact just be hardware credits for the system itself. I don’t think Nintendo was in the habit of outright omitting the names of people from credits at this time, and the music doesn’t sound like the work of someone who had no idea what they were doing, so maybe Yamano had been writing music in his spare time and found an opportunity to sneak in there one time?
Recommended tracks:
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“File Select” has a pretty pleasant delay-echoed lead
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“Dorihey” has a fun, rhythmically tricky transition at 0:22 into a short 7/8 section
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“Legendary Champ Profile” is some dissonant chugging and I really like how crusty Yamano got this to sound
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“Staff Roll” has a nice boxing bell sample at 0:13, and the layered string writing at 2:18 is pretty tasteful for a chiptune
(track titles are unofficial)
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