Game info: Steam
Listening/music info: soundtrack album
Info
Here’s an RPG written and illustrated by Yoshio Nishimura, an artist formerly at Capcom and Vanillaware who now just lives out in the middle of nowhere, so that’s cool for him. It’s a digital version of old-school gamebooks like GrailQuest and Sorcery!, not the choose-your-own-adventure kind where all you do is pick which page to turn to at various junction points but the more involved ones where you’re actually playing a tabletop RPG by yourself by making a character and rolling dice against the book and all that.
The soundtrack’s by Hitoshi Sakimoto, who wrote music for I think every single game Nishimura worked on while he was employed by Vanillaware, so it makes total sense to see him here. It’s a fantasy-folk orchestral soundtrack with piano and occasionally other folk-appropriate instruments like guitar, mostly synthesized but with some live piano, guitar, and violin. It most often has a calmer, more intimate vibe to it, though there are several tracks that are bigger or more active or both. So it’s reasonably straightforward there, I think if you imagined “Sakimoto writing a smaller-scale RPG soundtrack” you might end up somewhere around here.
Sometimes I kind of feel like the world’s last simp for Hitoshi Sakimoto because any conversation I see about his modern music inevitably turns into how it doesn’t have the magic of his PS1-/PS2-era stuff, and admittedly you can only compose Vagrant Story one time, but every time I listen to one of these random solo soundtracks he’s done it has good chords and random tonal fuckery and fine orchestration/ensemble writing and I enjoy it. And I enjoyed this soundtrack because it has good chords and random tonal fuckery and fine orchestration/ensemble writing! It’s just nice.
Recommended tracks:
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“The Warlock of Books Mountain” is the quirkiest track, we all love the funy whole tone sound
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“The Erishing Hills” starts off with a pretty guitar/wind duet section, the rest of the track kind of gives me Hirogami vibes (though without the rhythmic shenanigans)
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“Armies of the Dead” is one of the big orchestral tracks and also one of the most threatening-sounding
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