I Played Too Many MMOs As A Child, Part 1: Subspace/Continuum

Maybe this should be part 2, on account of my even older experiences with the Free Internet Chess Server… but we’ll get to that someday.

When I was but an egg, my father gave me the best gift any father could give his child – a shareware compilation called Total Arcade 98. This slightly dodgy (and oddly casino simulator heavy) collection was my introduction to many of the games I’d play later in my childhood – Earthworm Jim, Mega Man X3, Logical Journey of the Zoombinis (more relevant to the edutainment era of my youth), and so forth. It also contained an early beta of Subspace – a massively multiplayer online action game that I couldn’t properly experience, because as a small child my access to the internet was… iffy at best. I still opened it up many times just to fly around offline and collect powerups in an empty environment. It really didn’t take much to keep me entertained in elementary school. Fast forwards a few years – I was 10, going on 11, and Home of the Underdogs (the legendary abandonware site of the era) was suddenly my main source of games, to the point that the same dad would use work internet to burn me CDs with anything I couldn’t fit on a floppy. Then, I made my way to the forums, and speak of the devil – Subspace was back in my life, with a story that in retrospect has played out repeatedly during my tenure in this body.

Anatomy of VGM #33: Final Fantasy 7 (1997, PS1/PC)

This is the first time in a while that I’ve decided to write about the music of a game soon after playing it. Final Fantasy VII is, by my appraisal, pretty good. It’s much sillier than it seemingly intends to be, and there’s a lot of jank in the mechanics and UX, but it kept me entertained for about 35 hours, and that’s got to count for something given the state of the world that I’m playing it in… uh… let’s talk about the tunes!

On a structural level, FF7’s OST doesn’t feel that different from the previous game’s. We’re moving from a console that used sample based playback (the SNES, with a Sony-built sound chip to boot!) to one that also used sample based playback (the PS1, which admittedly could store more and/or higher quality samples, assuming you didn’t just use Red Book audio). Nobuo Uematsu also returned to score this game, and my impression is that he hasn’t drastically changed up his tools of the trade. Perhaps Final Fantasy VII emphasizes symphonic arrangements over rock themed ones? Final Fantasy VI felt more balanced in that regard, but overall, the fundamental DNA here is the same.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to deep-listen and find my brain focused in on the musical continuity. I guess a lot of it just comes down to how good the SNES’s sound chip could sound if you knew what you were doing. That being said, Final Fantasy VII is still blocked in its quest for musical verisimilitude by the limits of its sampled synthesizers. This might actually be a good thing. First, we’re dealing with a game that’s taken a heavy dose of cyberpunk dystopia and otherwise industrial aesthetics, whether it’s the giant city of Midgar, the naval base at Junon, the Mako reactors strewn across Gaia. Square didn’t offer us harsh noise, trance techno, or nu metal on this soundtrack, but they did choose a song palette that complements the cold, artificial feeling of these environments. Things admittedly get warmer in smaller towns (Costa del Sol would like a word), but this is definitely a more industrial soundtrack in spirit, if definitely not in genre.

The impression I’ve ended up with is that Uematsu played it pretty safe, taking things that worked in the previous Final Fantasy games, refining them, and expanding the formula carefully at best. Even “One Winged Angel” with its dissonance and choral sections has precedent! Remember, VI featured both the opera house segment and an entire orchestral suite for the ultimate battle with Kefka. Ultimately, this is fine (fine… al?), but this doesn’t feel like the kind of sound track that really deeply penetrates my subconscious. I would’ve been interested to hear a more experimental soundtrack – perhaps a full on embrace of an industrial/electronica sound would’ve been interesting? Perhaps deeper into the experimental classical? It’s all very hypothetical, short of me deciding to create some Final Fantasy fansongs. I’m sure Square could’ve pulled off something different if they wanted to, but I can’t really complain about what we got.

In other words, re-release Einhander, you cowards!

Anatomy of VGM #32 – Banjo-Kazooie (1998, N64)

I have a troubled relationship with Banjo-Kazooie. My adolescent attempts to explore the game typically ended in the putrescent depths of Clanker’s Cavern; I eventually lost interest and spent the rest of my Project64 days on other titles. But the long (feathered) tail of this game’s legacy remains, and from my perspective, it’s down to one person – the one, the only, the prolific Grant Kirkhope. His oeuvre is diverse, but I’ll forever more associate him with the cartoony mascot platformer music of titles like this one. If I’m not careful to monitor my own thoughts, I begin to wonder what other songs from other genres would sound like when contorted into this game’s soundfont! Needless to say, Banjo-Kazooie has particularly memorable music and sound design, but does that mean good?

There’s two major things you should know about the soundtrack to Banjo-Kazooie. First, in order to get the full experience, you need to listen to the music as you play the game. BK depends heavily on dynamic music – as you move through each level, you get multiple variations on its music depending on where you are and what’s happening, whether it’s something obvious like the peaceful underwater/cave variants, or something more complex like the seasonal variants of Click Clock Wood. Some of these are full on reorchestrations or rearrangements, which definitely ratcheted up the amount of work required to finish the soundtrack. I can appreciate this effort, but even more than the dynamic music, Banjo-Kazooie has exceptionally cartoony music! That’s probably to be expected given the rest of the game, admittedly. Either way, Grant Kirkhope’s songs are just completely deluged in silly-sounding instruments (lots of brass, kazoo, and sound effects like bees buzzing pitched to form motifs), and lots of upbeat, high energy compositions that wouldn’t be out of place in a children’s cartoon. It’s a lot.

When it comes to cartoony mascot platformer music, my main frame of reference these days is Crash Bandicoot. Good thing I wrote about those! Now, it’s my firm opinion that, at least based on those games and this one, mid-late 1990s Grant Kirkhope knew more about how to use Western/European-derived music theory when writing songs than Josh Mancell did… though I’d be remiss not to point out how much Josh developed his skills throughout the trilogy. At the very least, this means songs that are more accessible, though I’d argue that these arrangements have some nice meat on their bones that you can appreciate if you keep listening to them. There’s one slight problem – a lot of the tracks here are obnoxious – if you’re the proprietor of Invisible Blog (and believe me, I am), you’ll find some of the ideas here really grate on you. “Gobi’s Valley” is my canonical example – despite being a desert tune, it drowns in a deluge of harmonic minor noodling that’s intended to evoke stereotypical “Middle Eastern” music. Perhaps this isn’t the place for me to request a deep delve into the region’s traditions in order to compose something that’s respectful? Calling this game out on its reliance on stereotypes for characters isn’t going to achieve much, though my doing so might bring you some joy and cringe.

Ultimately, while there’s a decent chunk of musical effort to sink your teeth into should you listen to the soundtrack of Banjo-Kazooie, you’ll need to find a way to attune to the extremely bold flavors. Good luck with that!

Anatomy of VGM #30: Ys I & II (1987/1988/2009, PC88/Windows)

What a tangled web Falcom has woven with the Ys series! The first two titles have been repeatedly re-released and remade since their debut on the PC-88. Guess there’s just something about the whole bump combat system (your primary method of offense is to ram into enemies slightly off center). Writing about this series could be a major rabbit hole, so for today, I’m going to focus primarily on two iterations – the original PC-88 duology, and their arguably ultimate form (Ys I & II Chronicles), complete with its own high fidelity rerecording of the games’ storied soundtrack.

First point that should pique your attention for these games is their composers. Ys I & II were composed by Mieko Ishikawa, whom I don’t know well, but who’s produced a lot of music for Falcom, and Yuzo Koshiro, who’s a straight up superstar of VGM by my appraisal. The PC88 version takes advantage of the system’s robust FM synthesis chip, making for rich, bright sounds, though the percussion options suffer. The Adlib chip so many IBM PC DOS games used had a similar issue, for whatever that’s worth. A few things stick out to me. First, each of these games have a surprisingly large amount of music, given the era. A lot of contemporary (late ’80s) console and computer games either went for short loops, or in the case of the European scenes, put all the compositional effort into one song that maybe played on the title screens. The loops here, though, are decently lengthy (typically over a minute), which especially comes in handy for the cruder, grindier gameplay of these original incarnations.

What really makes the Ys series shine musically is its immediate, in your face approach to songwriting. There’s plenty of video games and ARPGs that go for more ambient music, but Ys generally avoids that, in favor of straight up synth rock goodness. While the towns and shops in the series tend towards calmer tunes, there’s still a major emphasis on catchy melodies, with a surprising amount of polyphony and counterpoint girding everything. In short, this is densely packed music that you can spend a while analyzing, even in the initial PC88 versions. Good place to start a legacy, I’d say. I wonder how much of this comes down to consumer expectations in the Japanese PC scene of the ’80s, but that’s a too much of a rabbit hole to deal with here.

We’d see a lot of remakes of these soundtracks as a whole after these games, but we’d also see some songs and leitmotifs make their way into other games in the series. For what it’s worth, I did very recently finish playing Ys Origin – for now, I’ll say that its song remakes were often more faithful than those of Chronicles, though they also expanded on the originals in different ways than you’ll see here. By the time we got to 2009, mind you, Falcom had a lot more budget and technology on their side, and it goes to show in the Chronicles remakes. The already intricate FM synth of the originals is replaced with either full live orchestral arrangements (see the towns), or straight up rock bordering on metal instrumentation. There’s a decent chunk of compositional changes, too, whether it’s altered tempos, new musical layers, rhythm changes et al. One interesting addition I noticed is the frequent use of solo violin – this seems to be a frequent trademark of the series’ music by now. Maybe the current composers just like violin? It does sound good. Outside compositional changes, there’s a couple of new tracks strewn throughout this version of the soundtrack. Some of them appear to be unused tracks from the PC88 originals (notably “Dreaming”) that’ve been bumped up to proper additions here, but as far as I know, some of the new tracks are original to the remake line that started in the late ’90s with Ys Eternal and eventually brought us here. Either way, these additions are appreciated!

To be honest, this isn’t my favorite Ys soundtrack (at the moment, that’s probably III/The Oath In Felghana), but it’s a very strong starting point, and it’s worth a listen even if you don’t end up playing the games. I wouldn’t blame you – while the remakes do a lot to slough off the archaic nature of the originals, there’s still a lot more cryptic maze navigation and grinding et al than I’d have the patience for more than once or twice. You’ll probably see more Ys soundtracks in the future of this series.

Anatomy of VGM #29 – Mega Man X4 (PS1/Saturn/Windows)

In my adolescence, I went through something of a liminal period where I was bullish about the prospects of running PlayStation through emulation, but was still stuck on dialup. The solution, more often than not, was to buy used copies on Amazon. This is how I got my hands on Symphony of the Night, Final Fantasy 9, and also today’s topic. Let nobody ever question my role in fueling Jeff Bezos’ dark armies of retail and cloud computing! Anyways, I’ve got a lot of Mega Man X nostalgia – I may have put more hours into the SNES titles, but X4 has a special place in my heart. I should probably try and get that looked at, though; what if it causes a clot?

Silliness aside, this is a pretty step for the X series. Capcom had plenty of titles on Playstation at this point (including Mega Man 8, which has an interesting take on the series’ music all its own), and the last X game eventually made it to the land of 32-bit consoles and Red Book CD audio, but this one pushes the envelope further. Interestingly, this one’s got a single composer again – enter Toshihiko Horiyama, who did some work on the original X and also 7. Let me be the first to thank you; your efforts keep my blogposts self-referential and loaded with links. It’s for a good cause, though, since X4 amps up production and instrumentation standards further than any game in the franchise before. While X2 came close, this is the first time any of the games has included really convincing metal, at least from a pure aural perspective. There’s still a lot of relatively gentle synth material, but the overall recording quality is also up, which is greatly appreciated.

When it comes to actual arrangements, Mega Man X4 occupies a happy medium point between simple, accessible songwriting (X1, X3) and the complex/ambitious material (7, X2) that some composers seem to favor. The average loop length is still pretty short; luckily Yoriyama doesn’t try to cram too much song into limited space. For what it’s worth, most of the melodic development is in the synth lines, and the metal part of the band typically plays a supporting role (though Double’s battle theme has noisy guitar solos and generally thrashes about wildly). If you put soundtrack duties like this in my hands, I’m going to try for more of a balance between the two, but this game came out in 1997; I was preoccupied at the time with Jump Start and other educational titles. Either way, it’s a personal preference in my own work that doesn’t especially affect this. I guess the only thing I can really say is that a few of the arrangements feel a bit scatterbrained, like they’re trying to throw in a few more phrases quickly before it’s time to loop and cede time to the rest of the CD. It’s a lot more coherent than X2 ever was, though.

In terms of “reasons Planepacked sounds the way it does”, Mega Man X4 probably isn’t quite up there with tracker music, or even some of the PS1’s wilder OSTs (Einhander and G-Darius come to mind), but it’s somewhere in the personal pantheon, and that’s a worthy accomplishment.

Anatomy of VGM #27 – Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped! (1998, PS1)

Here it is, folks – the Crash Bandicoot game I put only a perfunctory effort into. Luckily for me, souls more patient than I have invested countless hours into both the PS1 original and the N. Sane Trilogy remaster. Kind of funny how that happens with the megapopular games! From what I’ve seen of Warped, it’s got the most gameplay substyles of the PS1 trilogy by far, which could grate on you if you liked the more focused, but still polished platforming of Cortex Strikes Back. That part I’ll leave to public opinion, but to get it out of the way – the music on Warped continues to approach the platonic ideal of what a Crash soundtrack should sound like – Saturday morning cartoon music with plenty of atmosphere, but also with a strong emphasis on coherent song structures and catchy melodies. As is tradition on Invisible Blog, I frequently pose the question of “does this work succeed?” at the end of the first paragraph, as if I don’t already know the answer, and today’s no exception!

Successful or not, the Crash games have always been interesting to write about from a musicological perspective. Josh Mancell has a distinct aesthetic as a composer that pervades all three of the PS1 series (and presumably CTR as well; I’ll get back to you on that if I ever play it), and it continues to evolve here. The moments of darkness from Crash 1 are more or less gone here, pretty much in favor of more genre experimentation. This does result in an overall more diverse soundtrack. One side effect is that the N. Sane Trilogy remaster adds fewer composition changes than before, mostly limiting itself to percussion and some degree of ambient sound effects (one major exception being the Arabian themed levels). There’s one exception, though. Warped now has dedicated bonus stage and death route themes, which in practice is closer to how Crash 1 handled it. I much prefer this approach to Crash 2’s “worse song using the same instrumentation as the main stage” method, but I’m admittedly very biased. Either way, it does contribute some cohesion to the end result.

Other than the genre bending, I’d say Warped‘s music mostly just iterates on its predecessor in sensible ways. I mentioned the songwriting in particular. The tunes in these games originally had lots of melodic asides – phrases interjected for reasons I didn’t find entirely clear, to the point that I perceived them as senseless noodling. Mancell cut down on those a lot for Warped, which I appreciate a great deal! That being said, he figured out a better way to work in asides; ironically, he does so by incorporating more drastic rhythmic and textural changes than before. That helps with overall contrast, making for more interesting transitions and otherwise resulting in a more dynamic product.

Overall, while it’s not something I expect to listen to all the time, Warped really makes the Crash Bandicoot songwriting formula gel together like never before, and that’s worth commemorating.

Anatomy of VGM #24 – Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (1997, PS1)

I already mentioned this the last time we talked about cartoony mascot platformers, but Crash Bandicoot 2 is an improvement over its predecessor in every way. It looks better, feels better to play, offers more gameplay variety, has a fairer difficulty curve, and most importantly for our purposes – it has a better soundtrack. I didn’t get to either of this one’s endings (I decided I’d had about enough when they introduced the jetpack), but I still got to experience most of this one’s tracks in their indigenous environment, so that’s got to count for something.

On a technical level, Crash 2‘s music comes from the same place as that of its predecessor. You still have slightly tinny, sample-based music courtesy of Mutato Muzika’s Josh Mancell. It sounds to me like the actual audio quality of the samples is slightly higher than before, but this isn’t where the main improvements come from. What Crash 2 brings to the table in particular is a stronger grasp on music theory. Songs here have more in the way of coherent melody and structure this time around, which is pretty helpful if you want me to listen to them outside the scope of playing the game or writing about it’s music. Rhythm sections here are also more active than before, though the mixing of instruments still de-emphasizes them. Despite this, the darker, more ambient moments that pervaded the original Crash Bandicoot soundtrack are more or less missing here; the jury’s out on whether that’s a good thing or not. The N. Sane Trilogy again ups the recording quality and adds more vigorous percussion; despite the lack of grimdark tracks in the original, it still manages to completely change the feel of several tracks (“Turtle Woods” being the most prominent). I don’t remember if Crash 2 overall has more fast paced platforming than Crash 1, so I’m guessing this is just stylistic evolution.

Despite these changes for the better, Crash hasn’t entirely escaped the songwriting flaws of his last game. I’ve complained a great deal about the predecessor’s meandering and aimless tracks. In terms of main level themes, Crash 2 comes out ahead for its music theory acumen. However, it also adds variants of each track that play when you enter a bonus stage, or enter a special route by getting to a point in a stage without dying. Both of these tend to feel extraneous at best, but the bonus stages in particular feel off, like Mancell wanted to make a “happier” alternate theme but couldn’t quite figure out how to retain much in the way of structure at the same time. Pretty disappointing given how much he improved in other respects! I’ve also realized over time that the pure hit of wacky cartoon energy of Crash’s music overall can get pretty grating if I’m focusing on it for a long time. Crash 1, for all its songwriting flaws, was a bit more varied in mood, and for what it’s worth, Crash Bandicoot 3 was as well. As for whether the sequel improves on this game? You’ll have to check back when I decide I’m up for writing about it.

That being said, while Crash Bandicoot 2 doesn’t resolve all the beefs (bandicoot jerky?) I had with Crash 1, you’re still getting a better soundtrack to go with your better game. Continued perseverance in game development has its rewards!

Anatomy of VGM #23 – Baba Is You (2019)

This puzzling game is having something of a moment in my skullbrain. Baba Is You is basically a Sokoban derivative with one game-defining mutation – the rules for how various objects interact exist in the levels, and you can move them around to alter the game’s behavior. Combine this with turn based time, and you end up with a very laid back puzzle game that will regardless tax your brain and stimulate your lateral thinking. Is it any wonder, then, that the soundtrack has the same approach?

If Invisible Blog specialized in one word summaries of its topics, I would gleefully describe Baba Is You‘s music as “sparse”. Unfortunately, I hold myself to a (marginally) higher standard. That being said, minimalism is certainly the emphasis throughout. The graphics here take the form of squiggly pixel art – everything is monochromatic and laid out on a grid, and the music plays out on a small subset of synthesizer sounds, as well as a bit of sampled percussion and ambience for good measure. There’s even something of a lowpass filter cutting out all the high frequencies, making everything throb with bass. Overall, the effect is similar to old computer games, though I’m sure authenticity to retrocomputing standards wasn’t the goal here. Either way, there’s not all that many notes to play, so our composer and general creator (Arvi Teikari) has to be very careful and meticulous to pull off something worth listening to.

Fortunately for us, Baba Is You delivers in this regard as well. The songs here aren’t at all long or in-depth, but they’re well crafted, with clear structures, themes, and coherent development. In particular, they use their limited runtimes to experiment with some neat ideas. In particular, there’s an almost impressionistic approach to tonality at times – often slightly dissonant, but always justified in some fashion by the phrases around them. If I fixate on this, it’s because it’s one of my buttons, and it’s easily pressed. The other thing I noticed was the percussion. Mastodon incidents aside, this is pretty rare for me to pay attention to, but Baba Is You‘s previously established minimalism means it’s got more of a foothold in my brain. It’s impressive how much mileage these tunes get out of so few drum hits; what little there is interlocks with the rest of the instruments in a way that I find pleasing. I’m not sure if that says more about me or the music, but it helps that I’ve had my brain primed for minimalism.

The lesson here is pretty simple, really – make something that’s sufficiently trance-inducing and gate it behind some logic puzzles, and I’ll listen to it at least for a while. Tie it into the overall feel of the game, and you’ll be able to keep my attention even when I’ve finished.

Highlights: “Cog is Push”, “Leaf is Move”, “Tree is Shift”, “Rocket is Dust”

Anatomy of VGM #22 – Mega Man X2 (1994, SNES)

Mega Man X2 is the Mega Man 3 of the Mega Man X series, at least when it comes to music. Bear with me for a second.

Anatomy of VGM #21 – Crash Bandicoot (1996, PS1)

So I haven’t quite had the intended Crash Bandicoot experience. I remember running the game in a PlayStation emulator many years ago, but I only got around to delving the franchise when the N. Sane Trilogy made its way to PC. If my Steam client is to be believed, I spent 16.5 hours on the trilogy – I’m not generally a fan of platforming games (though Super Mario Odyssey is probably going to make an appearance here someday), but I get the appeal. This series’ music, on the other hand, has lived rent free in my head for much longer. There’s got to be something to that! Best to start at the beginning.

Crash Bandicoot‘s music comes from the mind of Josh Mancell; prior to this he’d built up experience working with Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO fame as an employee of Mutato Muzika. Mancell wastes no time in establishing a signature sound for Crash, immediately cartoony and atmospheric in equal measures. In 1996, he was working under some technical constraints, too; the PlayStation version of Crash Bandicoot uses sample-based music, which sometimes means some heavily compressed/bit-crushed instrumentation, or grainy samples at looooooooooow frequencies. Given the wizardry required to get the original game running on the PlayStation at all, I guess this makes sense; more importantly, I think it’s behind the ambient bent of these tracks! The N. Sane Trilogy remasters actually changes that a lot – the rhythm sections of these tracks are expanded; more often than not completely changing the overall feel of a song. “Temple Ruins” and “Slippery Climb” illustrate this perfectly – on PlayStation, they’re foreboding, but the new percussion renders the remastered variants frantic and tense. Your personal preferences may vary, but both play to various strengths of Crash Bandicoot‘s gameplay.

There’s just one problem, and it’s a bit of a doozy. The actual song content here… isn’t very good. The remasters don’t change much in terms of actual song content, so what you end up with is a lot of noodling without much in the way of composition. At times, it feels like Mancell was just playing random notes (albeit ones that fit his key); either way, once I got past the aesthetic strengths, there wasn’t enough of an arrangement to hold my attention, or do much than serve as an admittedly appropriate backdrop to the many player deaths I experienced pushing through. One lesson I take from my DMU days, politically troubling as I find them nowadays, is that you can generally rearrange a good song into a completely different genre and retain some core of what made the original worth your time in the first place. There’s admittedly exceptions where the actual sounds themselves are an integral part of the experience, but Crash Bandicoot isn’t one of them. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to attempt their own rearrangements and let me know how well that works out for you.

There’s a few tracks here that point to the better songwriting of future Crash games (Nitrus Brio’s theme being my canonical example), but then again, Crash Bandicoot the First is, if you ask me, systemically outclassed by its two sequels. That being said, it’s still the foundation upon which Naughty Dog devoured the PlayStation.

Anatomy of VGM #20 – Sonic Mania (2017)

Given my more or less auditory relationship with the Blue Blur at this point, I figured Sonic Mania might be a nice way to bring back a feature that we haven’t seen since my deadname days. Let’s be honest – this game is a masterpiece; a distillation of everything that made the Sega Genesis era of Sonic great, and an extraordinary boon for jewelers and goldsmiths worldwide. The soundtrack is no exception. This franchise has had far more good soundtracks than good games; either way, I don’t see any reason why we can’t figure out what makes Sonic Mania‘s music tick.

One thing that wasn’t present in my previous discussion of Sonic music is the series’ traditional approach to stage music. To summarize, each stage has two variants of its main theme – an original, and then a remixed version. Occasionally the latter gets phoned in, like with the “intermittently cut out half the channels” approach of Sonic the Hedgehog 3, but this isn’t an issue here. Now, Sonic Mania is partially a “greatest hits” title that reprises several levels from past games. The Act 1 stages usually stick close to the original tracks, albeit with higher fidelity production. Act 2, on the other hand, is where the composer (Tee Lopes, who’d previously done lots of Sonic-related remixes) really gets to flex his muscles. Either way, you’re getting a lot of classic songs that have been convoluted in some way to put a new spin(dash) on things. Sonic CD does actually strike me as a clear musical ancestor, at least in its original Japanese incarnation. You get a hefty dose of house/EDM/’80s R&B influence by virtue of the source material, and that makes for a pulsing, driving time.

The other half of Sonic Mania‘s music, for what it’s worth, is its fully original content. You get about one classic Sonic game’s OST worth of new material. Besides presenting some fun twists on the typical Sonic gameplay formula, these stages showcase some of the game’s most creative songwriting. Nothing’s too far from the CD inspired mold of the existing music, but the instrumentation and song structures are more diverse. The in-game remixes also go further in reinventing existing material – Press Garden is probably the most obvious example, with its switch from “press” to “garden” exemplified by its transformation from triplet-heavy guitar and organ jam to a slower jazzy synthfest. Some of these tracks take more time to gel, but it’s worth taking the time to digest what’s happening musically.

Gushing aside, the strengths of Sonic Mania‘s soundtrack match those of the game. I don’t know if either will have neophytes creating OCs on deviantART any time soon, but the mastery on display is always appreciated.

Anatomy of VGM #19 – Super Metroid (1994)

Forget what I said recently about Thunder Force IV influencing my musical tastes. I mean, it’s technically true, but Super Metroid has almost certainly penetrated deeper. For here, it should suffice to say that I’ve got a deep personal connection with this game (and the copy of ZSNES I was using to emulate it, way back in 2004). A review of Super Metroid as a whole here on Invisible Blog would probably devolve into frenetic gushing and pseudoreligious frenzy, but there’s definitely enough content on the aural side of things to be interesting.

The first thing I noticed upon returning to Super Metroid after so many years is that it puts forth its stark, alien, minimalist side first. After a few tense notes, the title screen reprises the main motif of the original NES Metroid‘s themes, but crucially, it omits the melodic development that once followed those first few notes – already, this is a colder and darker theme, even though the improved hardware could easily support a richer audio palette if the composers here were so inclined. It’s also using grainy, lo-fi samples. From a technical stance, this brings to mind a lot of subpar SNES titles that waste the SPC700’s potential. The other half of this, though, is that Super Metroid‘s degraded and sometimes clunky soundset contributes to the atmosphere of isolation and unease that the rest of the game creates.

The other major trend compared to the previous two Metroid titles (though, from what I’ve heard, Return of Samus did something… different) is that Super Metroid is far more orchestrated and melodramatic. Part of it is that you can more easily do this on an SNES. However, this also means that the game explores more musical ideas than its predecessors by far, even though it’s not a significantly longer experience. While most of the music here is sparse and atmospheric, there’s also a few lighter, even triumphant sounding themes mixed in, like that of Brinstar and the second theme of Crateria. I won’t fault the composers – sometimes, you need music to encapsulate your new capabilities as a Samus. Even with these moments, Zebes is still a dangerous place that can only absorb so much triumph and joy before it explodes. What else is there really to say? There’s still some emphasis on memorable melodies at points in this soundtrack, but this is still a cold soundtrack, even when you descend into the magmatic hellscape of Norfair.

At the very least, this is an example of how to perfectly tailor music to a game. I cannot imagine that Super Metroid would function as well as it does with a different soundtrack.

P.S: This is another one of those SNES games that someone has taken the time to produce a really good set of Genesis remixes for.

Anatomy of VGM #18 – Thunder Force IV (1992)

These notes are becoming a tradition, aren’t they? This game was released under the embarrassing name of “Lightening Force” in the USA. The music’s the same, though.

This game’s an old (< 2009AD) favorite of mine. Much of that was due to the soundtrack, but it was only once I revisited the game a couple years after my formal induction into metal music fandom that I understood what was happening here. While Thunder Force IV sticks most in my head for its veritable arsenal of traditional heavy metal music (think Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, etc.), it’s more diverse than I remembered, with excursions into spacey jazz, funk, and even a faux-orchestral section towards the end (“Down Right Attack”). It really does push the admittedly powerful sound capabilities of the Sega Genesis to their limit – and this was in 1992!

The metal/nonmetal dichotomy is the key to Thunder Force IV‘s music. Generally, you can expect boss themes and other major musical cues to be metallic, whereas stage music merely has the potential to be – and even that gets increasingly brutal and pyrotechnic as you progress into the second half of the game. You might as well take the time to enjoy the more laid back tracks early on, though – while it’s perhaps too on the nose to match your music like this, it still works splendidly, giving you a chance to appreciate the lighter sounds in a less chaotic environment. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of theming beyond this, but Tecnosoft can get away with that more when they have the hook writing abilities they have.

The other big reason Thunder Force IV has such good music is that its composers have mastered the wall of sound. Every channel on the YM2162 is running at full blast and utilized to its fullest potential. Part of the soundset here (example: the slap bass) is tailor made for FM synthesis, but Tecnosoft also makes good use of the chip’s sampling capabilities for things like percussion. The crown jewel, though, at least from a metalhead’s perspective is the simulated guitar. People who have heard an actual electric guitar turned all the way up to 11 aren’t going to confuse the sounds here for the real thing, but it’s more important that they’ve matched the role and timbre of a guitar in these songs. I’m essentially saying that it’s a heavily distorted and aggressive sound that stands in well for the real thing. The soundwall also extends to how these songs are written – they’re full of intricate melodies with lots of instruments backing them, and even the more laid back songs are often full of flashy synth leads or similar. Needless to say, there are a lot of cool musical ideas here that will take you a while to digest, which fits with the game’s punishing difficulty.

Now that I think about it, these tracks (and particularly their clean integration of both conventional-style and synth instrumentation into a metal context) are probably one of the reasons I became the type of composer I am today. Metalheads and chiptune lovers take note alike.

Highlights: “Space Walk”, “Sand Hell”, “Metal Squad”, “Tan Tan Ta Ta Ta Tan”

Anatomy of VGM #17: Jazz Jackrabbit (1994)

Funny true story – I had a childhood, and Jazz Jackrabbit figured greatly in it, at least when it comes to computer games. Between this, Lemmings, and Populous: The Beginning, I was pretty much the demographic for Home of the Underdogs… but that’s a story for another day.

It took me a while to realize just how lucky I had it with Jazz Jackrabbit‘s OST. In 1994, lots of PC games were still stuck with an Adlib they usually didn’t know how to use. This game, however, supports the legendary Gravis Ultrasound, which… usually was a sign that maybe you could get something more. Epic developed and published quite a few games willing to take advantage of this aural horsepower. In the case of Jazz Jackrabbit, you get a big chunk of Amiga style tracker music, and that’s used to fuel a rockin’ soundtrack full of funk, techno, and a bit of heavy metal for good measure. Nothing here is especially serious, melodramatic, or grim, but when your game is about a cartoon rabbit running around and murdering turtles with a laser gun, you can probably get away with that.

Jazz Jackrabbit‘s music is crammed into a mere four channels of instrumentation. As I’ve discussed before, this imposes specific constraints on what you can do. With a sample based format like the “Protracker” sound modules this game uses, though, it’s a lot easier to pull off some of the polyphonic ornamentation and instrumental variety (who would’ve guessed) tricks that composers can use to generate musical interest. Jazz Jackrabbit makes very heavy use of this – most prominently to build its rhythms, but also to implement sound effects like fake reverb and gating tricks. It suffices to say that the sound quality is top notch for 1994, and only streaming CD audio was really able to challenge it at the time.

However, mere effects aren’t enough to secure JJ‘s position in the pantheon of music I enjoy. The music here isn’t as cartoony or genre-diverse as its successor, but it’s still got a rock solid set of compositions. What particularly stands out to me at this point in time is the rhythm section. It might be the funk/soul influence as filtered through decades of electronic dance music, but there’s some very syncopated percussion here – from the brassy title theme, to the urban swagger of “Industrius”, but also the minimalistic electro of “Technoir”, or the goofy vocal textures of “Orbitus”. The songs here are also lengthy enough to build on their ideas, which is good since Jazz Jackrabbit has large, labyrinthine levels full of secrets and enemies that could very well kill you if you set the difficulty level beyond your skills. The last thing you want is to be driven mad by miniscule loops.

Ultimately, I think the composers here (Robert Allen and Joshua Jensen) did a great job with the music in this game. Admittedly, Alexander Brandon’s work on the sequel exceeded this already very high standard, but he also had a couple more years of experience underneath his belt. I’d go into more detail about his contemporary work if I hadn’t done so already.

Anatomy of VGM #16 – Tyrian (1995)

This feature is based off the definitive release (Tyrian 2000), and the AdLib version of the soundtrack.

It might not be a major theme here on Invisible Blog, but I have never been a big advocate for Yamaha’s OPL2/OPL3 sound chips (often sold as part of an AdLib sound card), at least not in isolation. FM synthesis has a very particular sound that’s well suited to certain styles of music, but many of the compositions for these chips (read: An enormous compilation of DOS games) disregard this, to questionable results. As a result, the gap between good and bad OSTs for DOS games is enormous! Tyrian is very definitely on the good side, and it is my go to game for anyone who wants an idea of what an expert can do with an Adlib.

Tyrian‘s music is about equally split between fast paced, upbeat synthpop/rock songs and more evocative, theatrical filmscore type music. Most of the tracks here were written by Alexander Brandon, who would go on to write more ‘tracker’ type music for games like Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex throughout the ’90s. A few were handled by one Andreas Molnar, who also apparently served as the sound programmer (at least for the Adlib version of the music). Tyrian‘s musical prowess is the result of their close collaboration, as the tracks here both play to the strengths of the OPL chips and demonstrate solid writing. The most obvious example of this is the variety of audio effects Brandon and Molnar pull off – ADSRM tricks in the instrumentation, screaming pitch bends to simulate guitarwork, pounding echoing percussion where a lesser sequencer would be limited to mere taps and tinkles. These types of tricks help add aesthetic flavor to the music at hand.

Since Tyrian‘s music exists in more forms than Adlib in an attempt to support more sound cards, we have to take a closer look at the writing to get to the heart of why it’s so well regarded. There’s a few factors here – I mentioned the broad types of music it contains, but for its length it’s an especially varied soundtrack, constantly exposing the listener to new musical ideas as they blast through the game’s generally short levels. In general, it holds these together with a focus on simple, direct, poppy writing focused on hooky motifs. Probably the best example of this is “Rock Garden” – a rather obviously named rock song that puts the OPL to good use with surprisingly realistic guitars (given the technology). It’s also based around two riffs with alternating guitar and organ solos. There’s not much there, but what IS there is as expertly honed as a carved diamond. The less rock-oriented tracks maintain this focus on leitmotif, from the soaring chords of the Asteroid Dances, to the complicated interplay of synth in “Tyrian: The Level”, to the driving energy of “Gyges”, and so forth. In short, while you could easily do more ambitious things with the Adlib, this comes off as more of an example of how to push a subset of its abilities to their limits.

The rest of Tyrian is good too, and you can play it for free nowadays due to the generosity of its creators. The other systems in the game could fill weeks of coverage here on Invisible Blog if I were so inclined.

Anatomy of VGM #15 – Mega Man X (1993)

When I decided to take a look at Mega Man X‘s music, I was laboring under the false impression that I’d done similar for more than a single game in the franchise. I do not know what universe this belief came from, but there’s still some kernel of truth to it. The armada of composers who have written music for Mega Man and its legion of subseries have all put their own unique spin on it… …well, maybe not the composer of the DOS versions pushed out by Rozner Labs, but in their defense, they don’t exist, because those games have no music. Mega Man X clearly doesn’t have that problem. As the first Mega Man to appear on the SNES (though far from Capcom’s first title for the system), the soundtrack matches the overall goal for the game – it expands on the core concepts and puts them in a new context, but you can still hear the elements of a Mega Man soundtrack.

To really understand how MMX fits into the megaseries (!), we need to start with a good understanding of what makes a Mega Man soundtrack in general. I’ve mentioned before that the NES installments didn’t exactly push the 2A03 to its limits, but succeeded in accompanying Dr. Wily’s follies with memorable poppy tunes. Meanwhile, the third game onwards saw Capcom’s rotating door lineup of composers experimenting with more complicated variants on this formula to mixed results. If you ask me, Mega Man X leans more towards the former, in that it favors overall intensity and pop hooks over elaboration and diversity. However, it does benefit from the broader sound palette and extra sound channels that the SNES has over its predecessor. Beyond this, it retains the generally upbeat aesthetic that I’ve come to expect from the Mega Man franchise as a whole. Later X-series games would push for more darkness and edge, but I’m not familiar enough with those games to know if their composers cooperated with that.

In general, Mega Man X‘s music fits well into a hard rock/heavy metal mold. It’s got prominent guitar work that exists in precarious balance with a versatile palette of synthesizers. There are also a few excursions into more speed/thrash metal oriented territory that I appreciate, but they’re exceptions to the rule, and if I were you I wouldn’t expect a SNES game to explore sample based metal music in that much detail. While there are exceptions to that rule, this game sticks to its niche. This mostly works out, but one thing that particularly bugs me is the weak sample quality. That’s not something you want to have when you’re composing for the SNES; but MMX’s catchy tunes are (in their initial form) marred by plastic sounding guitars and grainy percussion. In general, the sample fidelity is pretty lacking – more space on the cartridge might’ve helped, but it would also have driven up the price of the game. Mega Man X2 a year later was actually a major step up in this regard, for whatever that’s worth.

While sample quality is a pretty significant flaw, it’s one that I think we can easily look past. Due to its popularity, many a composer has contorted MMX‘s tracks into their instruments of choice, so if the aesthetics of the original bother you too much, you shouldn’t have any trouble finding a replacement. Barring that, the soundtrack of Mega Man X will give you a good idea of how a composer can put their own unique spin on an established sound, especially when they’ve got a hardware upgrade to help them.

P.S: Speaking of hardware upgrades, here‘s a quality remix of the OST for the Sega Genesis’s YM2612 chip.

Anatomy of VGM #14: Battle Garegga (1996)

Artwork from the Japanese arcade version flyer. We’ll be discussing the original soundtrack this time around… as usual.

Last week’s nominally bullet hell inspired recording got me thinking about shmups again. Battle Garegga was always one of my favorites, and an important milestone in the rise of the bullet hell genre (in fact, I’ve heard it inspired the folks at Cave to push themselves to new limits when they released Dodonpachi a year later). It’s music is a milestone of mastery for FM synth enthusiasts, a loving encapsulation of EDM/techno trends of the ’90s, and entirely worthy of the hyperbole I am slathering it in at this very moment. In the interest of hype, you should make sure you’ve listened to it before reading onwards.

The composer responsible for Battle Garegga‘s aural excellence is Manabu Namiki, who rose to prominence working for 8ing/Raizing before later joining up with Cave. His early work outside this game also serves as a master class for how to use FM synthesis in music. To be fair, the tracks here are not exclusively based on FM synth; the hardware the arcade cabinet uses also has some sampling capabilities that are used mostly for percussion and electric piano hits. Pure FM synthesis tends to model this sort of thing poorly, so having some basic noise generation or sampling capability frees the FM up to do the electronic/synthetic sounds it excels at. That in itself was pretty common – in the Western world, your best reference for this is probably the Sega Genesis, which had the capacity to pull this off between all of its sound hardware. Still, when you consider just how good the FM synth in this game sounds – lots of resonant pads and thumping bass, and the genres it covers, it’s a sign that Namiki has the aesthetics where he needs them.

As previously mentioned, Battle Garegga is a techno soundtrack of the sort that I suspect was most popular in the early ’90s. The instrumentation is what really tips me off; it results in a lot of midpaced, rhythmically simple tracks that focus most of their complexity on melodic/harmonic exploration and sound layering. There’s also a funk/jazz component here that occasionally syncopates the percussion into offbeat grooves; it’s not always present, but it makes for good contrast and variety. The aspect that sticks out most for me, though, is the aforementioned chord progressions. I’ve always been a sucker for this sort of “extended harmony but still relatively consonant” approach (Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel will attest to this if you dig them out of their graves), but Battle Garegga does this in a more contemporary, jazz-inflected way than most of what I listen to in my leisure time.

I cannot sing the praises of this OST enough, but what I’ve written here should be more than enough to give you an idea of why it’s so impressive.

Highlights: “Stab and Stomp!”, “Tunnel Vision”, “Subversive Awareness”

Anatomy of VGM #13: Mega Man 3 (1990)

Seems like every other installment of this series has a disclaimer about me using some random variant of the game’s boxart. In this case, the European version adapts content from the Japanese boxart and throws in an especially ghastly Doctor Wily for good measure.

This is my (admittedly biased) vote for the best Mega Man game on the NES. For the most part, it sticks to refining and iterating on the strengths of the previous two games in the series, and it hit just before the series began to get stale. The music, however, is more of a departure. The first two Mega Man games have driving, focused soundtracks that are definitely simple and accessible, but more importantly well written and memorable. Mega Man 3 is the first in the series to diversify its music beyond that formula. Capcom has had mixed luck with this approach, but I’d say it generally works well here. The actual reason for this change might be due to a roster change in the music department; in the case of Mega Man, this appears to have happened for pretty much every game in the series. MM3 was composed by Yasuaki Fujita (“Bun Bun”) and the otherwise unrelated Harumi Fujita. To my knowledge, neither of them contributed to the games surrounding this entry. All this shifting gives each game in the series its own unique character.

One thing that definitely hasn’t changed, though, is the instrumentation. Capcom’s games for the NES used (as far as I know) a very rudimentary sound driver that leaves much of the NES’s potential unused. If you’re a chip aficionado, you might be familiar with some of the neat things you can do with the console’s sound chip- sampled DPCM, complicated waveforms, neat tricks with noise generation, and so forth, but Capcom sticks to a pretty limited subset of NES audio. This isn’t innately a bad thing, but like most simple instrumentation, it means your actual song structures have to be very on point, since you can’t rely on wacky effects to grab people’s attention quite as much.

As mentioned, Mega Man 3 takes a less “direct” approach to songwriting than its predecessors. The actual compositions for instance are a bit longer; not immensely so, but enough to increase the pure amount of ideas the songs explore. We’ve also got more ornate instrumentation, particularly in the percussion – some of the robot master themes in particular have a more off-beat feel to their rhythms. The actual melodies employ a lot of counterpoint and ornamentation that wasn’t really present before. Harumi Fujita’s contributions in particular seem to double down on this oblique approach. To be fair, there are a few tracks that wouldn’t feel out of place in the previous game – Top Man and Spark Man are the closest fits, as far as I’m concerned, but overall the emphasis is more on instrumental interplay than big, obvious, monophonic hooks.

It seems like this attempt at more complex songwriting influenced the rest of the Mega Man games on NES, for better (Mega Man 5) or worse (Mega Man 4). It’s basically the NES equivalent of playing with fire – you can end up creating some surprisingly sophisticated tracks if you succeed, but if you don’t know how to manage your complexity, you can end up with some awkward, stilted-sounding tracks. Still, Capcom seems to have had enough success with the approach this game employed that it influenced even the revival games’ sounds… although by the time Mega Man 9 came out in 2008, the barriers to writing chip music had all but collapsed, so it wasn’t exactly hard for that game’s composers to go as nuts as they wanted. Either way, Mega Man 3 has long since sold me not just on the gameplay improvements it made over its predecessors, but the soundtrack improvements as well. It’s a good entry point to the series, too, so if you’ve never played any of the Mega Mans… you might as well get on that, lest you be ostracized and thrown into a pit of fire for failing to join an early millennial’s millenarian Nintendo cult.

Anatomy of VGM #12: Cities: Skylines (2015)

The boxart of the console ports of Cities: Skylines varies, but the OST is the same. This is not a review of the radio stations in-game, which amongst other things play music from other Paradox Interactive published titles.

I’ll admit it – I haven’t put nearly the hours into this game as my previous city builder of choice (SimCity 4), but I honestly think the rest of Paradox Interactive’s published titles are to blame. While Cities: Skylines lacks the sheer scale of that game, with its region building shenanigans, it’s still a great outlet for your creativity, and a far better successor to SC4 than EA’s efforts in 2013. What of the soundtrack? It’s certainly a substantial departure from the Cities in Motion series that birthed this, and even further from Jerry Martin’s approach to scoring SimCity titles, so at the very least, it’s going to win some points for audacity.

Cities: Skylines ships with 2 hours of strikingly modern/contemporary classical music. I’m not familiar with the bleeding edge of that genre, since my own experience tends towards the so called “common practice period“, but I have heard some music in the past that resembles what’s available here. The first thing you’ll notice is that the freedom of tonality – constant dissonance in the service of what more often than not is upbeat, optimistic, swelling orchestration. This is more prominent if you play relatively zoomed in – if I remember correctly, viewing your entire playing area tends to summon ambient synth soundscapes. The actual songwriting has something of an ambient feel to it as well – amorphous loops with abrupt transitions – trying to evoke overall feelings and paint pictures more than form a coherent narrative. It makes sense to a point – a simulation game like this has no preset story, so trying to score narrative setpieces might backfire – your ‘dramatic reveal’ might come as I meticulously place scenery to create a park for my Cims. I haven’t logged enough gameplay to really say how much the soundtrack reacts to your gameplay, but I suspect some of the more dissonant and imposing tracks are reserved for cities in crisis – at least those running a deficit. It’s not much, but it’s more than I’ve experienced in Maxis titles, which is at least potentially interesting.

My main difficulty in discussing the music of Cities: Skylines is that I don’t have a nostalgic attachment to it, and I can’t help but compare the music to that of Simcity 3000 and Simcity 4. It could be for the better that the composer went for something very different. The other part is that I’m not versed enough in ultra-modern classical to say whether or not I like it. The music here certainly challenges me if I try to sit down and listen to it, and it seems appropriate enough for the actual gameplay, though. Ultimately, I suspect people who are especially enthusiastic about this style of music will find much to love in Cities: Skylines‘ soundtrack. It might help that I have enough appetite for dissonance in my music that I didn’t immediately reject this approach, but at the moment, I feel like I’m too intellectually removed from the soundtrack to even so much as have a strong opinion on it. Usually writing helps, but not so much this time.

Anatomy of VGM #11: Castlevania – Rondo of Blood (1993)

Note: As with all “Anatomy of Video Game Music” installments, I focus on one version of the soundtrack. Today, we’ll be looking at the PC Engine/Turbografx 16 version. Perhaps someday, we’ll look at the ports.

Remember how the last time we did an Anatomy of VGM feature, I said that Rondo of Blood had a more focused and upbeat soundtrack than Super Castlevania IV? If I’d gone into this unfamiliar with either game’s music, then I probably would’ve guessed otherwise. If you extrapolate from other CD-ROM debuts of established franchises, you might expect an especially experimental and varied soundtrack from this game, but instead, it’s mostly a synth rock/funk extravaganza of the sort that was unusually popular on TG16 CD based games. Did it have something to do with the musical climate in Japan at the time? I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Regardless of why this Castlevania installment sounds the way it does, it’s essentially a continuation of the approach of the earlier titles in the series. It does get and employs the instrumental flexibility boost that you’d expect from streamed audio, but ultimately, Rondo of Blood cleaves more orthodox cuts, with a focus on compact songwriting, and several reprisals of established classic tracks from the series. It even lapses into a few tunes featuring the Turbografx’s distinctive sound chip (which is flexible, but oddly grainy). If I had to guess, I’d say this was probably an attempt to save disc space and/or loading time for small areas. Either way, despite the overall direction of the soundtrack, there’s still time for a few asides, like the chorale on the menu screen, or the bombastic orchestral sounds of the boss fights. I find myself neutral on this; you can imagine how an action platformer’s boss music might try to be more dramatic than its usual fare, Castlevania in general is no exception, and the actual motifs on display here seem logically consistent with how previous boss themes in the series were written.

There’s not much I can really say about the songwriting beyond this – fans have already dissected the ups and downs of every version of “Vampire Killer”, and will continue to do so until the garlic supply collapses and unleashes the undead upon us. The only real complaint I have with this soundtrack is its production and mixing, which is somewhat anemic, and perhaps a bit too shiny for its own good. My recommendation as a digital audio workstation would be to reduce the treble frequencies, and add more bassy instruments, but that might be my personal biases coming through. This is actually something the SNES adaptation of the game did better than the original, although in the interest of focus I can’t go into too much detail. Either way, it’s a minor blemish on what is otherwise a fine soundtrack, and an enhancement to one of the many quality Castlevanias this world has been blessed with. Given how consistently good the series was in its heyday, though, there’s not much else I can say.