Well, sort of classical.

It's five movements. Totals 15 minutes in length. The fifth movement includes a variation of that catchy melody found in two different games released within a year or two of each other: "The Boy's Got Wings" from Ys III and "Endless Battlefield" from FF Adventure (Seiken Densetsu 1).

http://patgannbrr.bandcamp.com/album/2012-backward-sonata

Free download. Comes with the sheet music. People tell me movements 4 and 5 are their favorite.

Please give feedback and thanks. ^_^

you'd probably do better selling II separately right?

I immediately remember that stage. I was too young to get it at the time. But ... that's kind of hot, in its own creepy way.

I like Meep. :)

Pray and Love Will Grow are magical treats. The instrumentation backing the vocals are a huge part of what make them great.

There are probably some PC games that did it earlier, but AFAIK it's the first console game to do it.

Rune system, 6 character battle system, True ending based on recruiting all 108 characters, the "base" that expands and improves as you recruit more characters, and a save file that transferred to unlock bonuses for its sequel.

Name me some console RPGs, or some *games*, that did any or all of those things before 1995 (Japan) / 1996 (America)

Yeah. For its time it did some pretty damn cool stuff.

But you just described what you loved about Suikoden 1 ... which has nothing to do with "high polish." The rough edges weren't dealt with. It was an early-life PS1 RPG with graphics, performance, and the occasional bug to show for it.

What made Suikoden worthwhile wasn't polish, but an intentional innovation. With innovation, it often comes with rough edges and sharp corners.

Methinks what you really want is a game that creates new game development ideas, but not necessarily one that requires "high quality standards." And then hope the new ideas are executed well and work for you (Suikoden), and not something nobody can really get into (the latter half of the Mana franchise)

For better or worse, "Complete" collections *never* stop companies from doing more. I have friends who own the Dragon Quest I~VII box set (which was all the DQ that existed at the time). I personally own the DQ I~IX box set. But of course, DQX's soundtrack is on the horizon, and of course it is also fully composed and orchestrated by Koichi Sugiyama.

Weeks after the SaGa box was released, they announced DS remakes for SaGa 2 and 3 with completely new, "upgraded" audio. Now those aren't new IPs, but give it time, they'll make a new SaGa one of these days.

That being said ... Capcom making BoF 6 sounds like a pipe dream. I do believe it'll happen someday. Maybe in the same span of time it took from them to make another movie after Rocky V. Hey, maybe they'll just call BoF 6 "THE Breath of Fire" or something stupid like that.

Thanks everyone for the support.

So far a lot of good has come from two places:

1) our remaining cat, Ms. Freya. She's 3, and she's feisty as hell, never bonded with me like Clive did. But whenever I cry she comes running up to me and meows and rubs herself against my leg.
2) I bought this 5-CD "guided imagery" collection a long time ago, and there was one that I never really jived with called "Restoration" -- it was about dealing w/ grief and loss. And I was like "I haven't really lost anyone or anything" so that particular disc was worthless. Last night it made a ton of sense.

Grim -- Merlin sounds like a frigging amazing cat. Your two new kitties look adorable. May they grow to be strong and live many many years!

The class would probably be best served with a chronological ordering of events. Start with pinball machines, early arcades, colecovision and atari and talk about how the genre starts with nothing but sound effects and single-track audio jingles.

The simultaneous development of "chip" music (music produced by running signals through the hardware itself) on Japan's Famicom and PC-88, and the west's Commodore Amiga (more popular in EU than America) is where looping "background music" (or "BGM") really got its start in gaming.

A great case study for the early hardware would most definitely be Koichi Sugiyama, whose compositions were originally written for a full symphony orchestra, recorded as such, but then "de-made" to fit the limitations of the hardware (for the first 4 DQs, that would be Famicom, then SFC for 4's remake and 5 and 6). Sugiyama didn't think of himself necessarily is a media (film/TV/game) score guru, but as a neo-classical and neo-romantic, and very "traditionalist," composer.

From there, starting with the MIDI sequencing and sound banks of the 16-bit consoles, things get a lot more complicated. But I'd always keep the focus of the course, when contrasting it to film, as the difference between needing catchy, "loopable" (indefinitely playing) music vs very sharp, evocative tunes playing at just the right times (that is, music cues). Eventually as games became more cinematic, we'd have more examples of non-looping "cue" or "cut scene" music. The earliest type of this music I know of was Tecmo's ahead-of-its-time cut scenes for Ninja Gaiden. But obviously, starting with the FMV revolution of the 32-bit era, it starts to become more and more common, til eventually you get to games like Halo and Alan Wake whose music is almost entirely cinematic and non-looping in nature.

Does this help?

If you check the link, you will see that Clive's story is now over.

Refunds are available if you wish to have your donations refunded. We no longer need a full $2000 since the vet did not bill us for the surgery (but we do need about $400 minimum, and any more than that I can pay back my parents or donate to the vet clinic).

I haven't cried this much, and this intensely, ever before in my life.

If only they'd get off their duff and remake Live A Live. Considering all the love it's getting from SE's own music dept (check virtually every "SQ" album and find one or two LAL arrangements), you'd think something would be in the works. It came out 20 years ago, and to this day is Japan-only, no remakes.

And it's a friggin good game.

Go through the game twice, getting all the endings OTHER than that dream-team ending. On your third full playthrough (New Game+ on top of the New Game+ you started, with all those stat-up items found and your characters at a ridiculously high level), ALL BATTLES are easy. That includes both this path and the Zeal awakening path for the Dream Team ending.

It's really not that bad. :)

It's good, but I'm still more pleased w/ the Star Wars one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqJmP7PcaUw