The second of three Albert Odyssey soundtracks (all written by Naoki Kodaka), this one definitely holds its place as the middle child. While it is not quite as impressive as Albert Odyssey Gaiden ~The Legend of Eldean~, it out-performs its predecessor by leaps and bounds. First, on a practical level, this soundtrack is a solid 20 minutes longer than the first soundtrack, yet it is only four tracks more: this means the songs are, on average, longer.
Yet, if this were the only improvement from the original, that would not be very impressive. Another point at which Albert Odyssey 2 excels is in the quality of the synths. They sound one step closer to realistic, while yet retaining the 16-bit VGM feel that we fans of nostalgic old-school VGM cherish so much.
Also, Kodaka’s compositions for this soundtrack, while having less stylistic variation than the previous soundtrack, do manage to hit more of the expected “themes” you’d want from a VGM soundtrack: battle themes are much better, and there are more town themes than you can shake a stick at! Some of them are bland, but even the blandest song is better than not having the theme there in the first place. Agreed?
One complaint I have is that many songs on this soundtrack, including a number of important themes, are the same songs as from the first Albert Odyssey, now with some slight improvements. If this were the case with just one or two song, that’d be okay, but I heard familiar melodies on this album about six or seven times … which means they came from the previous game … which is a little disappointing … but I guess we can let that go … and I guess I can stop rambling now…
To summarize: Kodaka’s second attempt was better than the first, but it’s still nothing compared to Legend of Eldean. And hence I give my final word of advice: don’t worry about finding this soundtrack, just try to get the two disc Albert Odyssey Gaiden soundtrack. It is in every way better than this album, though this album isn’t bad in itself (it’s just too darn hard to find!).
