“Where has Iwadare been?” Lunar and Grandia fans have been wondering this for awhile. He hadn’t really done any RPGs since Grandia III. However, he did re-arrange his own work for the PSP “Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star.” For the last three years, Iwadare’s primary work has been for love (dating-sim) graphic adventures, such as Amagami and True Fortune.
Grandia Online has been in development for years, and the game is finally making an appearance in Asia. On Christmas day 2009, Iwadare had his first major MMORPG soundtrack released. Grandia Online -Perfect Sound Library- is a massive set of music. Only 32 tracks, yes, but each track is of significant length (often five minutes or more). There’s a lot of content to enjoy.
Stylistically, the music is very much what you would expect of Iwadare. If you know your past Grandia (and Lunar) soundtracks, you’ll hear Iwadare using the same instruments as he’s used so many times before. The only instrument he seemed to downplay was xylophone. The only place I heard it stand out prominently on this soundtrack is on “Battle #1 (arranged).” I love Iwadare’s xylophone-centric battle themes, and I wish we’d hear more of it on this soundtrack.
On the album, you’ll find vocal choirs, pitched percussion, wind/string ensembles, acoustic piano, electric piano, electric guitar, slap bass, and all manner of synths. The quality of the recording and the overall production values are what, I think, sell this album. That and, of course, the Grandia brand name. Unfortunately, there aren’t a whole lot of in-your-face catchy melodies. This, of course, is a real problem, considering Iwadare is known for writing marvelously memorable tunes. Not that this OST is devoid of said tracks. But some of the best tracks on here are arrangements of previously-composed themes (again, Battle #1, as well as Ernest and Theme of Grandia).
At the end of the day, I’m just happy to have Iwadare contributing new music to a series I know and love. If I were forced to rank Grandia Online against other Grandia albums, Grandia Online would rank just above the first Grandia’s “Volume 2” OST, and below pretty much everything else. If memory serves, I might also want to rank it above Grandia Xtreme. In any case, it’s not Iwadare’s best, but considering the baseline of “worst Iwadare music” is still quite high, I would still recommend this album to fans of the Grandia series and Noriyuki Iwadare’s music in general. The summary as to why? Again, it’s like this: production value is extremely high, but memorable melodies are few and far between.
