Archives

A musty smell hangs in the air. An old man makes his way across the room and gently removes the music box from a gnarled shelf, pausing to blow away a layer of dust that has settled on its lid. Propping the lid open, he returns the tiny antique to its perch, gives its silver… Read More »

My initial thought on discovering the existence of “T. Sekito’s Guitarworks Selection” was, “It’s about time.” See, I think Tsuyoshi Sekito is one of Square Enix’s best kept musical secrets and a criminally underused composer. Brave Fencer Musashi sports one of my favorite Square Enix RPG soundtracks, and I still have songs from that game… Read More »

It is no secret that I really liked Record of Agarest War 2, my favorite aspect of which was its music. I was, therefore, disappointed that the only soundtrack of the game I could access was the 23-track pack-in CD for the European version of the game. One of my biggest complaints for that album… Read More »

Nobuko Toda, known for her work on the Metal Gear Solid series since Snake Eater in 2004, breaks away from her previous and more ambient works in order to venture into an exciting industrial electronic motif for Senritsu no Stratus OST. Most of the 36 tracks are reminiscent of a Matrix or Bourne movie, with… Read More »

Vana’diel is very much alive. Skeptical? It’s easy to be, but Final Fantasy XI has been running for well over a decade, with four major expansions and six add-on scenarios to date. This past week saw the worldwide release of the game’s fifth expansion pack, Seekers of Adoulin. Naoshi Mizuta has returned once again to… Read More »

The Music of Mugen Souls, as performed by the G-Castle Shampuru Philharmonic is a cute title, but a little misleading. I originally thought it was an arrange album, so I was mildly disappointed to hear it was just a selection of 20 tracks from the full two-disc, 51-track soundtrack. I loved Mugen Souls’ music and… Read More »

I’ve listened to the Dragon Quest X Symphonic Suite every day for a month straight. I’ve been waiting for something profound to hit me so I can tell you, dear reader, all about it. That time never came. So then I thought I’d start the review with a quick overview of the series, explain how… Read More »

Having only freshly boarded the love-train for the Zero Escape series, I only recently took notice of veteran composer Shinji Hosoe’s work on both 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward. Despite the relatively low sound quality of the DS original, I was still a big fan of the moody yet memorable tunes that accompanied the game’s… Read More »

Final Fantasy Vocal Collection consists of 10 vocal themes from the Final Fantasy series. But don’t look for anything really old here — the series only began utilizing vocal songs in Final Fantasy VIII, with the love song “Eyes On Me.” Since then, the series has incorporated vocal themes with mixed results. Some songs are… Read More »

Though Daisuke Minamizawa has been composing intermittently since 1996, the Final Fantasy Solo Guitar Collections have been his first commercial performances. However, with string plucking like this, one could easily be fooled into thinking Minamizawa’s created several albums over his lifetime. In the West, few have probably heard of his compositions and arrangements. Still, with… Read More »

The brooding introductory notes take me back to days of portentous rainfall and melancholy. The unique bond between music and memory makes listening a deceptively complicated act. There’s always something else at play: associations — where did the listener first hear this music, last hear this music? Was the listener content at the time, or… Read More »

I’ve played a lot of Pokémon over the years. Every generation, in fact, including the remakes. Even after all of that, I’m still looking forward to Pokémon X/Y when they hit the 3DS later this year. But Red/Blue/Green will always hold a special place in my heart. I played Red for long enough that I… Read More »

The name TPR (of Phoenix Rise Music) might not be immediately familiar to you; it wasn’t one I knew prior to this album. I first spied it only a few weeks ago, in fact, under a newly released Joypad Records album called A Melancholy Tribute To Final Fantasy IX. However, after having listened (again and… Read More »

Masakazu Sugimori, Akemi Kimura, Noriyuki Iwadare, and Johan Sebastian Bach – with their powers combined, we have a varied three-part box set. The Gyakuten Saiban Sound Box, or Ace Attorney Sound Box, contains the WiiWare editions of the original trilogy. Whether these sound any different, I cannot discern, but they’re close enough to the DS… Read More »

Record of Agarest War 2 was a big surprise for me. Instead of being a proverbial Idea Factory mess, it was a surprisingly good JRPG. Sure, it could have been refined further, but it was a step in the right direction, and the most impressive aspect was undoubtedly the music. I absolutely adored every note… Read More »

When I reviewed Mugen Souls a few months ago, I called the game’s sound “its best and most consistent element.” I’m not a hardcore collector of video game soundtracks, like some of my RPGFan colleagues, but I generally love music and I felt like this soundtrack was one that I really wanted to add to… Read More »

Few Final Fantasy titles have been as polarizing to the fan base as Final Fantasy XIII. While not everyone was in love with the game itself, the soundtrack for both FFXIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2 were much more well-received. The Crimson Blitz single gives us our first taste of the music for Lightning’s final story,… Read More »

Every instrument has its calling, and the synthesizer was made to illuminate the alienation of the computer age. The soul-tugging, heart-drowning, breath-arresting sounds championed by artists like Vangelis can’t be reproduced with strings, pianos, and flutes. Those are more organic instruments, and our new alienation is anything but natural. The Primordia soundtrack, while not wholly… Read More »

Humbled. That’s how I feel after listening to Rainbow Moon Melodies. I’ll begin by saying that I try to have an open mind when I review anything, soundtrack, game, or otherwise. That said, when I was approached to review the music of Rainbow Moon, a game that I truthfully had no interest in based on… Read More »

The crimson-haired swordsman Adol Christin is driven by insatiable wanderlust. According to official Ys series lore, his escapades number well into the three-digit range, though we (as players) have only experienced seven of those tales thus far. Actually, in America, we’re still missing Ys IV and V. I weep for their absence, but I’m still… Read More »

For a game that can be beat in around six hours, a one hour, 36 minute soundtrack—about a fourth of Crimson Shroud‘s length—is almost ostentatious. Hitoshi Sakimoto, of Final Fantasy XII and Tactics (among many others) fame, leads a small team of composers in creating a classic orchestral sound befitting the JRPGs of the golden… Read More »

For various reasons, I have yet to enter the abyss in which Artorias makes his home. There is always a nearly equal sense of attraction and repulsion connected with Dark Souls, but listening to the soundtrack for the DLC expansion has upset that balance, and I want to take the plunge into sweet, mad hell.… Read More »

The Final Fantasy remix drought we’ve experienced of late has finally come to an end. If you’re anything like me, you’ve asked yourself, “With such a powerful library of music spanning 25 years, why has this series gone so neglected?” All sarcasm aside, the variety and nigh-perfection of this famous series receives yet another tribute… Read More »

It seems the time has come for Nobuo Uematsu to become more a music supervisor than a day-to-day composer. His last full score was for “The Last Story,” and even that had all of its arrangements handled by Uematsu’s young friend and protege, Tsutomu Narita. Enter Idea Factory. They’re apparently looking to get some star-power… Read More »

The Suikoden series of JRPGs has built a passionate following of fans since its debut on the Sony PlayStation back in 1995. It has seen five main installments: a pair of visual novels (Genso Suikogaiden vols. 1 and 2 for PlayStation), a tactics game (Suikoden Tactics for PlayStation 2), a card-collecting video game (Suikoden Card… Read More »