Archives

Yo Denzel, what’s up? The re-release of Final Fantasy VII Advent Children, now with the word “Complete” tacked on at the end and released on Blu-Ray, added roughly 30 minutes of footage, much of which centered around the memories of Denzel. However, there were also elongations of certain scenes: particularly, battles and dialogue. That’s really… Read More »

I cannot tell you how sad I am, in this moment, wherein I sit down to write about the SaGa 2 DS remake soundtrack. The original soundtrack for SaGa 2 (Final Fantasy Legend II), back in the glory days of Game Boy chiptunes, was one of my favorites. Its only rival, in my mind, was… Read More »

Introducing… Here it is, ladies and gentlemen. The single largest game music release in the history of the genre. The box includes 20 CDs, with over 19 hours of music, as well as a bonus DVD, and a ton of seemingly extraneous packaging. Before discussing the music from this long-running “black sheep” series, let’s talk… Read More »

When Nippon Ichi ported Phantom Brave to the Wii (and added a new scenario), they published this promotional soundtrack to go alongside it. This same CD was also made available to North American consumers via the “RosenQueen” store. If one ordered NIS America’s localization of “Phantom Brave: We Meet Again” for Wii from RosenQueen (within… Read More »

We don’t cover most “doujin” material on RPGFan, particularly because much of it is released on CD-Rs and may have been published without permission from the copyright-holders (that is, illegally). But we have done our best to cover “Gaijin doujin” (that is, fanmade game music outside of Japan). OneUp Studios has been a continual source… Read More »

Hey, it’s another version of the Chrono Trigger soundtrack! As if we needed another one. Before we get to the music (which is, of course, completely awesome), let’s take a step back and ask ourselves why this soundtrack exists. Is the music any different because this is the soundtrack to the DS port of an… Read More »

Yasunori Shiono, a former colleague of Motoi Sakuraba’s, and a composer of some renown during the Super Famicom era, is best known among Americans for his music to the Lufia (Estpolis) games. But he also worked on two other games around the same time: Chaos Seed and Energy Breaker. A full multi-disc OST would be… Read More »

This EP-sized gem from Egg Music and composer/arranger Koji Hayama features some classic Super Robot Taisen original character/mech theme songs, now vocalized and/or re-arranged by Hayama-san himself. If you’re ready to be floored by a sound that is as silly as it is epic, then you’re ready for this album. The first three tracks are… Read More »

It’s been awhile since I heard an SMT soundtrack that didn’t list Shoji Meguro as a composer. Devil Survivor, a spin-off title from the series that’s infamous for its many spin-offs, is a DS Strategy RPG with music by Takami Asano. And though Asano attempts to hold true to the dark, exotic dance-pop-rock styles that… Read More »

Yasunori Shiono is a name I’ve become quite familiar with thanks to games like Lufia and Chaos Seed. But Shiono, during those days, had a close-knit group of co-composers working with him. One of those composers is Yukio Nakajima, who wrote almost all of the music for Energy Breaker, another RPG for Super Famicom. Nakajima’s… Read More »

The Infinity series, consisting of Never7/Infinity, Ever17, Remember11, and 12Riven, has seen installments on the Playstation, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, and the PC. The games are converging onto the PSP and these versions sport brand new opening or ending themes. This soundtrack features all the opening and ending themes for the original and PSP releases of… Read More »

The Touch Detective series is an oddball one. I personally rather liked the games, but most critics and many players did not. It did not bother me that some of the puzzles were obtuse and that the world was completely wacky. I embraced the wackiness of the world and characters. Another aspect of the game… Read More »

The Tales of Legendia OST was rather incomplete at the time of its release. Masaru “Go” Shiina had written plenty of music for the game that just wasn’t thought worthy to be put on the OST. Fortunately, on the second of two drama CD releases (the “voice of character quest” series), someone at Avex saw… Read More »

NIS America is always happy to please the consumer. Mana Khemia 2, following NIS America’s tradition with releasing games from Gust, comes with a bonus one disc soundtrack packaged inside the double-sized cardboard box. Now, the full soundtrack (which you’d have to import from Japan, as it’s published by Team Entertainment) covers two discs. NIS… Read More »

Tecmo’s “Wind of Nostalgeo” (their first proper RPG in decades) had a promotional soundtrack released alongside the game in Japan. The game’s music was outsourced to the T’s Music team, who have been doing soundtracks for games whose developers don’t have a dedicated sound team for at least a decade. The promo CD offers ten… Read More »

Atlus USA loves to spoil their customers. And, luckily for us game-audiophiles, it is common that part of the spoiling involves a soundtrack release. This CD is one of those lovely perks for people who picked up the first print of The Dark Spire for DS. Now, the album is a combination of tracks from… Read More »

Kenichi Arakawa decided to follow suit with Yuzo Koshiro on his score for another intentionally retro dungeon crawler. Koshiro worked on the Etrian Odyssey (Sekaiju no MeiQ) titles, as well as 7th Dragon. And when he created the music, he actually made two versions of each song. There was the DS version, and the “original”… Read More »

Success released a full two-disc OST for this game (known in North America as “The Dark Spire”), but they also created a promotional CD with some special arranged tracks. Two piano tracks, a vocal track, and a special (rock-band-style) battle theme were recorded and put on this album. Also unique to this album are 8-bit… Read More »

Mother. The original. The Famicom RPG that Americans never saw (and became known as “Earthbound Zero” in some circles, as it was a prequel to Earthbound). This soundtrack is, primarily, a vocal arrange album, arranged and performed by British people. Yeah…that’s strange. But it’s only fitting for the Mother series to do something this offbeat.… Read More »

Mother. The original. The Famicom RPG that Americans never saw (and became known as “Earthbound Zero” in some circles, as it was a prequel to Earthbound). This soundtrack is, primarily, a vocal arrange album, arranged and performed by British people. Yeah…that’s strange. But it’s only fitting for the Mother series to do something this offbeat.… Read More »

When I heard Atlus was bundling a two-disc bonus OST with their new PSP version of the first game in the Persona series, I thought to myself: “not again!” You see, the full soundtrack for Persona has been printed not once, but twice! First by “First Smile” (now out of business), and again by King… Read More »

Falcom’s “Sora no Kiseki” trilogy has seen a fair amount of success in Japan, both on PC and PSP. Falcom continues to milk their franchises for all they’re worth with these PSP ports, and with exclusive bonus CDs like this one to tempt fans and collectors. Fortunately, for this particular promotional album, released in 2009,… Read More »

“Gyakuten Kenji” is the latest game in the “Gyakuten Saiban” (Ace Attorney) series. This gaiden title puts players in control of Reiji Mitsurugi (known to Americans as “Miles Edgeworth”), the prosecutor that was, for the first two games in the series, Phoenix Wright’s chief rival. This game takes a look at some of Edgeworth’s adventures… Read More »

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Akumajou Dracula X: Nocturne in the Moonlight in Japan) is considered one of the finest video games of its generation, if not all time. This RPG/platformer hybrid had gorgeous, hand-drawn visuals and was an absolute blast to play with its super-tight control and nonlinear progression. It also had an absolutely… Read More »

The preorder/LE bonus for the Japanese release of Atelier Rorona was this digipak-sized artbook/CD combo. On it, we find nine tracks from Ken Nakagawa. B-Sides, arrangements, previously unreleased music: all quite good. And it comes from a wide range of games. Die Musikkiste des atelier may be the subtitle for the album, but it isn’t… Read More »