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The two disc soundtrack for the Nintendo DS epic sci-fi fantasy RPG “Infinite Space” fits the game’s premise and setting perfectly. Sweeping strings, military-style marches and other pompous tracks with set-in-stone rhythms… in other words, the kind of music that can give you a headache before too long. Seriously, I was begging for respite after… Read More »

You know “Half-Minute Hero,” that PSP RPG where you have a time limit in every zone and the graphics look super-retro? This is the soundtrack to that game. A diverse team of composers worked on its soundtrack. Did too many cooks spoil the broth? No, not at all. The two disc soundtrack includes over 60… Read More »

The Shining series has never achieved the kind of mainstream success of Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, but it has a very loyal and dedicated following. The most ardent fans are of the Shining Force series of strategy-RPGs, but the series also consists of dungeon crawls like Shining in the Darkness and many action-RPGs like… Read More »

Most dungeon-crawlers end up being critically panned by many for their frustrating difficulty. Being based on Namco’s 1984 arcade title “Tower of Druaga,” which is renowned for its unforgiving difficulty, it is no surprise that Arika’s Nightmare of Druaga shares the same type of difficulty. Despite being criticized by virtually every video game review site,… Read More »

Fragile: Farewell Ruins of the Moon features an intense setting: a post-apocalyptic world where the main character, Seto, is left to make sense of the wasteland around him. The game prides itself on being an emotional tale and it isn’t afraid to be dark and desolate, especially when evoking emotions such as loneliness, rejection, desperation,… Read More »

It is no secret that I thoroughly enjoyed the music in the game Yo-Jin-Bo and therefore quite enjoyed the Yo-Jin-Bo ~Unmei no Freude~ ROCKS OST. Disc 1 had a whole bunch of vocal numbers sung by the various game’s voice actors and disc 2 had the in-game music. It is therefore that I had no… Read More »

I’ll start by saying that I am a huge Dragon Quest fan, and anyone who has read any of my other DQ soundtrack reviews knows how much I appreciate the game and the music. However, a lot of my love for the music comes from my love of the games, all of which I had… Read More »

Let me give it to you in one word: underwhelming. Now, for the longer version of the review. Naoshi Mizuta has done nothing but Final Fantasy XI music for about eight years. And, in my opinion, he’s done a great job in that role. I was excited to see him take on his first non-XI… Read More »

The name Yasunori Mitsuda became well-known after composing one of the most popular RPG soundtracks in the 16-bit era: Chrono Trigger. These days, you don’t quite hear Mitsuda mentioned so much since Xenosaga Episode I, but it is not for lack of composing, or his loads of talent dropping off. If he’s not working on… Read More »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »