Archives

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 »

You can always count on Falcom to re-arrange their classic tunes many times over. They’ve done it more for Ys I and II than for any other game in their library. When you have such a large quantity of music, from varying sources, there comes a new option when it’s time to bundle a new… Read More »

Takashi Okamoto was on a roll with Flight-Plan for a bit there. His score for Dragon Shadow Spell was fantastic, and his contributions to Poison Pink only made him seem like that much better of a composer. With Flight-Plan’s latest Strategy RPG, Sacred Blaze, we find that perhaps Okamoto is running out of steam. But… Read More »

I remember the main theme from the first Sacred: it was full of passion and sent a twinge of excitement through me as I began my journey. The boring, uneventful main theme for Sacred 2 should have been a warning. I should have known then that the low level of excitement on this theme would… Read More »

Glory of Heracles was Data East’s only significant RPG series. They released four games in the series (two NES, two SNES), as well as one Game Boy spin-off. None of these games were published outside Japan. After Data East went bankrupt in 2003, a developer named Paon picked up the rights to the series, and… Read More »

Let me say, right now, that I was misled regarding the origins of this album. I was given the ESPION-AGE-NTS Original Soundtrack as an assignment from soundtracks head and crazy taskmaster Patrick Gann, and he had informed me that this album was from the Japanese version of a very terrible game called CIMA: The Enemy… Read More »

Okay, so here’s an extremely clever idea. You may be wondering, “is this the OST or an arranged album?” And if I told you it was both, you’d ask “which are the arranged tracks, and which are original?” Well… all tracks are original, and all tracks are arranged! The way the soundtrack for Glory of… Read More »

Glory of Heracles IV: The last game to be released in Data East’s RPG series (that is, until the DS resurrection of the series in 2008). The soundtrack, written by a team of composers from Data East (including Shogo Sakai, who would go on to write the score for Mother 3 a full decade later),… Read More »

Under the Wave Master label, SEGA released another retro soundtrack grouping very recently. They’ve been on a roll recently, with products like the Phantasy Star 1st Series hitting the soundtrack market. This release pairs up two games from the same sound staff. Hiroshi “hiro” Kawaguchi composed the music for the games Sword of Vermilion and… Read More »

“Secret of Evermore became known as the only US-made RPG released by Square and not much more than that. Sure, this game didn’t turn many heads, but I feel the music had its own unique flair. This CD contains 8 excellent orchestrated tracks as well as 21 tracks of game music. Even though the music… Read More »

The vast majority of soundtracks from the “Atlus spoils” campaign (that is, the bonus stuff Atlus USA gives away with many of their games) are little more than a selection of “best-of” tracks that they rip from an import soundtrack. Sometimes they’ll give you the entire soundtrack, but usually it’s a one disc collection of… Read More »

The two disc, complete OST for Knights in the Nightmare was published by Five Records last year. I think it was a little too much for me. The sheer amount of music was overwhelming, and there was a heck of a lot of “filler” music, particularly on disc one. So, for the first time ever,… Read More »

Though still a fair number of tracks shy from a full OST, this second “RQ Exclusive” disc for Ar tonelico II from NIS America was the disc that you didn’t get via limited edition. The CD was available only to people who preordered the game from the RosenQueen store (hence “RQ”). I think I had… Read More »

I looked everywhere to get this album. Composer and vocalist Akiko Shikata made her own, unique arranged album for the Ar tonelico “Hymmnos” tracks. The album had a low print run and is already a hard-to-find CD. I needed to know, was this album any good? Did Akiko Shikata know how to make interesting orgel… Read More »

Five unused tracks from Yuzo Koshiro’s score for 7th Dragon were published as a limited edition bonus with the DS game in Japan. The music is DS sound source, not “8-bit retro,” in nature. There’s a reason why these songs were cut from the game. In my opinion, there isn’t much interesting content to be… Read More »

After Norihiko Hibino and Yuzo Koshiro produced the Sekaiju no MeiQ (Etrian Odyssey) I and II Super Arrange Version, I was convinced that this series of music would become the hip new thing. It was one of my favorite albums from last year. Then, this year, they announced that another album in this same vein… Read More »

The newest Atelier game is Atelier Rorona for PlayStation 3. It takes a turn back in time, going for the style of the older Atelier games (such as Atelier Marie) instead of the more recent, combat-heavy Ateliers (Atelier Iris and Mana-Khemia). The all-star trio of the Gust Sound Team (Akira Tsuchiya, Daisuke Achiwa, and Ken… Read More »

Gust’s Atelier series (which includes Mana-Khemia) has some awesome music. It awesome has beautiful vocal tracks strewn throughout. So very, very good are these vocal tracks, that Team Entertainment published a three disc collection of vocal tracks from the series entitled Atelier Vocal Historia. What will you find here? Let’s discuss. First of all, what… Read More »

In my review for the Nintendo DS title Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon I mentioned that I thought there was little variety in the soundtrack while I was playing the game, so I was astonished when I saw this soundtrack had 63 songs. Were they playing the same songs constantly or were they just so unmemorable… Read More »

Disgaea 3 was released on the PlayStation 3, the first of Sony’s consoles to offer “downloadable content.” So much extra content was developed for NIS’s latest in their flagship series, that they were able to put together a full soundtrack for the new music Tenpei Sato wrote to support all the new content created for… Read More »

A la carte, indeed. The third (and, I pray, final) album in the new brass quintet series is a most random smattering of songs from Koichi Sugiyama‘s repertoire of Dragon Quest compositions. Like its predecessors, this brass quintet also includes some diverse percussion, which allows for a lot of jazz influence on these arrangements. Unfortunately,… Read More »

This soundtrack was a promotional item for the premium version of KID’s acclaimed visual novel Ever17 -the out of infinity- on PSP. The soundtrack itself is nearly identical to the prior Ever17 OST except for a pair of new vocal pieces entitled “It’s a Fine Day” and “The Azure ~Blue Memory.” Strangely, the tracklist appears… Read More »

The Star Onions are back! Years after one critically successful arranged album, this eclectic group of musicians (primarily, but not exclusively, from Square Enix) return for their second studio album of arrangements from Final Fantasy XI. The album focuses primarily on music from the game’s four expansions (all composed by Naoshi Mizuta), though some notable… Read More »

The soundtracks for Izuna and Izuna 2 were published together in a special-order two disc set from Success. For whatever reason, Success and Ninja Studio have decided to withhold any and all information about the game’s sound team. The games themselves don’t seem to have the information in any “end credits” sequence, and the composer(s)… Read More »

I don’t know why this soundtrack exists. Don’t get me wrong, I like the music. I like it a lot, in fact. But the difference between this album and its predecessor, “Jin no Shou,” I cannot determine. About 70% of the tracklist is the same. The music quality isn’t that different (it was a port… Read More »