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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 »

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 »

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 »

Gyakuten Kenji is the latest game in the Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney) series. This spin-off 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Fithos Lusec Wecos Vinosec: Final Fantasy VIII features fully orchestrated arrangements of some of Final Fantasy VIII‘s most memorable songs. This must be what Uematsu envisioned these songs to truly sound like, because some songs that felt choked in the game’s MIDI format sounded gorgeous here. “Blue Fields” is a key example of that last… 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 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 »

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 »

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 5pb.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, I’m… 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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »