After Square Enix shadow dropped SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered earlier this year, I patiently waited for Square Enix Music to publish this new version’s full soundtrack. Why? Well, not for a remastering of the original audio. My excitement was entirely for the ten new tracks, which make up disc four.
If you don’t have the existing SaGa Frontier 2 OST in your personal library and/or playlist, let’s establish that this is some of the best game music ever made. I recently reflected on my top 25 RPG soundtracks, and SaGa Frontier 2 was an absolute must when I assembled this list. The soundtrack for SaGa Frontier 2 is one of Masashi Hamauzu’s early works, crafted with an emphasis on piano, an impressionist-era approach, and plenty of motivic emphasis. The bouncy melodic motif first heard in “Roman” that goes “G, F G D E♭ B♭ C” is all over this soundtrack, transformed in a variety of ways (modal shift, reharmonization, augmented intervals, etc).
Additionally, the SaGa Frontier 2 soundtrack boasts some of the best battle themes of its time. I’m not just limiting myself to the four “Feldschlacht” themes, either. In fact, I’m not even focused on the two final battle themes, “Mißgestalt” and “Todesengel,” impressive as they are. For my money, “Besessenheit” and “Todfeind” (specific boss themes from the game’s story) are top-tier, catchy, memorable battle themes that deserve more praise than I can possibly dole out.
So, what’s this Remastered label all about? Musically, nothing. At least, as far as I can tell, there wasn’t extensive effort to transform the three-disc OST in any meaningful way for the remastered game. When my ears couldn’t pick up the difference between the songs from this publication and the original DigiCube release from 1999, I checked the audio’s waveform using Audacity. And here, visually, I could only detect the slightest differences in the peaks and valleys. Maybe the remastered audio underwent some Normalization or other filters? I can’t say. Frankly, the OST didn’t need any updating. It sounded awesome then, and it sounds awesome now.
So let’s get to the exciting part: ten new arranged tracks for SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered. The approach here is what excites me so much. These new songs are not explicitly arrangements of ten particular tracks from the old OST. Rather, much like Hamauzu’s approach to his own OST, these new arrangements border on being new compositions. They weave some of the key melodic motifs from Hamauzu’s OST into new songs written for the game’s new scenarios and optional super-hard boss battles. Given the small number of these new tracks, I’m going to take these on one by one, in track order. If you want to skip to the end, I can summarize now by saying they’re very good and expertly fit the setting of SaGa Frontier 2.
We begin with “Feldschlacht V,” arranged by Junnosuke Usui. Here, Usui creates an amalgam of the previous Feldschlacht (battle) themes by working with the standard melodic motif and sampling the descending arpeggio on the second beat of each measure directly from “Besessenheit.” This arrangement delivers a loosely structured salsa, with melodic lines led by piano for some sections and accordion for others. In-game, “Feldschlacht V” is the standard battle theme for all of the newly-written scenarios. It’s a great signifier when you’re playing the game that you’re in Remastered territory. The higher quality sampling rate compared to the sequenced MIDI of the PS1 era is the giveaway.
Accompanying the new standard battle is the new victory theme, “Freudenbezeigung V,” from arranger Shingo Kataoka. Compared to its four predecessors, this fifth victory theme has a rich, orchestral introduction before paring itself back down to the decorative, arpeggiated goodness that frames the game’s main melody. Kataoka does a fantastic job fleshing out the back half of the victory theme as well, where the harmonic structure becomes increasingly vague and the upper octave piano jumps into an ostinato pattern before looping back to the beginning. Talk about channeling Hamauzu at his best!
The next six tracks are the new boss battle themes for the optional, postgame forms of the six Elemental Lords (the Edelritter that join with The Egg / Fake Gustave). These new battle themes only start playing once you’ve pushed through each Elemental Lord’s first phase and they fuse into their “Lord + Egg” form. First up, we have the theme for Sargon as the Flame Lord, “Zehrflammen.” Junnosuke Usui is back for this one, and the salsa style is back too! Usui even writes in the album’s liner notes, “[W]e incorporated salsa-esque Latin musical styles to evoke a ‘fiery’ image, used bass piano sounds for depth and complexity, and accordion to highlight the melancholy behind the melody.” Combining Hamauzu’s impressionist whimsy with this fun salsa style is, in my book, a winner.
Junnosuke Usui’s final contribution to the new arrangements is “Düstersee,” used for the Water Lord Bolse. In the earlier half of the Water Lord battle, the game utilizes “Todfeind,” and while “Düstersee” is more than just a simple arrangement of “Todfeind,” the song includes many of Todfeind’s musical elements as part of a larger remix. My favorite aspect of Düstersee is its breakneck tempo. The piano and synth keyboard elements rush by so quickly, it’s nearly impossible to keep up! Meanwhile, the arrangement states the main melodic motif slowly enough that it gets the prominent attention needed to keep track of what’s going on!
Next on the docket is “Zauberwort,” the theme for Mika the Tree Lord. According to the soundtrack’s liner notes, arranger Nao Oe actually received a rough draft for this exact arrangement from the Remastered game director Naofumi Ueno (in fact, Ueno is co-credited for this track as well as “Immerfort” in the game’s sound test, but is not credited for the arrangements in the soundtrack’s liner notes). I will again cite the liner notes, with Nao Oe’s explanation on how she came to understand her role on this project:
When I had meetings to talk about the songs I was going to work on, Game Director Naofumi Ueno gave me some rough drafts of what he wanted the Tree Lord’s enhanced boss battle BGM to sound like. I distinctly recall thinking in that moment, “So the idea here is to express the backgrounds behind the various lords through their music—something that was left unexplained in the original.” With the concept grasped, I was filled with a fresh determination to tackle this task.
Nao Oe worked on three of the six Edelritter (Elemental Lord) themes, and my sense is that she best understood the concept of taking these flawed characters and considering what happens when their will and their power is further warped and strengthened by The Egg. Mika appears briefly in one of the new scenarios in Remastered, and we come to understand her as a gifted child with fantastic control over Anima in the forest. She has this caring and sweet dialogue with an important character from the Gustave plot line, and as that character passes away (of natural causes), Mika goes on a diatribe about how humans are awful. She plans to see whole towns swallowed by her anima-fueled forest. This charming forest girl turns out to be a megalomaniac, and “Zauberwort” captures her personality perfectly. The wooden pitched percussion (xylophone, marimba, etc) used throughout this piece is also fitting.
Before we get to Oe’s other tracks, we have to take a moment to appreciate Shingo Kataoka’s Edelritter contribution. Yes, alongside making the new victory theme, Kataoka brings us “Grabesstille,” the new battle theme for Moi the Stone Lord. Shingo Kataoka doesn’t shy away from big, awesome percussion throughout this frenetic arrangement. Whether it’s concert bass drums, crashing cymbals, or hammered anvils, the instrumentation emphasizes the heaviness of stone. That being said, Kataoka also leans into some great fast-paced piano work, very much in line with Hamauzu’s original. There’s also one brief section in this track where we get quarter-note bursts of orchestra hits in the upper register, which feels a lot more like Uematsu than Hamauzu. Nothing wrong with that, though! This is a fantastic arrangement, one that fits the scared messenger Moi (not even his real name, for those who remember his backstory in the 1293 event), who suddenly and surprisingly discovers his ability to petrify others.
Next up! “Urgewalt” is the theme for the Beast Lord, someone the game tells us the least about, even in the Remastered version. Fake Gustave recruits a character named Towa, a highway robber, to become the Beast Lord. Nao Oe chose to go heavy with percussion on this one as well, though with an entirely different set of percussion than what Kataoka used in “Grabesstille” — timpani, hand drums, and floor toms. I also noticed a melodic theme that, while I could be wrong about this, appears to be entirely original during the opening measures. This was a bold choice, and one I fully endorse. Of course, this new melody gives way to the game’s central motif, now with some epic timpani and lower brass to help fill out this otherwise rambunctious Beast Lord theme.
For the last of the Edelritter themes, Nao Oe brings us what might be my favorite of the bunch. Fitting that “Verzückung” is the theme song for the Tone Lord, i.e., the Elemental Lord who rules over sound itself. The track opens with an epic musical statement: the main melodic theme on pipe organ. Players can actually hear this introduction ten seconds in the quest where you (as Gustaf) accompany Isis up Laubholz Tower to find the organ at the end. When the organ plays this intro, Isis says, “No human could create something so perfect… I hear it… This is…a message… From the rulers…of the world of old…” It has to be quite a challenge, then, to craft music so good that it sounds like songs from ancient forerunners to the human race. In my opinion, Oe nails it with this one. “Verzückung” translates from German to “Ecstasy” or “Rapture,” and there is definitely an ecstatic, rapturous, peak religious experience vibe coming from this one. Sustained pipe organ meets frantic marimba ostinato patterns? New melodic lines? Prog rock 12-tone patterns based on stacked fourths? Yeah, this one has it all. I’m obsessed with “Verzückung.”
And to think, we haven’t even gotten to the headline track. I am, of course, talking about “Endverkünder,” the new music for the super-hard, optional final battle versus The Egg. This arrangement comes courtesy of Noriyuki Kamikura, an accomplished composer and arranger in his own right who has worked on many recent SaGa titles and is a key member of the SaGa-centric rock band DESTINY 8. To be clear, this new theme is not a DESTINY 8 style arrangement. Kamikura definitely worked to keep his arrangement as close as he could to the sound palette that Hamauzu first established in the 1999 OST, though the realism of the synth horns is unquestionably a step above what we hear throughout the rest of the soundtrack. This upbeat battle theme may not be my favorite, but it is objectively the most impressive in terms of how sweeping and brilliant it is. Kamikura pointed out in his liner notes commentary that he wanted to use this song to combine the Gustave family and Knights family stories in one climactic battle theme, utilizing key musical themes for both. As a result, this arrangement pulls from much more than the game’s main melody. The most impressive thing is how Kamikura manages to keep a sense of cohesion even as the melody wanders into so many different places.
The new disc and the entire soundtrack close with “Immerfort” (an adverb one can translate as “Forever,” “Evermore,” or “Always”). This piano solo arrangement from Ayumu Murai is a slow, soft recollection, utilized during the game’s new scenario that gives a proper epilogue to Gustave XIII. Melodically, we get versions of the motif similar to what Hamauzu wrote for “Botschaft” and “Erfolg.” I enjoy how nuanced this particular arrangement is, paying particular honor not only to Hamauzu but to the character of Gustave and all those who loved and supported him through his journey.
In summary? SaGa Frontier 2 always had a great OST. Now it has a great OST with ten new tracks that are also fantastic. As a collector, I would have been happy to see disc four released separately to avoid duplicate printings of the same music. But I must remember that I’m not everyone, and not everyone has the SaGa Frontier 2 Original Soundtrack on their shelves already. If you already have the soundtrack, I do think a new purchase just for disc four is warranted. If you don’t have the soundtrack yet, but you generally like what you’ve heard from SaGa Frontier 2, the SaGa Frontier 2 Remastered Original Soundtrack is a must-have.
