I thought I really had things figured out with the Summon Night series. Truly, truly I did. And then Summon Night 4 happened, and my whole world turned sideways.
I knew that Minako Adachi had composed some music for the Summon Night series, but most of the task had fallen onto Chiaki Fujita. And that’s the way it should always be, right? Wrong. “Sing Like Talking” (Chiaki Fujita) has gone the way of Uematsu in Final Fantasy: compose vocal theme songs only. Now, an unnamed group of composers have taken on the job. Summon Night 4’s OST is composed by “LL Lab” and “Pure Sound Company.” In fact, different tracks are listed as being composed by one or the other group. Talk about careful outsourcing!
Surprisingly, however, Summon Night 4 didn’t lose the feel (not in the way that Ex-Thèse did, at any rate). It sounds like a tried-and-true addition to Fujita’s scores. This leaves my head hurting. If Fujita didn’t take part in these compositions, someone out there sure knows how to imitate.
Though I generally prefer the Summon Night scores for their bouncy town themes and memorable “event” music, the final battle themes (there are a few of them in a row, check thr tracklist) really stood out to me as some of the best ever put into a Summon Night game. They were up there with Flight-Plan’s other Strategy RPG, “Dragon Shadow Spell,” in fact. I was pleased.
Someday, I’d love to see a real Summon Night title come to North America (not just the handheld gaidens, but the actual series installments). Perhaps that would also help to create a boosted interest in the VGM for this series, which I’ve found to be decent in almost every game Flight-Plan has made. In the meantime, this is the most recent soundtrack in the series (at the time this review was written), and I am certainly pleased with it. I hope you will be too.
