When fans think of Noriyuki Iwadare, the first games that come to mind are the Lunar and Grandia series. Some of my favorite battle themes come from these series, so I tend to associate Iwadare with killer battle themes. Imagine my surprise when I heard that he scored a series of love adventures such as True Fortune (the girl’s-side gaiden to the “True Love Story” series), whose soundtrack I am reviewing. So the million dollar question is whether or not Iwadare’s love adventure music is any good, or should listeners stick with listening to the Grandia II soundtrack again. Although the music in True Fortune is excellent for the love adventure genre, many fans used to his more majestic RPG compositions may gag on this.
Love adventures generally have saccharine music and there was plenty of that here. However, it didn’t feel vapid like a lot of cotton candy music I’ve heard in other love adventures. Part of this is because the pieces generally had multiple layers of instrumentation and some complexity in the compositions, so they were not sonically one-dimensional and actually took a couple of listens to grow on me. In addition none of the compositions sounded repetitive and I liked that every track had a definitive ending rather than fading out. This is good since these compositions need to last through the loads of expository, text-heavy, and leisurely paced cutscenes inherent to the genre.
The first disc consists mostly of character themes where each character is associated with one of the major arcana of the tarot, such as Fool, Star, or Justice. The character themes here were generally bright and poppy. Upon first listen, I thought some of the pieces were too bouncy for their own good, but still fit the intended arcana and character. For example, The Fool piece sounded quite foolish. My personal favorite character themes included the ones based around the Star, Moon, and Justice characters.
Disc 2 contains the music reserved for important events in the game. I preferred the music here over the character themes in disc 1. There were some bright sounding pieces, but also great emotional pieces which used piano or acoustic guitar to great effect. my favorites were those more emotional pieces such as Hoshimiya’s Guitar and Hoshimiya’s Piano. The vocal song that capped off disc 2 was pretty cool. I liked how the instrumental started out sparse and became more forceful halfway through the song. Unlike many love adventure vocal songs, this one featured a male vocalist rather than a female one. I was not 100% sold on his voice, though. The karaoke version of the song was excellent, though.
This soundtrack was quite a departure from what I or any RPG fan would expect from Noriyuki Iwadare. This was an outstanding adventure soundtrack and a great taste of Iwadare’s versatility as a composer. The soundtrack took a little time to grow on me, partially due to my initial reaction of it not being the Iwadare I was used to, but it did grow on me and I liked it.
