So Nintendo and Square team up to make Super Mario RPG back in the day. But they weren’t the only ones to take a totally not-RPG-ish franchise and create an RPG. We must not forget about Konami’s Twinbee RPG, after all.
“Twinbee” was a decent “shmup”-style series from Konami, like Gradius, Darius, etc. Cute girls in bikinis piloted ships and took out bad guys. That was the idea. Apparently the world was developed enough to make an RPG. And so, Twinbee RPG was born.
A strange anomaly in the world of RPG-dom, to be sure. But the soundtrack to Twinbee RPG is a textbook case of what a ’90s JRPG soundtrack is meant to sound like. Granted, it was also an example of how to do track layouts wrong (this should have been two discs: no looping to fit 70 tracks on one disc is not cool). But it has everything you could want, or could expect. It’s Kukeiha Club synth-happy. It has town themes. It has battle themes. It has catchy melodies at nearly every turn. And though most songs on here are forgettable, there are plenty that, if one wanted to, one could become hooked on the themes. It is only because the RPG is so niche and unpopular that its themes can’t stick as well as, say, Secret of Mana.
For those willing to venture outside RPGs, I would recommend pretty much any other Twinbee CD (minus the drama CDs) over the RPG soundtrack. They are progressively better, the more action-oriented they are. But, with a little TLC, this soundtrack for Twinbee RPG could’ve been something special. Even so, there are some tracks I found to be superior, which you can hear in the audio samples. Check ’em out.
