Textual Pornography

Every year I usually have a reasonably strong preference for my favorite soundtrack from a video game that came out that year, but that wasn’t really the case for 2015. So instead, here’s a list of the five songs I’ve probably listened to the most from games released in 2015.

5). Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. – “Dark Messenger”

Lead Composition: Yoshito Sekigawa (né Hirano)
Additional Composition: Dimension Cruise, Procyon Studio

About 13 people worldwide bought Code Name: S.T.E.A.M., which is a shame because it’s an excellent X-COM-like by Intelligent Systems and it has a new soundtrack by the Advance Wars guy that sounds exactly like a new Advance Wars soundtrack.

Truth be told, though, the rockin’ Advance Wars tunes that Yoshito Sekigawa is known for, while good, are my least favorite of his music. He was the best orchestra/strings writer at Intelligent Systems by far, and he turned in some absolutely brilliant material for the Fire Emblem series and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door.

So what got me excited the most when I played the demo of Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. wasn’t the awesome alien shooting action or the chugging guitars accompanying said action, but rather the rad string cues accompanying the first minute and a half of the opening cinematic.

Naturally, then, my favorite song from the game ended up being this one that’s half metallic scraping noises and half loud blaring. That makes sense, right?

It is some quality horror orchestra music, though.

4). BOXBOY! – “Shop”

Sound: Jun Ishikawa, Hirokazu Ando

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzeL6geSilo

How’s that for a song transition?

There is very little happening in this piece, and despite that it’s abundantly clear to me from the complex chords and the bum-buum the melodic phrases end with at 0:10 and 0:35 that Hirokazu Ando composed this.

Ando has really been impressing me since Kirby’s Return to Dream Land and is, in all probability, my favorite person currently writing video game music. Almost all of BOXBOY!‘s music is weird minimal stuff that I don’t hate but isn’t all that great either, but then here’s this piece that sounds like it came directly from Kirby: Triple Deluxe without modification. I love it, it’s cute and makes me want to hug something.

3). Fire Emblem Fates – “To a Foreign Land”

Composed by Hiroki Morishita

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty8gjJt6Qkc

About fifteen seconds into listening to this for the first time, I said “well this is a battle preparation theme composed by Hiroki Morishita” because it sounds exactly like the battle preparation theme from Fire Emblem Awakening, composed by Hiroki Morishita. That theme ended up being one of my favorite songs from Awakening, and this ended up being one of my favorites from Fates.

I have a real soft spot for this kind of orchestral music that builds up rich textures with repeating rhythmic layers. Morishita did this in a few of his pieces for Awakening, which is the main reason I think he’s the composer of this one.

2). UNDERTALE – “Amalgam”

Composed by Toby Fox

Ｗｅｌｃｏｍｅ　ｔｏ　ｍｙ　ｓｐｅｃｉａｌ　ｈｅｌｌ．

1). Splatoon – “Maritime Memory”

Composed by Shiho Fujii
Squidvox by keity.pop & Mari Kikuma

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUd7FTR56Yo

I said at the beginning that I don’t have a strong preference for best soundtrack, but my weak preference is Splatoon, so it’s fitting that my favorite song of the year is definitely from that game.

When I heard the music from Splatoon, I had no idea who was responsible for it because none of it sounded like anything that had ever been in a Nintendo game. Even after learning the composers were Toru Minegishi and Shiho Fujii, I couldn’t even begin to guess with any certainty who composed what until the soundtrack album with credits came out. My suspicion was that Minegishi wrote this song based on a single song he wrote fifteen years ago, and that was dead wrong. Where I’m going with this is that you should temper those parts in the blurbs of songs #4 and #3 when I guessed the composer with the fact that I’m always wrong when I guess composers.

So hella props to Fujii for doing something I never thought she could do: bust out a chill R&B jam that’s legit as heck. “Maritime Memory” combines the melody and lyrics of two other songs she wrote, “High-Color Evolution” and “Shiokara-Bushi,” and I absolutely adore the latter’s transformation in the section from 1:17 to 1:51, especially the very last part of it starting at 1:46. Everything about this song kills.