Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 83: The Music of Panzer Dragoon, Final Fantasy, Dracula X and more

Episode Date: January 16, 2017

It's an all-music episode of Retronauts as Jeremy looks at recent classic game soundtrack releases of note. Includes looks at Panzer Dragoon, symphonic Final Fantasy, Castlevania: Dracula X, Metroid, and more! Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, now updated daily! This show is an entirely independent and a self-sustaining concern for 2017. Please help support our livelihoods through Patreon!

This week in Retronauts, it's Radio Retronauts. I should have looked that up before I started this. Hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish, and this is a retronauts experiment. I'm actually trying something different this week. Hopefully something that will work. If it doesn't, well, be sure to let me know, and I'll never do this again. But my hope is that in addition to the standard Retronauts episodes that you normally listen to, I'd like to throw in some episodes maybe once a month that focus on game music

because that's something everyone really seems to like. Most of our listeners really seem to appreciate game music and some of our most highly downloaded episodes have to do with game music. So maybe if we make video game music a regular recurring thing, that'll work out great. Of course, this is part of the new initiative for monthly content or, sorry, weekly content for Retronauts. As you probably know by now, I have left my position with U.S. Gamer and I'm trying to focus on Retronauts full time. hopefully we can drum up the funding to make that happen. We're getting there, but we have crossed a few funding goals through Patreon. And in addition to daily blogs, we've also moved from a bi-weekly schedule with Retronauts

and Retronauts micro-alternating on different weeks to nothing but full-length episodes. And that'll start in February. And while I, you know, we intend to continue doing the regular episodes where Bob and I get together in a studio in San Francisco, Bob's not able to take on Retronauts full-time himself because he has a full-time job. So the other two weeks of the month are going to be slightly different, but, you know, still full-length episodes. One of them will be Retronauts East, which I've teased a few times, and that will be debuting next month. And the other is kind of a wild card, but I'm hoping this approach, Retronauts Radio, or whatever you want to call it,

the game music roundup. I'm hoping that will be something that people like enough to want me to keep doing. So this time it's just me talking about some game music, but, you know, I'm open to the possibility of bringing more people in, making it more of a roundtable traditional retronaut style. This is, like I said, just an experiment. So please drop me a note in the Patreon comment section or in the comments section of Retronauts.com. Game pie ready? Good luck. I don't know. So anyway, without further ado, let's jump into the premier experimental episode of Retronauts Radio.

So we have done some kind of, you know, game music-specific episodes in the past, mostly as micros focused on, you know, single composers or single slices of game music. Like I know Bob did one on Konami music, like the Tiny Tunes or something like that. I can't remember it's been a while. But in any case, this one's a little more broad-reaching because it's going to be a full one-hour-to-90-minute episode. And instead of just doing, you know, like, hey, here's some great video game music from the past. which is all fine and good, but Ray Barnholt already did that with the sound test. I'm more interested in taking sort of a current look at things.

It's still retronauts, so it's still going to be focused on classic game music, but I want to look at things that are sort of current and now. So for starters, I'm going to be looking at some recent classic game music releases as, you know, like specifically LPs this time, but in the future I'll also look at CDs. It's just I've been following LPs for the moment, and there's a lot to talk about. And video game music on vinyl is actually,

it seems kind of weird, like why I take digital music and put it on an analog format. But, you know, there's a lot of fidelity to music on vinyl and a lot of nuance that might be lost in CDs. I don't know, maybe not. Maybe it's all just hocus pocus. In any case, I like listening to vinyl. And one nice thing about vinyl releases

is that they tend to be, I guess, I would say finite in nature, you know, with digital downloads or CD releases, people can just put out a ton of content very inexpensively. LPs because of the limitation of the format and the cost of the format, it tends to sort of be self-curating. It's like the difference between games on Steam and games on console. Like, you can get just about anything on Steam. By getting a console release, getting it all licensed and developed

and, you know, through approvals and everything, that's a more costly endeavor. there is sort of like, you know, with indie games, sort of a curation process that happens when you take a game onto consoles. And LP records kind of work the same way for game music. So you do tend to see a lot of, you know, current releases on terrible picture discs that have awful sound quality. But when it comes to classic game music, in most cases you're going to get things like, you know, the data disks line where the producers really care about the music and they really want to reproduce it as. as accurately and as faithfully as possible.

So the quality tends to be really high on these. Anyway, that's enough of me just jabbering about stuff. So, without further ado, again, let's jump in. And the first album I'd like to look at this time is the recent release from data disks of Panzer Dragoon. Panzer Dragoon, of course, in 1995, first person, or not first person, but on Rails third person shooter from Sega. It was one of the kind of early defining titles for the Sega Saturn. And, you know, even though Saturn was not known as a 3D powerhouse, there was really something atmospheric and unique about Panzer Dragoon and its 3D graphics that very few games on Saturn reproduced, but, you know, you didn't really see that kind of unique visual style. on any system really.

So Panzer Dragoon is one of those series that really sort of stands out and it sort of faded away over the past 20 years and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that some of its lead creative talent has passed away. And, you know, after Panzer of Dragoon's saga,

it was kind of difficult for them to continue the series without that sort of vision behind it. And so Panzer Dragoon has become kind of kind of this unique space in video game history, this unique creation. And the game soundtrack really complements that uniqueness because the game soundtrack is actually quite unique. Panzer Dragon's soundtrack was composed by Yoshitaka Azuma. You may never have heard of Azuma, and that's because he was not a video game composer by trade.

He was actually a new-age instrumentalist. You know, think sort of like Mike Oldfield, you know, someone who did a lot of extended compositions, all very instrumental, all sort of ethereal, the kind of thing you could play in the background and it just sort of fades away and becomes sort of like background texture. But if you stop and listen to it, it's actually quite good. Panzer-Dar-Dargoon was really his one actual creation for video games. He did dabble a couple of other times in some Sega soundtracks, but Panzer Dragoon was the one time that Azuma sat down and created from start to finish a game soundtrack.

Azuma's sort of uncharacteristic approach to music and the fact that he was not by trade, a game musician really speaks to what Sega wanted to do with Panzer Dragoon, which was to create a really sort of different experience. And, you know, it is a third-person shooter. It's on rails. So if you wanted to look at it as to, you know, just like a Star Fox kind of game, you could. But I don't think that's really fair. And I don't think it really gets to what makes Panzer Dragoon so great,

which is that it was, this multimedia experience. just it was a video game, but, you know, in addition to the action and the shooting and the graphics, you also had the sort of defining art style, and it had like a very strong French influence. I don't know if Jean-Girard actually did the art for it, but it has, like the cover art has a very strong style reminiscent of his. And likewise, the music just didn't quite sound like anything that had been in a video game before. And even the shooting mechanics were a little different because you weren't, you know, just pointing at something and shooting because it was in 3D space, the game sort of worked with a lock-on system, and you would sort of pan around and

target. And, you know, you would see this again in res. And that kind of defined, I guess, that sort of Sega shooter style in a sense. But at the time, it was really unconventional and unique. And so all these things sort of worked together to make Panzer Dragoon a very distinctive and original work. So the soundtrack is a big part of that. And if I were to describe the soundtrack to describe the soundtrack to Panzer Dragoon, it would be weighty and majestic. There is like this sense of grandeur to the music. And it does evolve and change a lot. There are a lot of different moods and textures throughout the

album. But the whole thing almost flows together like a movie soundtrack. And I think, you know, the fact that Azuma was able to create orchestrated versions of the two lead tracks at the game and then the staff roll at the end to kind of bookend the soundtrack with like a live symphonic sound. I think that helps lend to the cinematic field. But there is like just this kind of overall vibe, this overall feel to the album that sort of grows and, you know, it'll ebb and then subside and then make itself known again as you listen. but there are little snippets of music, little themes and different instrumentation that you'll hear at one point in the music, and then, you know, several tracks later, it'll appear again. And if he had arranged this album so that instead of being discrete tracks played per stage,

if instead of doing that, he had just made it so it was, you know, like Hiroki Kikuta's Secret of Mana Plus, where it's just one track that flows, again, like Mike Oldfield, you would never think a thing of it, because it just has that sort of natural flow to it. because, you know, the game was broken into discrete stages, and there would be the standard flight section, the shooting sections, and then at the end of each stage, you'd have a boss encounter. And the stage themes and the boss encounters are very complementary to one another. They're not identical.

They don't sound exactly the same. But there is this sort of, I don't know, there's almost like a unity between them, and you can hear how the boss theme plays up motifs and elements of the stage that precedes it without just being a more bombastic version of that previous track. And that's something that I think you really can appreciate when you listen to the arrangements like this. Now, Datadisk's album is a, it's basically an analog reproduction of the original game soundtrack CD, which came out in 1995, in Japan only. There was another release of the soundtrack that changed up the track order.

And if you listen to it in that order, it sounds terrible. But this goes back to the original, like the flow through the game. And it does have kind of, like I said, sort of peaks and troughs as you go through the combat sections, and then it culminates in the boss. And then the next stage theme will come in. And you'll hear almost like little elements of the previous stage, the previous boss fight, in a lot of these stage themes. But then, you know, those elements drop out.

So it does sort of evolve and flow throughout the entire game. You know, I'm going to be able to be. So if you go back and compare Panzer Dragoon to Azuma's solo work, he mostly was active during the 80s and did a little bit of work into the early 90s. You can definitely hear that it's his. A lot of his music had a very strong Asian influence. You know, it was all very instrumental and very electronic, but at the same time, it still had, I guess, phrasings and instrumentation that made you think, like, oh, yes, it's Japan. And there was always a lot of, like, Neo-Asia,

far from Asia in the titles of his works. And there is a lot of that that carries into Panzer Dragoon. This overall, this collection of music is more energetic than his solo work tended to be because it was more, you know, textural New Age background work. But that element of his previous work still creates like the baseline for the Panzer Dragoon soundtrack. And so even when, you know, the heavy drums come in or you have like the bombastic imperial chorus. We're going to be able to be.

At the same time, it's still decidedly Azuma's work. So this is just a really fantastic soundtrack. I think it's one that certainly I've been guilty of overlooking. You know, I've played through Panzer Dragoon back in the day, but didn't really think too much of the music. And it wasn't until I sat down and really just put on some headphones and listened to this record that I stopped and really appreciated how good the soundtrack is.

It's very, very much of the 90s. You wouldn't mistake it for being of any other period because it has a lot of instrumentation, some of which kind of borders on cheesiness almost, but it never quite crosses that line of good taste. Like even though it sounds dated in a certain way, there's like these synthesizer stings, like these multi-layered synthesizers

that sound almost exactly like the punctuating synthesizers that you hear in some of the battle tracks of of Mega Man Legends which came out just a couple of years later and also

had sort of that unique sort of comic influence style to it as Panzer Dragoon like a future comic post-apocalyptic sort of thing

Even though we're going to be. element to it, it doesn't feel trite or out of date, if that makes sense. And not surprisingly, this being a data disks release, the quality of the actual production is extremely high. They've gone back and they've remastered the soundtrack. I don't know exactly what sources they pulled the music from, but they always take care data disks does to go to what, you know, the most primal source of the music they can find and work from that. and then, you know, release the albums in as high a quality of format as possible. In this case, they took a nearly 70-minute CD and put it on two discs

because you can't fit that much music onto a single LP record, at least not without really compromising the quality. 70 minutes across four sides stretches things out a little bit. They were able to release this album as 2.45 RPM LPs, And, of course, that means that the mastering on it is of a higher quality. So I don't know how much you go in for like the mumbo, jumbo and hocus pocus of LP records. Maybe it doesn't make any difference to you. But the fact that they actually took that extra step and they released a double 45 LP.

To me, it just kind of speaks to the care and the love that data disks always put into their projects. The record itself, you know, the records ship in a nice heavy stock sleeve, which is printed on a sort of metallic iridescent silver. And if you look carefully, you'll see the silhouette of the dragon rider and his dragon embossed over like silvery blue metallic clouds. It's a very subtle effect. But when you look at it, there is more than just the logo on the front of the box or the front of the package. In any case, I've really enjoyed listening to this release and strongly recommend it to not just fans of Panzer Dragoon and game music, but just it's great music on its own. Again, very much of the 90s, but so much more than just a video game soundtrack and so much more than

just a new age soundtrack. It's, it's, it touches on a lot of different things all at once, and it brings them all together in a really great way. It's a, I would say it's probably the best released data disks has done so far. Uh, and it's definitely a highlight of my music collection. So great stuff. I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. You're going to be able to be. You know,

Also going back to the mid-90s. in terms of music. There's a second LP release this month that I'd like to talk about, which is Final Symphony. Now, this, as you might guess, is a symphonic rendition of Final Fantasy music based on the Final Symphony Orchestra series. Now, there are a lot of ways to listen to Final Fantasy music

performed by an orchestra. There have been arranged albums, basically since the dawn of time. I think Final Fantasy 1 and 2 had an orchestral arrange album. Final Fantasy 3 definitely did. And then, of course, there's the distant worlds uh series i was fortunate enough to attend a distant world's performance in

chicago back in 2012 and spoke to composer nobu umatsu at that and uh yeah i really enjoyed that but i have to say that the uh the arrangements that were created for that concert series were not especially surprising or unconventional it was really pretty much just taking the game arrangements and performing them with an orchestra like the most notable thing about distant worlds was that Uyematsu actually went back to the opera from Final Fantasy 6, which, you know, in game, they get like a little ways into the opera and then it's interrupted by battle. Well, here he actually went back to that opera sequence and completed, like wrote the whole

opera and they performed, you know, the opera in its entirety as opposed to being interrupted by the Ultros battle. So, Maria, Maria, my love you, for me. So that was pretty cool. But at the same time, it still felt like, you know, pops, as opposed to, like, a real symphony. It was more like, you know, here's some contemporary popular music done with nicer instruments. Final Symphony is not like that. The LP record that was recently released, the works have been performed by a number of different orchestras, but on record, they're performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, which is, you know, a pretty big deal.

but I would say that more than any other Final Fantasy arrangements to date, Final Symphony really deserves to be given that special treatment, you know, given that deluxe treatment by a world-class orchestra. Because this is not just a pop's arrangement of Final Fantasy music. These arrangements really take the entirety of the soundtracks of three different games and treat them like actual, you know, classical music. Not being a professional musician myself, I have a little bit of a hard time explaining exactly what I mean by that.

But basically, instead of, you know, having standalone tracks that loop once or twice and maybe go into like an improvisational section and then end, the final symphony arrangements take multiple tracks and weave them together and bring the theme. and motifs all throughout the works. So these different compositions from throughout the game fit both thematically in terms of their story, their story significance, but also in terms of how the music flows.

About half of the Final Symphony LP consists of Final Fantasy 7, which probably isn't surprising because that's the most popular game in the series. But it also has arrangements for Final Fantasy 6 and Final Fantasy 10. And all three of these breathe new life and bring a new dimension to this classic game music. The Final Fantasy Ten arrangements are especially interesting because they really stand out they're very different, with a heavy emphasis on piano, and that is because they were arranged by one of Final Fantasy Ten's composers, Masashi Hamazu. I don't know. And if you're familiar with Hamazu's work, whether it's in Final Fantasy 13 or in Saga Frontier 2 or his Final Fantasy 10 work, you have an idea of kind of what to expect. There's this very distinctive piano sound. It has like a large, kind of spacious ambiance.

And that fits together really well with the orchestration and the actual live, the live orchestra playing with the lead piano. But again, it is definitely a piano lead. And Hamaozu really, like, brings all the elements, not just his own compositions from 10, but the ones by Nobu Uamatsu and everyone else. And they all weave together into like an 18-minute composition that really kind of spans the entirety of final. Fantasy 10 with a heavy emphasis, you know, onto Xanarkand, the sort of introductory piano ballad that sort of sets the tone for the entire composition. It's a distinct passage on the album, and it's extremely faithful in spirit to the source material.

And to me, it really stands out as a highlight of this release. But the whole album, it's three LPs or two CDs, just is fantastic. Everything outside of Ten was arranged by Yon Valtan, a Finnish composer, I believe, and Roger Wanamo, a I assume Japanese composer, the album begins with an original overture, which doesn't really quite fit the rest of the music, in my opinion, but everything else is Final Fantasy 6, 7, and 10. Again, Final Fantasy 7 comprises about half of the album,

and that's been broken into three different suites. And the structure for the music works really well, because you have basically the three sort of main plot elements of Final Fantasy 7 represented, but also three distinct styles of music within Final Fantasy 7. Now, the first passage is called Niebelheim incident and takes a pretty liberal interpretation with the music. It's not your standard, the game soundtrack with an orchestra arrangement. Again, like the rest of the music,

it feels like a reputable symphony, like the London Symphony, would be playing. But the Niebelheim incident is a lot of, you know, sort of built around the themes of Sephiroth and Genova, and you hear those battle themes, and they're kind of like the dark bells of... of the Niebelheim flashback. All of these things kind of surface and resurface.

All throughout this album and its accompanying album, Tokyo Symphonic Fantasy, you hear One Wing Angel a lot. Abelheim incident is the one incident where it really, really works. Like it belongs in there, and Vultonan does a great job of integrating one-winged angel with, you know, the other combat themes. and the other Sephiroth and Genova-related themes. The second suite from Final Fantasy 7 is called Words Drowned Out by Fireworks, which of course is, as you might guess, kind of revolves around character relationships. And it mostly focuses on Cloud and Tifa and Ayrith.

And it actually ends with Ayrith's theme. But, you know, it has anxious hearts and some other little snippets. thrum throughout the game where, you know, it's scenes focused on the characters and their interaction, such as drowned out by fireworks, the theme that plays when you have the date with whichever character Cloud's been nicest to at the gold saucer. So this makes a nice middle of it, it's more subdued, it's more mellow, it doesn't have the ominousness of the Niebelheim incident, and it doesn't have the sort of grand scope of the third suite, which is called the planet's crisis.

And the third. And the third. And the third, suite really focuses on like the world, the overworld themes and some of the bigger, more central adventure themes and then culminates with the ending theme. So altogether the three the three suites tell the story of Final Fantasy 7, the Cloud Tifa and Ayrith triangle and relationship, and then the bigger picture where everything comes together and ultimately has its sort of culmination with the grand finale. This gives it the Final Fantasy 7 soundtrack a lot of space to breathe, a lot of room, and it works really well. There's a lot of development, a lot of thematic growth throughout.

these three suites. And they all fit together nicely while all still standing distinctly. Final Fantasy 6, on the other hand, does not receive nearly as much time to grow. There's only about half as much Final Fantasy 6 music as 7. It consists of a single album side. But they managed to pack a whole lot of that classic soundtrack into a single 18-minute suite. You'll hear things like Terra's theme, which is also the overruled theme of Final Fantasy 6. Midway through, you know, you start to hear Kefka's theme come in, the sort of almost like comical, clownish music that has that dark, ominous edge to it. And then that becomes the opera.

And then, you know, that segues into other themes like the sealed world. And then, of course, you hear Kefka's theme again as the story sort of reaches its culmination. And that becomes more of the dancing mad style. And the last album side has just kind of a collection of smaller compositions that take battle themes and things like that. And they're not as remarkable in my opinion. It's the more adventurous exploratory suites that take entire. entire game soundtracks and really try to weave them into a sweeping single composition that make this album stand out.

You know, there have been a lot of Final Fantasy albums through the years and a lot of orchestrated Final Fantasy albums, a lot of arranged albums. But in my mind, this is probably the most unique that I've ever heard outside of maybe like Final Fantasy for Celtic Moon. But of course, this is a totally different style than Celtic Moon was. This is grand symphonic orchestra as opposed to, you know, Irish dance band. Symphonic Fantasy just released on CD and LP last month in December. So it should be pretty easy to find a copy.

And if you're interested in taking this, you know, exploring this different take on Final Fantasy's very classic music by Nobu Umatsu, I give this one a pretty high recommendation. Also out last month, which is something I meant to write about, but haven't had a chance, This one's a little bit dated, but is definitely worth checking out, if only to grab a copy to keep on hand for next year. And that is the Scarlet Moon Christmas album, which is produced by Scarlet Moon Records. I don't know if you've heard of Scarlet Moon Records, but they're sort of a small game indie label. Mostly do a lot of digital renditions. They work with some highly respected composers.

They're named after the kingdom in Sweikiden. So you know they're pretty serious about game music and about great game music. But this was a collection of holiday theme pieces by different game composers. You know, people who have worked a long time. game industry veterans and really highly regarded composers, and also people who are not nearly as well known. Everyone from Dale North, the former destructoid editor, and a friend of mine who provides a Christmas-themed chronotrigger remix. to people like Secret Amana composer Hiroki Kikuta and Vince DiCola who wrote the soundtrack to Transformers the movie.

It's a pretty eclectic collection of people, but the album doesn't really have as much of a mish-mashed feel as you might expect, given the lineup of talent involved. There are some pretty odd choices for game arrangements, like a Christmas theme sort of dance electronic rendition of the Rainbow Road theme from Mario Kart 64. which is just bizarre. But it works. And there is a pretty decent amount of consistency across this album. You hear a lot of the, like, you know, the sleigh bells and strings and pianos and that sort of thing. The one track that doesn't quite fit is an Asperchia City remix from Pokemon Black and White 2 by the band Materia, which has a lot of distorted electric guitars that don't quite fit the rest of the album's vibe.

But everything else, like I said, despite the kind of random array of talent, It flows together nicely as a Christmas album, and it's definitely something that you'll want to keep kind of in the background at Christmas, and no one but you has to know that it's a lot of video game tunes. I was especially impressed by the lead track, which is, again, by Vince de Kola, who wrote the music for Transformers the movie. If you think of him as, like, the cheesy butt rock 80s Transformers the movie guy. You might be surprised by the fact that his take on jingle bells is actually mellow jazz and sets kind of like a quiet, contemplative, easygoing pace for the rest of the album. Other people might not surprise you quite as much. Like Robin Miller, who co-wrote Mist and created the music for it,

put together a track called Christmas Comes to Mist. And it's about what you would expect. It's very quiet and atmospheric. And it feels, you know, pretty chill, pretty down tempo. And then there's like these ominous atmospheric moments where you're kind of like, huh, that's a spooky Christmas. But, you know, it fits mist. And then you have something like the piece by Osama Kubota,

the former Konami and Beatmania contributor, which is an almost entirely string-based arrangement. It doesn't have much percussion at all except some tune percussion like bells toward the end of the track. On the other hand, you have Hiroki Kikuta, from Secret of Mana, who put together a really, I guess, I would say, Kikuta-ish arrangement of angels we have heard on high. It's very layered. There are pizikato strings.

There's a chorus of voices singing. There's percussion, both like standard drum percussion and also tune percussion. There's reeds and woodwinds. It has a lot going on. And it's, even though it's only like three minutes long, it's a very dense piece of music, which is, you know, exactly what you would expect from Kikuta. So again, this is a Christmas-themed album, so as such, maybe not what you want to listen to in the middle of January. But again, I would encourage you to check it out, download a copy now, put it away for next Christmas,

and crack it out at family gatherings, and make people listen to video game music without even they're realizing it. Also on the digital music front is a work by a guy called, I think a guy, called Luminist. I don't know his real name, but he has put together an album called Metroid Resynthesized, which is exactly what it sounds like. He has taken the entire Metroid soundtrack for NES and performed it and recorded it with a Corg MS20 mini analog synthesizer. Now, I talked about, you know, Metroid FM synthesis remakes back in the FM synthesis episode of Retronauts Micro about a month and a half ago. And this is something in a similar spirit, but in practice is pretty much exactly the opposite. The analog synth is, you know, kind of the sounds, the music instruments that you would hear in, like, progressive rock or sci-fi soundtracks in the 70s and into the early 80s.

Analog synthesizers were pretty much phased out as digital synthesizers kind of took their place throughout the 80s. So there is a definite dated sound to this, but in a good way, it's a very warm and moody and atmospheric take on the Metroid soundtrack. And you know, the music to Metroid, the NES game, was incredibly rich and atmospheric for an NES game. It was one of the first game soundtracks where you really stopped and thought, the composer here is actually trying to do something. He's trying to make a statement. He's trying to use this really simple video game hardware to create something that is reminiscent of actual instruments. And of course, you know, Hirokazu Tanaka was very limited in what he could do with the NES,

but that soundtrack still stands out. And I really feel like this analog synthesizer remake of his music is just the best expression possible of it. I don't know, there's something about the sort of vintage sci-fi feel of this instrument, the corg, that perfectly complements the sort of, you know, lonely space science fiction bounty hunter vibe of Metroid. And if there were a way to play the game with this music running in the background, I would love to do that. Even without it, it's just worth listening to on its own. The highlights would definitely be, well, pretty much, you know, the music that was great in the game, like Crades Lair? You know,

I'm going to be able to And I'm not going to be. Of course, the theme to Norfair, it's just spectacular here. So check that out. That's Metroid Resynthesized, composed by Luminist. I think it's like a $6 download. You can pay what you want. I gave him some extra money because it's that good.

Definitely worth your time, your money, and your brain space. If you're not keen on fan remixes, there's also an official remix that's just been recently released of game music, and that was within a game itself. Natsume's Wild Guns Reloaded came out for PlayStation 4 last month, and it's basically a scaled-up four-person recreation of wild guns for Super NES. which is kind of a weird choice, but it's a good game, and it's completely insane when four people are playing together.

But just like the game itself, the Wild Guns Reloaded soundtrack was rearranged by Hiroyuki Iwatski and is itself a big, bold remix of the original game soundtrack. So, you know, if you would compare Wild Guns Reloaded, to like taking a super NES game and turning it into something more along the lines of a crazy over-the-top PlayStation 1 experience, that's pretty much what you have with the soundtrack too. It takes the super NES soundtrack and rearranges it for very 90-sounding instrumentation.

And this does have a tendency to hit that cheese factor in a way that the Panzer Dragoon soundtrack doesn't, but I kind of like that. There is something sort of corny about this entire project, and the soundtrack, track perfectly embodies that. So it may not be to everyone's taste, but it perfectly fits the game. It's like ridiculous synthesizer butt rock, which has no place whatsoever in a game that's about gunslingers in the Old West, but it's great. Compare this track, the Carson City track on Super NES. To the Reloaded Carson City theme.

And you can really see what they were going for with this remake. This right here, this comparison of the two tracks, is Wild Guns Reloaded versus Wild wild guns. Anyway, definitely check up the game. If you're a Retronauts fan, it's probably something you'd enjoy. And while it's not a new release in any sense, aside from having just been reissued on 3DS Virtual Console, I do want to call attention to Castlevania Dracula X, which just came out, like I said, on Virtual Console a few weeks ago, because who doesn't love Castlevania music? Regardless of what you think of the games themselves,

the music in Castlevania is almost always spectacular. And that's certainly the case with Castlevania Dracula X, which is the sort of unloved, benighted, super NES remake of Rondo of Blood for PC engine. Of course, Dracula X takes out most of the things that people like about Rondo of Blood, things like the alternating paths, and the branching storyline, and the save system, and the sense of completion as you play the game over and over again and find more and more secrets. Oh, that's missing. All the great cutscenes are missing. The storyline is pretty much truncated, and the level designs are not actually that.

good. They're really cheap and unfair. But the soundtrack is great. The original Rondo of Blood soundtrack was really, you know, it was a great piece of music, but it sounded pretty unlike anything that it had come before in Castlevania to that point. It had an extremely strong electronic dance vibe to it. And that's actually kind of become how you, like a telltale sign of a Castlevania side story. Like, is it a dance remix? You know, the Castlevania Chronicles for PlayStation, the remake of the X-68,000 album. That also had a dance vibe to it.

And the weird Saturn-only compositions for Symphony of the Night also had that kind of dance club feel to them, you know, electronic drumbeats. So Castlevania Rondo of Blood had that because it was a Castlevania spin-off, so it had its own different vibe to it. Dracula X attempts to recreate that, but it does it with the superanias sound chip. While everyone agrees that Rondo of Blood is better than Dracula X, there are a lot of people who will stand up for the Dracula X soundtrack versus the PC duo renditions. They definitely have a different texture and character, even though a lot of the compositions are the same.

There are some tracks sadly missing from Dracula X, like Requiem and Cross Afear, which are, you know, all-time Castlevania classics. But the tracks that do get carried over have a distinct and very super NES-ish sound to them, which, you know, a lot of people really swear by. Bloodlines is great, of course, and the Bloody Tears remix is great. And people who only know Castlevania Dracula X from Symphony the Night will definitely recognize the final battle, illusory dance, even though you probably won't be able to beat Dracula in this version of the game because it's super cheap. Anyway, you may or may not want to pick up this game on virtual console because it's not that great, although it's an extremely expensive cartridge now, so getting on a virtual console is a big money saver.

But if nothing else, you can at least enjoy the music. And finally, I'd like to end with the classic soundtrack of the month, which is a segment that I just invented because all of this is just being invented right now off the top of my head. So one of the weirder pieces of game-related, classic game-related news in the past few weeks has been that Arc SystemWorks is creating a Double Dragon 4. There was a Double Dragon 5, but never actually a game released as done. Double Dragon 4. A lot of people consider Super Double Dragon for Super NES Double Dragon 4. Everyone agrees that it was kind of terrible, and Double Dragon 5 was also pretty bad. So I think there is some

interest in Double Dragon 4, although weirdly the game goes for an NES vibe, rather than the more iconic, or at least the more groundbreaking arcade look for Double Dragon. And given that Double Dragon 4 looks back to the NES, I thought I would go back to the original Double Dragon for NES a soundtrack and have a look at that because it was one of the system's all-time grates. Even if you don't happen to like what they did with Double Dragon on NES, taking away the two-player mode and make it more of a platformer as opposed to like a traditional belt brawler, the soundtrack was fantastic. The arcade soundtrack and the NES soundtrack contained most of the same compositions, but the arrangements on NES worked a lot better. They had a more cleaner, more aggressive sound

to them that really fit the game. Of course, the Double Dragon intro is just a classic that has shown up, not only throughout the series, but also in River City Ransom. And it segues really easily into the heroic level one theme. It's kind of like the Billy and Jimmy Lee theme, if you want to call it that. Even though Double Dragon was kind of a one-note brawler, the soundtrack really helped create a lot more atmosphere than the game actually probably should have possessed, which you really see in the stage 2 theme, which has kind of a more of an anxious vibe to it. It's not so heroic and exploratory as it's more tense.

As you leave the city and move into enemy territory, you know, the electrical plant where the enemies have set up camp. And, you know, there are some passages that kind of echo the heroic theme of stage one. But the further you get away from the beginning of the game, the further you get away from that sort of Billy and Jimmy Lee theme. This is actually true in the third stage, which sees you going into the woods, where the enemies have sort of set up an ambush for you. It has an almost like an Asian vibe to it, but that gives away to these like weird spooky cyrus that I remember a friend of mine getting really freaked out about the first time we played the game. And from there you head into the series of caves, where the music becomes almost bluesy.

But, you know, the further you get away from the beginning of the game, the slower the music becomes, the more tense it becomes, the less epic and inspiring. Until you get to the final stage, which has like this really crazy uptempo beat. It almost sounds like, you know, a Russian dance or something like a Cossack dance. It's very perky and lively. And then it ends with a final showdown with a reprise of the title screen as the two brothers face off, oh, spoilers. Anyway, I'm not sure that Double Dragon for NES necessarily holds up as well as it could due to its limitations and compromises, but man, I could just listen to this soundtrack any time.

Hopefully, Double Dragon 4 will have Meteor gameplay, and also a soundtrack every bit as good as the original inspiration for this new project. quite a surprising amount, actually. So I think I'm going to wrap up this episode now and call it a day for Retronauts Radio. Hopefully you've enjoyed this game music monologue, and hopefully you've also enjoyed the game music that plays along with it.

Again, this is an experimental episode, part of our new weekly podcast venture. So I welcome any and all feedback you might have. Do I need to bring out another host? I need to just shut up and play music for an hour? I don't know. You tell me. I'm open to suggestions and feedback, so please swing by the Patreon page or retronauts.com or our social feeds, just whatever, Facebook, I don't care, Twitter. Share your thoughts. Let me know how this episode could have been better and how future episodes could be better. Or if you even want future episodes

like this. If this is a horrible mistake and I should be doing something else, let me know now. Follow the instructions of your superior officer and evacuate immediately. have another Retronauts Micro this time from Bob. So you can listen to someone else's voice besides mine. For Retronauts, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com and on the iTunes store. We are a fully independent venture now, no longer with any other website. We are supported by Patreon. So if you enjoyed this show, please consider supporting the show for $3 a month or even a dollar, if that's all you've got. Every bit that you contribute helps support and sustain the site. I would like to make this a full-time venture,

but we still have a ways to go. So yes, if you support the show through Patreon already, thank you. And if not, well, I hope you'll consider it. In any case, we'll keep producing these episodes, these podcasts for as long as we can. So be sure to check us out. Give us feedback. Give us ratings on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook and so on and so forth. And we'll be back again in a week with more podcasting. Thank you. You know,