Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 99: Snatcher LP, Final Fantasy Brass de Bravo, and more

Episode Date: May 15, 2017

The latest Retronauts Radio features an extended look at the new soundtrack release of Hideo Kojima's legendary SEGA CD adventure Snatcher, the latest Brass de Bravo Final Fantasy album, Taito on TG16, and more!

This week in Retronauts, Hideo killed the video star. Hi, everyone, and welcome to episode 99 of Retronauts. Jeremy Parrish, and this week I'm Flying Solo. It's another Retronauts Radio episode, and I'm going to make good on a promise. Last time, I spoke with Jack Minhorn, and we talked exclusively about game soundtracks that had been released on vinyl. I know vinyl is kind of a premium market, kind of a collector's market, and I want Retronauts Radio to be more accessible. So this month we're going to look at one vinyl release, which is a good one, but also several retro game music releases that are freshly out

and won't cost you an arm and a leg. In fact, a few of them are available for just a few online. Rather than belabor the point, I'm just going to jump right into it. To start with, let's look at by far the most impressive and most eagerly anticipated release for this month, which is the soundtrack to Snatcher from Ship to Shore Media. Snatcher, of course, was a graphical adventure, released on several platforms. This is the soundtrack to the Sega CD version, the only version ever released in the U.S. or released in English officially, and it's a pretty significant release in several senses. For one thing, as far as I know, it's the first full album release of any Hideo Kojima game on vinyl. I know there was a single from Metal Gear Solid 5 released as a record store day

exclusive a couple of years ago, but this is a full album. It's two LPs, 33 RPM, so, you know, it's about 80 minutes worth of music. As far as I know, it's also the first time Snatcher's soundtrack has been available as an official American release. The game has seen several soundtrack releases through the years on CD, but only in Japan. And those are hard to come by. They're not quite as expensive as the game, but listening to the game's soundtrack has until now been a pretty pricey prospect. Ship to Shores release is not cheap because it's on vinyl, but it's still much more affordable than actually buying the game, which are pretty hot commodities, given their nature and the fanaticism of Kojima fans.

So I mentioned that Snatcher had been released on several platforms through the years. The game actually debuted as an MSX computer game. I believe it was reissued as a PC-801 game, and then finally ported to Sega CD. And I think that version was converted later to Sega. Saturn and PlayStation. Again, only the SIGID CD version came to the US, and it stands as one of the high watermarks not only of game design, but also of localization for the 16 and 32-bit era. And given its place in Hideo Kojima's sort of repertoire, really kind of the first game that showed off his design and creative sensibilities coming immediately after Metal Gear, the original

Metal Gear, and it's a much more sophisticated and advanced game. Because of that, I think it's really become a huge collector's item, you know, given the importance of Kojima in the video game industry and the significance of his works in the medium, Statcher holds a pretty important place, and so therefore is highly coveted. It also doesn't help that it came out for Sega CD and was released in very vanishing quantities, so it's a rare game that holds a lot of import and is very expensive. These days, it'll cost you two, three, four hundred dollars if you want the privilege of playing it, which is a lot of money to spend just to listen to a soundtrack. So having the double-l-p release for like 30 bucks is, in my opinion, a much better way to go about it.

As far as I know, the Snatcher soundtrack release here is not a direct adaptation of any existing soundtrack that Konami has released in Japan. Ship to Shore has converted some existing CD releases to LP for the US. Mother 1 and Mother 2, particularly were that way. But this, I think, combines several different soundtrack releases. Again, this is all Sega CD music. And because of Sega CD's disc-based nature, the soundtrack itself was kind of a hybrid.

There were a lot of chip tunes, you know, produced by the internal Sega CD, Sega Genesis processor, but there were also a lot of streaming tunes. The streaming tunes, the live performances, basically, were released as a separate soundtrack in Japan called Snatcher Zoom Tracks. So basically you have the entirety of the Snatcher Sega CD original soundtrack and the Snatcher Zoom Tracks album in this one collection. So in my opinion, it's a great value.

The sound quality is excellent, and the music itself is phenomenal. It's all very much of its time and era. You know, in terms of kind of sophistication for video game soundtracks of the era, it really ranks way up there with, you know, like Yee's Book one and two for turbo CD. So the music holds up really well. And I like the way that ship to shore has kind of shuffled around the track listing. So it's not just like a clump of zoom tracks and then a clump of chip tunes. They kind of shuffle things around mixed and matched. So you get a variety and it doesn't sound too monotonous at any one point. Like you go with chip tunes for a while

and then it switches over to live performances. On the whole, a really excellent soundtrack release pretty reasonably priced for a game and soundtrack selection that is pretty hard to come by. So a really worthwhile release. I mentioned Snatcher was a graphical adventure. If you haven't played it before, which is pretty likely, given it scarcity. It's not like Metal Gear at all. It is not an action game. There are some very, very brief, actiony sequences in the game.

But it really is a graphical adventure very much in the style of, you know, the sort of format that was really popular in Japan in the late 80s, after U.G. Hori's Portopia serial murder case sort of blew the door open for graphical adventures on consoles. This is very much in that style where you have sort of a first-person perspective and you poke around and search different elements on the screen and look for clues. It's very story-driven, very pretty linear, I would say. But the combination of nice graphics, great music, excellent voice acting, or really well-written English-language script, and a derivative but enjoyable story make for a really great game. The only action sequences, it's been a while since I've played,

but the only action sequences I can remember are the occasional encounters with the eponymous snatchers, which are robots designed to look like humans that have gone berserk and are causing incidents all over Neo-Cobe. You occasionally have to get into shootout scenarios with them, and that the game did support a light gun on Sega CD, but you could also play it without and just select with the controller a grid of the television screen to fire on the enemy. So those are really the only times there's any fast action in snatcher. Otherwise, it's very, very methodical game, very deliberately paced, very narrative-focused, very character-driven. You can really, if you look at this in the context of Kojima's work, you can really see a lot of his ideas and a lot of his thoughts about game design and even meta-narrative starting to emerge here.

There's one particular part. I won't spoil it, but it also plays with the idea of sound and kind of breaks the fourth wall in a very subtle and sly way. So it's a very Kojima kind of game. If you haven't had the chance to play it and you ever do have the chance to check it out, I strongly recommend it. I hope it gets a re-release someday. But until then, you can at least enjoy the soundtrack. So this first track is the first track on the album called Biohazard, which is from the Zoom CD selection.

The Zoom cuts on this album are all remakes of chip tunes from the original MSX and PC80801 version. versions of the game, PC-9801. But they've all been, you know, embellished and performed by sort of an, you know, the Konami Kukea Club, the in-house band, for a kind of higher quality sound. So they're much richer recordings and productions and arrangements than we're in the original version of the game. Biohazard is sort of the opening of the game. And as you can hear, there's a heavy guitar element that shares a lead line with the

synthesizer. and something unique about it is the, I feel, the thick drum rhythm. It kind of veers between a live, hot drum sound, which was really sort of uncommon to the late 80s where this was created. You know, it does occasionally kind of with like some of the drum fills, switch over to the sharper, cleaner, gated snare 80s sound that was more typical. But there is this kind of like element of not quite heavy rock, not quite jazz, but a little bit of fusion music, which, you know, I guess was pretty common on, in video game compositions and among video game composers of this period. So again, it really does feel like.

a product of its time, but it's great. And the live recording quality of this, the streaming audio quality of this, allowed the integration of eerie sound effects and things like that that weren't necessarily possible on the original hardware. So it kind of embellishes the sort of suspense and the otherworldliness of this music. It's really successful, I think, in sort of reinventing Snatcher's audio scape. Thank you. The second track on the album is One Night in Neo-Cobay City, which has more of a typical late 80s sound. You know, lots of staccato synthesizers and tune synthesized percussion.

I like that there are these kind of sparingly played electric piano licks in the background. And then that's combined with live saxophone sound. I mean, if I were to say this reminds me of any particular kind of music, I would immediately point to the bubblegum crisis soundtrack from the anime bubblegum crisis, Which maybe is not a coincidence because Bubblegum Crisis, like Snatcher, was very much, very heavily influenced by the movie Blade Runner, took place in a near future Japanese setting, involved rogue cyborgs. The two games have a lot in common. Totally, they're very different. But I guess you probably shouldn't be surprised that some of the music kind of, there's a lot of commonality between this soundtrack and the bubblegum crisis soundtrack.

So rather than go through this entire So rather than go through this entire album in the order of the track, I'm actually going to kind of break it up the way that shipped ashore did not, and talk mostly about the Zoom tracks first. After one night in Neo Kobe City, the album actually switches over to several chip tune pieces. And it's not until track six that you get to another live performance, another Zoom track. And that's Twilight of Neo Kobe City. Neo Kobe City being the location, the locale, where Snatcher takes place. And that's kind of important.

Usually you see Japanese manga and anime take place in Tokyo or something. sometimes Osaka, but everything in Snatcher takes place in Neo-Cobe, which is probably not coincidentally where Konami's headquarters was located, well, in the original Kobe city. I think they moved away after the Kobe earthquake, but up until that point, that was where a lot of their game development and production took place. Twilight of Neo-Cobay City has a piano melody, and it sounds almost like castanets as the percussion, and it builds into a string arrangement. There's a really great reed passage toward the end, and occasionally you get like the intrusion of something that sounds like bass pedals. So there's a lot of different things happening in this track, but it doesn't feel messy.

It's more like a typical video game loop theme, but it's very lengthy and it has several iterations of the loop. And each time you hear an iteration of a different iteration of the loop, it sounds a little distinct from the previous time. Like it has a different texture, a different character. So it's kind of an example of, what game arrangers and composers were able to do, you know, with the, the technology and the space afforded to them with the CD-ROM format. So this album really does kind of play up the nature of the revolutionary medium that was CD-ROM. We'll be talking a lot about CD-ROMs the next episode of Retronauts. But I don't think we really talk about Snatcher in that one,

but this soundtrack, I think, really kind of drives home what that meant for people who were creating games and composing for games. So the B-side has two notable live tracks, and those are Theme of Snatcher Part 1 and theme of Snatcher Part 2. And these two pieces, despite having, you know, like a common title and being listed as part 1 and part 2, are completely different from one other. Part 1 is like very heavily focused on drum machines, and there's that kind of 80s dance synthesizer backbeat, like think, you know, EFM or something.

That kind of plays out and sort of lays down the tone and the rhythm for the track before the primary melody kicks in. And you also have these kind of slightly out-of-tune female vocal samples being thrown in. It's a kind of high energy and a little bit unsettling track. But then you get to the same. Part 2, which plays, it kind of bookends, these two tracks, bookends the B side of the album. And Them of Snatcher Part 2 is a completely different piece of music, even though it has some thematic elements in common with Them of Snatcher and also with the opening theme. It has a very languid pace at first.

There's this slow, deep drumline and piano melody. They set up as sort of melancholy jazz synthesizer and rhythm guitar. And these elements grow in force as new elements enter the mix. Eventually you get more of that live drum sound and you get these sustained strings or sustained synthesizers that sound like strings. This piece really reminds me of Falcom's JDK band, and the music they particularly created for the game Brandish, which is a soundtrack that I love, so don't get me wrong, that's a great thing. But it feels, this track feels completely different than Theme of Snatcher Part 1.

I'm going to be able to be. Another sort of noteworthy zoom track edition is toward the end of the D side of the album, right at the end of the record, which is called Beyond Sorrows. It accompanies a character's death. I don't want to spoil anything. But it's meant to be a sad theme sort of toward the end of the game is, a key character passes away. And it's a kind of

a quintessential late 80s emotional electronic instrumental. It's a slow-paced and it culminizes in a synthesizer trying really hard to sound a little bit like an electric guitar. After it kind of, you know, does that emotional

plucking at your heartstrings thing, it eventually kicks into a faster tempo as it reaches its climax. And then finally, the last year, Last of the notable Zoom tracks is tear-stained eyes, the very upbeat sounding name for the credits theme. This is not actually as sort of sad and emotional as beyond sorrows. It's more like adult-oriented pop, and it's maybe just a smidge on the cheesy side.

It's not as bad. as I Am the Wind from Castlevania Symphony the Night, but it's definitely kind of plowing that same furrow. Overall, the album feels a little bit like it has kind of a split personality thanks to all the different kinds of incidental music. The Zoom tracks, I think, all kind of feel like they are of a piece, even though there's a lot of variety in the sound of these pieces. But side B and side C have a lot of incidental music, side D also, that probably could have been left out. Like, if you wanted to pair this down to a single record, there is a lot of sort of incidental music and sort of environmental music that's not all that exciting to listen to it.

I think it works pretty well in the context of this album because of the way the track listing is shuffled around. So you get sort of like the more contemplative tracks and the slower atmospheric tracks mixed around with some of the more energetic pieces or the more melodic character themes. And really, I would say very little of it is truly inessential. And there's only one track that feels jarring or out of place, and that is Side B, Track 2. And it's called Mary Exmus, Neo-Cobay City.

It's basically a synthesizer version, chip tune version of Jingle Bells. And I probably would have put this someplace on the album, like at the end of a side, because it's very, like having jingle bells, the melody amidst all this other original music, it's kind of distracting. It feels a, it's not like a cheesy version of jingle bells or anything, but it's very recognizable as a holiday jingle, and it's very, it feels a little out of place in this particular soundtrack setting. So I'm not crazy about where it's placed. You can't just skip past the track on a record. If I were to divide up and categorize the music in Snatcher, I'd probably break it down by a few different categories. In addition to the Zoom tracks, there are sort of scenic themes that you hear while you're looking and exploring and doing the graphical adventure type stuff, exploring a scene.

then there are the character themes and the action themes. And all of these kind of have their own sort of, their own kind of vibe. Like they all kind of, again, kind of feel of a piece with one other. The first Chiptune track you hear is, is one of the atmospheric pieces. It's called Junker HQ. Junkers being sort of like the blade runners of Snatcher's world. Snatchers are the cyborgs.

Junkers are the detectives who are assigned to cases involving Snatcher crime. Junker HQ is the first chip tune track on the album, and it does a good job of carrying forward the general atmosphere of the first two tracks, even though those are the live zoom tracks. It doesn't really have a melody. There's a dominant bass effect and a synthesizer, but it's very atmospheric. And I will say that

if you stop and listen to these chip tune tracks, you have to remember that they are on Sega Genesis, which is a Sega CD Sega Genesis, same hardware. And the sound chip on the Sega Genesis, I think, is always a little bit controversial.

But as we've seen with data disks, their Sega Genesis releases, the Sega Genesis was capable of producing some excellent sound, some excellent music. And I think the compositions in Snatcher do a great job of building up atmospheres that don't really sound like anything else that you hear on Sega Genesis. It's not nearly as cold as you tend to associate with FM synthesis sound.

So you have to be really impressed with the quality and the tone of the music in this album, even when it's not the live compositions, the Zoom tracks. It's still, like, there's still great quality to it. And again, this shows that, as with anything, the, the, The quality of a Sega Genesis, Sega CD soundtrack really rested in the hands of the composers and the programmers and depended on their ability to make it the most of the soundtrack and the hardware. A lot of the music in this, the atmospheric tracks work a lot better in the context of the game.

Like Plato's Cavern is an electronic music, pretty subdued. has a variant version called Decadence Beat, that's a little, has more of a drum element to it. But it's still pretty subdued. It's still kind of like stuff that sort of fades into the background. Likewise, the entrance to outer heaven. That track, there's a club in the first of the mini self-references in Hideo-Cogamous work. There's a nightclub called Outer Heaven, based, you know, named after the enemy base in Metal Gear. And I got to say that as nightclub music goes, the entrance to outer heaven does not feel as energetic or sleazy, as you might expect from sort of a place where you meet an exotic dancer. Probably the most interesting of the atmospheric scene themes comes in the form of restoration, which is a piece that combines multiple. urgent pulsing backbeats with a very quick, lively theme and bassy synthesizers. It feels more intense than most of the atmospheric music in the game and kind of draws back on the Junker HQ theme because this is a piece that plays while Gillian,

the main character, Hunts for Snatchers, in his own headquarters. You also get to hear the theme Gillian's apartment, which is the protagonist's, uh, where the place of where he lives, so you have to visit once or twice. And it's, uh, I have to say it's, as a composition, it's more delicate than you might expect from the background music to a divorced, grizzled detective bachelor's pad. That's a little bit ethereal. And there's a tiny hint of percussion keeping time with little peeps of a subdued guitar lick. But it's a pretty low key. pretty chill. But these are all interspiced with the game's action themes. One of the weird things is the action themes are kind of a series, pleasure of tension, parts one, two, and three. But the track listing actually has them out of order. You get two, three, and then toward the end of the album, there's the first pleasure of tension, which is kind of weird.

Pleasure of Tension 2 and 3, there's actually kind of like an ascension of intensity to them. Pleasure of Action 2 is very atmospheric, almost sounds like one of the background scenes, whereas Pleasure of Tension 3 has a little more energy. The sound mixes a little more forward than Pleasure of Tension 2. And then Pleasure of Tension, one is the most energetic of these. It's sort of the live Zoom tracks take on pleasure of tension. I mean it opens with record scratches and processed voices. There's this shrill synthesizer that almost sounds like a soprano sax. saxophone, and there's processed guitar chords, but all these play in like really quick bursts.

They blip in and play over really harsh synthesizers, very electric, very raspy sounding digital synthesizers. And then in the second half, you start to get some acoustic instruments. You get a piano melody that comes in and runs some sort of discordant lines. But there's like this atonality to the piano, and it never really breaks into the foreground of the sound mix. It's always just kind of lurking on the periphery of your ears. It creates a sense of tension and anxiety. And then all that builds up and there's a break,

and then the theme reprises itself with sort of a variant and draws to an end. It's really one of the few tracks on the entire album that feels like an action theme. And it really kind of stands out because of that. It also stands out because it makes really great use of audio sampling and the use of kind of playing tricks with the sound mix to generate anxiety. So it's definitely one of the standouts of the album. And then finally you get to the character themes. There are several characters who play major roles in Snatcher besides the protagonist Jillian,

There's his ex-wife, Jamie, who actually has two themes. There's Jamie's theme and theme of Jamie. I'm not exactly sure how that works within the game. Like I said, it's been a long time since I've played it. But Jamie's theme is actually very uninteresting. It's just kind of there. But then theme of Jamie kind of builds on that, and it's a Zoom track, so it's got kind of a live sound,

and it's actually really funky with some free-form keyboard riff work. There's even a fake drum breakdown. Before it kicks into a heavily processed guitar lick. So I feel like Jillian and Jamie had a very strange relationship of this is sort of the embodiment of. it. Another major character in the game who also gets two themes is Katrina Gibson, who is, I believe, the police chief's daughter, she's underage, and the way the game looks at her, like the male perspective of Gillian is a little bit on the skeevy side. That's also kind of,

I think, some kogima predilections coming to the surface here. Interestingly, the first iteration of her theme is called Innocent Girl, but the thing is it has this, like, sort of intense, moody, almost gothic organ and synthesizer arrangement. And it feels a little, a little disturbing. So, I don't know, maybe it's supposed to be unsettling. Maybe you're supposed to be like, hey, maybe Gillian doesn't have the best of intentions toward this girl. But on the other hand, the second theme, theme of Katrina, feels more appropriate. It drops the ominous organ instrumentation in favor of a more delicate, tuned percussion style.

Kind of sounds like a glockx. with reverb on it, or it almost even hints at a musical box, so it's more kind of what you would associate with a character whose theme is called Innocent Girl. And then there's one more character who also gets two themes, and that's random Hajile, who is a major character and a bounty hunter who shows up throughout the game and kind of plays a key role in cracking the mystery of Snatcher. I don't want to spoil too much of that, but I will say that both of his tracks are taken from the Zoom tracks selections, and both of them have a lot of energy and a lot of, they both kind of

callback to the main snatcher theme, which kind of, I think, hints at his importance to the story. The first of his tracks, Fated Memories, has those great 1990s burst synthesizer elements, like you hear in the Panzer Dragoon soundtrack from a few Retronauts radio episodes ago, or maybe something like Mega Man Legends. But it moves at a faster pace than any other character theme in the game. It has a driving beat and lots of different layers of melody that you kind of shift and fold into one another. It also features this really strange sampled laughter throughout, which goes on for quite a while. And the last track I want to talk about on the Snatcher soundtrack is Eternal Promise Goodbye Random,

which, uh, you know, given the title has kind of a soulful sound to it. It's a sort of a lower tempo reprise of faded memories, lots of echo and reverb. And I feel like this track would feel right at home in an 80s movie soundtrack like Labyrinth or Lady Hawk or Quicksilver or something. You know, one of those soundtracks created by someone who was like, oh, I don't need an orchestra, I can just do lots of synthesizers. It has that kind of feel too.

So again, this soundtrack overall feels very much like a product of its times. It feels like a product of its platform. And, you know, I think it does a really good job of sort of setting. the tone of the game and the nature of the game, which is a 1980s vision of near future Japan, which is nothing at all like what near future Japan actually turned out to be. But it kind of takes you back to that sort of time of hope and a little bit of depression. Like everything's going to be better, but it's also going to be worse. And even though reality turned out to be better and worse in completely different ways than we all expected,

snatcher's vision of the future is pretty interesting to revisit. it. And again, if you can't afford to do that through the game, you can at least check out this album, which, again, runs about $30, 35, I can't remember exactly, but it's pretty affordable. And as it's the only way to buy a copy of the Snatcher soundtrack through a U.S. distributor, it's definitely worth checking out. What if every time you went out, you could cash in. Now with the Capital One's saver card, you earn 4% cash back on dining and entertainment, like their first taste of guacamole. Ew.

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Some features are not available in all states. All right, well, I spent quite a while talking about the first selection for this, for this month, and that was the one vinyl release for the month. The next album is one that you can buy in iTunes. for about $12. So we don't have to go buying expensive extra hardware or hunting down CDs from an importer or ordering online from a record distributor. You can just go to iTunes or, I don't know,

it's probably on some other service if you want to play it that way. But it's available right there for you, and it's called Brabara, Brass de Bravo 3. As the name suggests, this is the third in a series of brass band interpretations of classic Final Fantasy music. All music composed by Nobu Uomatsu. It's performed by the Sienna Wind Orchestra and conducted by Hirofumi Kurita. I actually had not heard of the series before now. I missed out on the first two of the Bras de Bravo series, but checked out the third one, which came out at the end of March.

And after listening to this CD, I really enjoyed it. And I'm definitely going to go back and check out the first two albums, which are also available on iTunes. So I'm not making any money off of these recommendations. I'm just putting the music out there and telling you where you can find it. If you buy it, that's fine. If you don't, that's also fine. I don't make any money either way. I'm just putting good music in front of you. The thing I like about Brastor Bravo is that it takes a lot of music that I know very well that I've heard many times, both through the original soundtracks, through playing the games, through different arrangements, and in almost every case, it puts a new spin on very familiar music.

And that's pretty hard to do, considering how many times and how many different albums Square Nix has released, reprising Final Fantasy music. The one track on this entire album that didn't really do much for me was the 10th track, which is Ereth's theme from Final Fantasy 7. It doesn't really add much to any other take on that composition. So I kind of, I think I'll skip past that one in the future. But the rest of this album kind of covers a really broad span. I wasn't sure what to expect from a brass band rendition of Final Fantasy music. But there's a lot different styles. There's like big band, there's more like marching band, there's, you know, some flamenco music, there's sort of smooth jazz, there's live jazz, improvisational jazz,

and even some other sort of interpretations and styles. So, you know, there's good variety here, and it doesn't stick to one particular format or genre of music and interpreting this music. It puts a different spin on every track. Some things are very upbeat, some things are very pompous, and some things are very low-key. So the album opens with the main theme of Final Fantasy 5, which I love the original. It's one of my favorite video game tunes of all time. And this one doesn't, like this composition is actually kind of a weak start for the album. It loses the inspiring urgency of the original theme,

favor of a more sweeping style that changes its pace. I don't know, like the kind of up and down, change in tempo, change in volume, change in intensity doesn't really fit the main theme of Final Fantasy 5. The composition does kind of pick up the plot again and a three-minute mark or so and there's some great timpennies that build up and then it ends with some reeds and woodwinds sort of picking up the more wistful element of the melody.

But on the whole, yeah, it's just kind of all over the place. Unfortunately, the second track, Ilya, the maiden of water from Final Fantasy 3, is a much more considered a piece that feels more internally consistent with itself. This is a classic Nobu Umatsu heroine piece. So it's very kind of a little bit melancholy, a little bit, you know, you can kind of hear the John Williams influence like Leia's theme or Marion's theme for Raiders of Lost Ark. Like Uwamatsu kind of takes that same approach when writing light motifs for his female characters. And this does a good job of just capturing that one element, that one stylistic tone of the original composition and just running with it.

The third track, Back is Mount Golg from Final Fantasy 1 and 9. And that was kind of like this upbeat sort of, I don't know what you necessarily would expect from a volcano theme, but this was, it was very uptempo and sort of almost comical in nature. Here it's been given a more serious kind of Middle Eastern vibe. It almost sounds like belly dance music, except the way the melody sort of rises and falls. Like it grows in intensity in a way that, you know, like a belly dance wouldn't. I'm going to be able to be. I don't know.

From Final Fantasy 6, there's Terra's theme, or Tina's theme, if you prefer, which is a very, a nicely varied arrangement that works in a way that the theme from Final Fantasy 5 does not on this album. You start getting these different sections sort of building in to climb. and then drop down and then build up again for another climax. And each time the music rises, it feels a little more intense, a little more triumphant. So there's this kind of rising, falling action, building toward a peak throughout this composition. And it sounds really great and really kind of drives home that sense of exploration that you felt while hearing terrorist theme in Final Fantasy 6.

It was the overworld theme that accompanied your exploration. I've always been a big fan of the Final Fantasy 8 soundtrack, and there are two pieces on here from Final Fantasy 8 that are both excellent. The first is Ami, which is kind of like the main character and his friends, their theme when they sort of hang out together and spend time together. Um, and this one. has kind of a melancholic era. It starts out with an oboe, and then other instruments sort of pick up the melody. It's kind of like a, it's not quite rounds, but it's a very simple melody and it repeats a lot, and it's played in its different iterations by different instruments. And it kind of builds on itself, and you hear these different permutations of the theme,

and kind of culminates in a really nice passage at the end played on Glockenspiel that avoids going bombastic and noisy, it feels very true to the original piece. And likewise, the Final Fantasy 8 battle theme, Force Your Way, retains largely the same feeling as the original composition here as well, but it's actually a little more intense. It has that kind of live drum sound percussion that I talked about in the Snatcher soundtrack. One of the interesting things about it is that it, you know, has that kind of, like, big, bombastic battlefield, but it peels away layers as it iterates instead of building up like most of the tracks here do. So it kind of gives it a different character, a different, kind of a different take on music than you hear throughout the rest of Braster Bravo.

And then there's a nice little reprise at the end, which is a cute little musical reference to a very standard Final Fantasy theme. But I would have to say probably the best arrangement on this entire album is from Final Fantasy 7, and that is The Chase. While I didn't like this album's interpretation of Aerith's theme, I love its take on the chase, which is the motorcycle escape from Midgar, that kind of happens at the end of Disc 1 in the game. There's this really great acoustic percussion. that gives the whole thing a Mission Impossible vibe. It really feels like something from a film soundtrack. The arrangement here is slower and more intense than the original rendition. And there's a bridge section that quiet things down before the live percussion kicks in again,

and it builds up toward a crescendo. It's really just an excellent composition. It adds a lot of new interest in dynamism to the original composition. Same thing happens with dear friends from Final Fantasy 5. It's a totally different kind of arrangement. It's a super jazzy number that wouldn't be out of place in a cabaret or, you know, sort of a retro musical, like Chicago. It has like a tenor sax and trumpet solo. It has a tenor sax and trumpet solo. It has a drum solo.

it's very much that sort of like big band live instrumentation feel to it. It's great stuff. So like I said, that's Final Fantasy Brastabravo 3, and you can get it from a retailer like CDJapan, probably from Amazon.com, or you can get it digitally on iTunes for, I think, $11.88. So pretty good value for a pretty good arrangement album. We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be. I'm going to be.

I'm going to be. I'm going to be a bit of a lot of it. And so, you know, and I'm going to be able to be. So the third album I'd like to talk about is a CD release that came out in Japan. I doubt it's going to come here. It doesn't really seem geared toward the American audience. But it seemed interesting.

So I imported a copy. And I enjoyed listening to it, although I'm not sure it's going to enter my regular rotation. It's called Hewcard Disc and Taito Volume 1, which is not a very rolls-off-the-tong kind of name. But basically what this is is a collection of Taito soundtracks, all taken from the PC Engine TurboGraphics 16 versions of those games. So it's a really unusual soundtrack collection concept. When I think people, I think when most people think of Tito soundtracks, they think of their arcade work. They think of, you know, the music that Zontata composed. and performed. And Ship to Shore is actually in the process of producing several Zuntata

soundtracks. I did liner notes, actually, for the first volume and for a third volume that's coming out soon. And there was a Darius LP that was just released, and we'll look at that in next month's episode. But this is something different. It is not based on, you know, the FM synthesis arcade sound. It's based on the Turbographic 16. The Turpographics had its own sort of unique approach to game music and the sound. It had six wave-tave audio channels. So it kind of used the same technology as the NES and Sega Master System, but it was a step or two above those. It also had some sort of special features on a couple of the channels that allowed for something that kind of approached an FM synthesis-like effect. And you can kind of hear that on the CD.

I don't think you ever really hear people talk too much about the turbographics's chip audio, because usually discussions about PC engine music or TurboGraphic 16 music focus more on CD games, things like East 1 and 2. And, you know, that's understandable because there were some truly amazing soundtracks produced for the turbographic CD. So even though this album, Who Card Disc in Tito Volume 1 is not something that I'm going to listen to on a regular basis, I love the fact that Taito produced it because it is this sort of forgotten corner of video game history and video game music. It's a shame that it's a little bit hard to track down. You'd have to go to some place, again, like CD Japan, or get lucky on eBay. But it's a really unique addition to the library of music.

And you can buy a lot of these games, the soundtracks to them, on iTunes for like $8 to $10 a piece. But those are the arcade versions, and it definitely is a different style and different quality of music than you have here. This album is a great opportunity to see how a top-flight developer worked with a sort of not quite niche, but definitely a less popular console's audio capabilities, both for original compositions and arcade conversions. Hew card disc in Taito Volume 1 is two CDs, and it contains complete soundtracks to all the games included, Kadesh, Dondokodon, the New Zealand Story,

Parasal Stars, Rosden Saga 2, Kiki Kaikai, aka Paki and Rocky, Jikoku Meguri, and Champion Wrestler. Because these are the complete soundtracks, there are a lot of incidental filler tracks and throwaway cues, things that, you know, you'll probably want to rip this album to your music player of choice and not include things like the coin drop. But if you just take, you know, the music that you enjoy, the meteor music, there's some pretty good stuff here. Kadesh, I find, is actually a little bit of a difficult listen. The main theme is very strident.

There's this kind of scratchy quality to the music. And it sounds like they were trying to almost like sample the FM synthesis of the arcade or to imitate that. And it didn't quite work out. But really, I feel like the biggest problem in Kadash is the lack of memorable percussion. There are very few tracks that have like a driving beat that you would expect for an action RPG like this. sort of an innovative action RPG, a multiplayer RPG, up to four people could play together in the arcades. On PC Engine, I think it was just two people could play together.

But with four character classes, it was even localized by working designs. And so it's one of the few games on here that most people probably would have played if they followed the Turbographic 16. There's a very heavy bubble-bobble influence on this album, with three games in a row on the record that are very much in the bubble-bobble vein. Don doodon was a two-player arcade platformer, single screen, very much to bubble-bobble-like, except that you hit things with a mallet instead of shooting them with bubbles. It's got very bright, upbeat music. It's cleaner and less static-y than Kadesh. So it's a little easier to listen to.

It lacks the earworm quality of Bubble Bobble, but it has a similar vibe. The New Zealand story was also kind of in that bubble-bobble vein, even though it was a single-player game. The music is even more bubble-bobble-like, kind of circus-like. Paris All-Stars, the story of Bubble Bobble 2, is the first soundtrack on here to a have been composed entirely, originally for the PC engine. This game was never released in the arcades, and so maybe as a result of its origins being on the PC engine, it has the cleanest sound of any of the games here so far. It's very chirpy and upbeat, and there's a kind of tango-like quality to a lot of the themes, especially the boss battle.

It's very catchy, memorable music. My far. The most ambitious music on here comes from Rosden's music on here comes from Rosden Saga 2. It has very few tracks, but two of them are extremely lengthy. One is eight minutes long and one is nearly seven, the story and the trap. And the way these were like, you know, the background music for these adventure stages that you played through. I really feel that with the soundtrack for Razden Saga 2, Taito and Zutata were trying to capture the film inspiration of the game. We talked about that in the Prototypes episode of Retronauts a couple of weeks ago,

but this was a game very heavily influenced by Conan the Barbarian and that sort of barbarian action movies of the 70s and 80s. They're not necessarily the best possible versions of these compositions, but the music is still really cool and ambitious, and it's definitely worth a listen to. And after that, the final three games on Hukar Disc and Taito Volume 1 are a little bit of a letdown.

Kiki, Kiki, Paki, and Rocky, only has a couple of themes. They're very heavily Japanese in nature, given, you know, that you're playing as a Tuduki or a Shinto princess fighting Japanese yokai. Of course, it's going to be super Japanese, but there's not, there aren't very many original compositions, just like the main battle theme and the boss thing. And then there's Jigoku Meggery, a very strange game that I'd never heard of before this, which seems to involve a very sort of ugly, big-headed child fighting his way through hell. And that also has kind of a Japanese style to it. The music is strange, the game is strange,

kind of a hard listen. And then finally, Champion Wrestler only has really two themes. and it's mostly just a lot of character-specific jingles. Anyway, I don't know that I necessarily recommend picking up a copy of Hu-card disc in Taito, Volume 1, but I do think that, you know, for those with a fondness for the turbographics, or who are just interested in hearing these sort of classic arcade games interpreted in a different way, and who are interested in hearing some console chip tunes that aren't the NES or Sega Genesis, it's definitely worth a look at least.

And then finally, just in time for the game's And then finally, just in time for the 25th anniversary of the game's American release, there is a fan arrangement of the soundtrack to A Link to the Past. Produced by Will Patterson, this is the first in a series of analog synthesizer cover albums based on Super NES games.

The series is called Switched on S&S. And this is a look at The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past. As far as I can tell, this is a legit thing, with profits going toward Nintendo, composer Koji Kondo, et cetera, rather than just being one of those like, hey, I took other people's music, give me money.

So that's cool. You can pick it up for like $5 at his Bandcamp page that's switched on s-N-E-S dot bandcamp.com. So several months ago, we looked at the analog synth rendition of Metroid's soundtrack, and that was great and really fit the nature of the game because analog synths do have that kind of spacey quality, and Metroid had a very spacey quality being set in outer space and all that. Whereas the legend of Zelda, a link to the past, is a very different kind of game. game. It's not an action game. It's not a shooter. It's not set in a science fiction futuristic setting. It is a action RPG set in a sort of medieval kingdom. So the idea of creating the sort of spacey analog synth interpretations of Legend of Zelda The Last soundtrack is pretty interesting and maybe doesn't quite fit the nature of the game and the music as well as it does Metroid, but I still like the results. This gives the music an

interesting sound. It's a different take that feels authentic. You know, the original Super NES sound chip was based on samples, audio samples, and it always had kind of a fuzzy quality to the music due to the low sampling rate. Analog sense also have that sort of fuzziness, not for the same reason, but there is that sort of warmth and a little bit of distortion to music played on analog synths just because of their analog nature. They weren't, you know, precise computer-driven devices like digital sense. I think some tracks in this arrangement are more successful than others, but the entire thing is 12 minutes long. So the whole thing does not overstay its welcome. It's more of a sampler. And just when you think, oh, this track is starting

to wear out, it's welcome, it's over. So there's something to be said for the brevity of it. I will say that on the whole, I like these synth arrangement albums, but I think they would probably benefit from the incorporation of some other instrumentation, like some drums or a guitar, or even a bass guitar, just something to kind of break things up and not make them this kind of oppressive, spacey, digital, like electronic sound. At their best, these arrangements actually give you a new appreciation for tracks that you might have otherwise overlooked. That's especially true with opening, which plays over the sort of the introductory cutscene

that sets the stage for the game. There's this interesting panning effect across the stereo stage, a mix of rapid pulses and melodic elements that makes you appreciate the track. You kind of sit up and take notice of it. Whereas in the game itself, it's just kind of, kind of there and kind of sort of discreetly in the background, and it's not one that you hum to yourself often. Whereas the light world theme, which is recaptured here, the music that you hear after you collect the master sword in Zelda, it has a calliope effect and feels kind of like slight and lightweight, like something you'd hear at a baseball game, which gives it a very kind of different sense than the majestic quality that you associate with the Zelda overworld theme.

Both the fairy theme and the crystal theme, I think, probably work best on this album just in terms of the nature of the instruments. Like, these themes were very ethereal originally to begin with. And especially with the fairy theme, the lead synthesizer's line, doesn't really sound too dissimilar from the actual thing. There's also some really great secondary sound elements that build and swell and create a sort of atmosphere and texture that adds something to the compositions, I think. Meanwhile, tracks like Kakariko Village and Sanctuary, which in the game, accompany places that are like, you know, friendly locations, safe spaces for Link to explore, you know, a village or a holy sanctuary, these become almost melancholy and eerie

here in these synthesizer interpretations. So it's almost like these tunes become inverted in their purpose, just based on the nature of the instrumentation, which is really interesting. And likewise, you see her the same thing, with the final track I'm going to talk about, which is Dark World, in the game, that's kind of like an ominous take on the overworld theme, and it's supposed to make you feel unsafe and uncertain, like you've gotten in over your head. But here it has more of an upbeat quality. So like I said, there's kind of a tonal inversion in this album. Anyway, it's a pretty enjoyable piece. If you like the sound of it and want to add to your analog synth cover collection of video game soundtracks, you can go to

switchedon-s-n-es dot bandcamp.com and check it out. And I think that about wraps it up for this episode of Retronauts Radio. I've been monologing for the past hour, and I'm starting to lose my voice. So I think I will stop belaboring the point and remind the UU that you can pick up these albums. Let's see. The Snatcher soundtrack you can get at ShiptoShoreMedia.com. Brast of Bravo 3, you can buy on iTunes Music Store. Hew card disc in Taito Volume 1.

You'll have to look for an importer like CD Japan. And switched on S&ES, link to the past. You can get it switched on S&ES.bantam.com. And that wraps it up for this latest episode of Retronauts Radio. I have been Jeremy Parrish, and as usual, you can find me on the internet at retronauts.com and on Twitter as GameSpite. Retronauts, of course, you can find at Retronauts.com. You can find on the iTunes Music Store, and you can find on the podcast One network or app. This podcast is, of course, both ad-supported and supported through patreon.com. Both forms of income allow us to make this a full-time endeavor. and to do more than podcasting, but also create videos, create really great content at theretronauts.com blog, and so on and so forth. So please consider supporting us by checking out some of our advertisers or just giving us a few dollars per month to create great podcasts.

Hopefully, you'll agree they're great. If not, then, well, I apologize for that, and hopefully next week will be better. Next week will actually be the 100th episode of Retronauts, and we have something a little special lined up for that. So please look forward to that. In the meantime, enjoy the music. and thanks for your support. The Mueller Report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General.

Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged.

charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.