Hiroki Kikuta, composer of Secret of Mana and Alphabet Planet, has a new album coming out in February.
Featuring his musical contributions to the Japan-only MMORPG Concerto Gate, the release for the artist’s privately owned Norstrilia label will feature 15 songs and a four-page booklet. It is titled simply “Concerto.”
A music sample and thumbnail of the elaborate cover art is now on display at the artist’s official website Angel’s Fear.
While the English-speaking world has yet to be assured of a localization, December 13 will see the release of Chocobo’s Dungeon: The Labyrinth of Forgotten Time for the Nintendo Wii in Japan. The Square Enix dungeon crawler is the direct descendant of two Playstation titles and its music launched the careers of composers Masashi Hamauzu and Kumi Tanioka. The upcoming title will be scored by Joedown Studio, the music production company based in Hokkaido responsible for the soundtrack to Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales. [More about Joedown’s remixes of Uematsu’s tunes after the jump.]
To this day Hiroki Kikuta’s soundtrack for the Super Nintendo action adventure title Secret of Mana scores on more than just nostaligia, but it has been a bumpy road for the composer. The epic sequel to Secret of Mana was famously denied an English-language localization, as was the composer’s first project for the Playstation. His massively multiplayer online project for Enix called Chou Bukyo Taisen geared toward the East Asian market, was canceled by the international co-developers during beta-testing. Following these setbacks, Kikuta has become increasingly tenacious in his desire to maintain creative control over the music he creates. The result is a fledgling publishing company - Norstrilia - named after the only novel published by science fiction writer Paul Linebarger under the pseudonym Cordwainer Smith. In what appears to be an understated homage to the digitized keyboard culture of today, Kikuta’s latest album published under the label is entitled Alphabet Planet. Read the rest of this entry »
And the winner of the most elaborate booth present at today’s Tokyo Game Show goes to… Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Clearly not satisfied with having the best looking game on the show floor, Konami pulled out all the stops and leaving a lasting impression on visitors. Consider that while standing in line for a twenty-minute hands-on demo, booth babes passed around PSPs tethered to their camouflaged shorts. Having Portable Ops Plus and the attention of attractive women seemed to make the time fly by, and soon everyone was escorted into a closed theater and debriefed on the game mechanics.
Probably a sign reading “MGS4 This Way –>” would have sufficed in capturing the attention of game show attendees.However, instead of merely being escorted to the demo, Foxhound operatives in full regalia were on hand to lay down the mission objectives. Belting out their lines like trained men of war, they even goaded some of the introverted group of gamers into saluting like soldiers. Taking the theatricality of the event beyond what was expected, or really necessary, a siren went off in the middle of the presentation and a planted member of the audience was identified as a spy, escorted out of the room, and dispatched with thunderous gunshots.
Finally we were allowed to play an early mission of the game, surrounded by barbed wire and a chain link fence to add to the effect. Unsurprisingly, Guns of the Patriots comes off as a deeply immersive experience. Players can evade enemy AI by activating their thermal suit’s camouflage function, thereby blending into any environment. A variety of weapons are available to suit all manner of military need. There is even a new-fangled stun knife to bludgeon an opponent without the attendant guilt of committing murder. Old Snake can also interact with the environment in a variety of ways, including crawling into trash bins and dragging unconscious enemies around. The level of detail on every object in the environment is astounding. More impressions of the game itself should be up in the following days.
And for every portable, a Kingdom Hearts. At today’s Tokyo Game Show, Square Enix showed a series of trailers in their Closed Mega Theater, culminating in a trilogy of side stories for the Kingdom Hearts series. The games will focus less on the Disneyland set-up of the previous titles, and delve more deeply into the dramatic entanglements of the Organization XIII. Two of the games feature Roxas as the main protagonist, making Sora and his Disney friends secondary figures of importance. However, seeing as all three games appear to be prequels, players will be allowed to face off against their favorite vanquished Disney villain (yet again).
The first game showed in the closed theater was for mobile phones and titled Kingdom Hearts: Coded. Jiminy Cricket is shown flipping through his notebook and comes upon a block of text reading “We must return to free them from their torment.” He rushes this news to King Mickey, who declares that only one person will do. So the cell phone entry will see Sora fighting without his friends. The trailer featured virtual reality simulations with eerie green lighting captioned “Debugging Mode.” The gameplay appeared somewhat puzzle game-oriented in nature, with time trials and customizable environments. All the familiar Heartless enemies were on display, as well as familiar locales such as Destiny Island and Traverse Town, though all appeared a tad more pixelated that usual.
Today Square Enix game producer Tomoya Asano launched a development blog for the Nintendo DS remake of Final Fantasy IV. The development column idea may well have been inspired by the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fatescommunity blog organized by the director, Mitsuru Kamiyama. That particular action RPG rose to first-place this week in sales in Japan. Maybe dev blogging might not be such a bad way of promoting a game?
Asano writes that with the full remake of Final Fantasy III for the NDS, his team at Matrix Software focused on novelty in three main areas. 1. Converting the graphics from sprite-based images to polygons. 2. Improving game balance, so that each of the job systems would confer advantages for experimentation. 3. Expanding the scenario. Adding cut-scenes to flesh-out the storyline in a way that wasn’t possible on the Famicom cartridge of the original.
That’s not to mention the role of full-motion videos, along with the instrumentation of the music remixes. Asano calls Final Fantasy IV “Remake #2.” A provocative statement if good sales invite a host of follow-ups to round out the series. Will we be seeing other Super Famicom classics on the DS?
Want a reason to want Folklore, the upcoming Playstation 3 adventure title? Kenji Kawai.
Kawai-san is the lead composer on the spooky fairy tale set in an alternate universe of mythic folklore, joined by Super Sweep veterans Ayako Saso and Shinji Hosoe. If the background music is evocative of a motion picture soundtrack, it is because Kawai has lent his prodigious musical talents to such breakthrough Japanese movies as Ringu, Ghost in the Shell and Death Note. How’s that for a repertoire? Having heard the score in its entirety, I can safely say it is up there with the most engagingly macabre wonders dreamed up by Danny Elfman.
Want a reason not to want Folklore, though? Perhaps like me you cannot, nor ever will be, able to afford a Playstation 3. If so, at least you can take solace in the scathing review from Eurogamer, which brands the title “one part boring adventure game, one part underdeveloped collect-em up, and one part standard dungeon crawl.” Ouch.
I’m thinking I might just stick to the soundtrack and leave the Sixaxis for future generations. Or at least until Media Molecule’s game is on shelves.
I was somewhat shocked upon learning today that Rockstar is porting Canis Canem Edit to the Wii and XBox 360. Having never played the game, I am something of a fervent enthusiast of the audio portion of the boarding school sim, called Bully on my side of the pond. Sharing news of Canis Canem Edit: Scholarship Edition’s Winter release and my fanboyish adoration of the game’s original soundtrack with 8bit Hero! seemed only too appropriate, as the title’s music composer Shawn Lee grew up in Wichita, Kansas and currently makes his living in the UK. Mr. Lee shanghai’d my last.fm somewhere around December of last year and I still get unbelievable mileage out of Bully. Check out this audio sample and hear for yourself. You can also read an interview with the composer from January on Square Haven.
It’s looking like I might just enroll in this scholarship edition thingermajig.
At E3 it was announced that the strategy RPG title from Intelligent Systems, Fire Emblem: Goddess of Dawn, would be making its way to Wii consoles in North America this November. The tenth installment for the series, though only the fourth to receive an official translation, the game received a warm reception from Emblem’s dedicated following of fans in Japan. The story is divided into 45 chapters and features 72 playable characters, half of whom are returning from previous titles. The game will also retain the emblematic Permanent Death System. Once one of your allies runs out of HP, no phoenix down in the world can bring them back. From the looks of the first English-language screenshot, the localization on the title has every appearance of being serious business as well.
Aside from showing off tantalizing trailers of Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill V, Konami had some games at E3 that were actually playable. Among the most intriguing is the PSP title Dracula X Chronicles. The game will feature a 2.5 dimensional remake of the 1993 Super Famicom classic Rondo of Blood, with characters redesigned by series illustrator Ayami Kojima. A remixed soundtrack and CG cutscenes are not the only thing to be thrown into the mix. The Playstation title Symphony of the Night will be packed into the UMD disc, spruced up with new voice acting. The two games are sequentially ordered, with Richter Belmont’s fight against Dracula memorably kicking things off in the Playstation title. Incidentally, Rondo and Symphony were the first Castlevania games to incorporate styles of music into their titles.
For fans of the sidescroller genre this is looking like a good pick to go alongside the slimmer PSP.
Hiroki Kikuta, composer of Secret of Mana and Alphabet Planet, has a new album coming out in February.
