Dragon Quest V Soundtrack (PlayStation 2), Koichi Sugiyama, 2004
Considering how enormous the Dragon Quest franchise had already become in Japan, it is slightly surprising that it did not reach the SNES until 1992, perhaps the last major 8-bit franchise to make the transition. Once Dragon Quest V was released, however, it was another massive success for Chunsoft and Enix, selling 2.8 million copies on the SNES alone. Add in the subsequent remakes for PlayStation 2 in 2004, Nintendo DS in 2008, and mobile phones in 2014, and the total rises beyond six million units.
For a franchise with a reputation for changing little from instalment to instalment, Dragon Quest V does attempt some interesting things. Most notably, its narrative spans thirty years of the protagonist’s life, from birth to marriage and parenthood. And while Dragon Quest V did not invent the idea of collecting monsters – the Megami Tensei series had already done that – it still treated the concept as a relatively novel one, soon to become ubiquitous through the Pokémon games.
Of course, another Dragon Quest game also meant another score by series regular Koichi Sugiyama. Previous soundtracks had seen him gradually expand the scope of each entry, moving away from the “overture / town / castle / field / dungeon / battle / final boss / staff roll” template established by the original Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest V halts that development, running to roughly the same length as its predecessor and offering little increase in variety despite the move to a 16-bit platform. As ever, multiple recordings of the orchestral arrangement followed, with the usual suspects: the NHK Symphony Orchestra in 1992, the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2000, nine years after its Dragon Quest IV recording, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra in 2004.
Previous Dragon Quest titles presented a familiar problem for anyone trying to appreciate their music in-game. Ultimately, the orchestral arrangement albums almost always offered the strongest representation of the material, and the later remakes attempted to approximate those recordings to varying degrees of success. Dragon Quest V continues this conundrum, though in a slightly different form.
Let us begin with the SNES original, which, like the NES Dragon Quest scores, is a rather uneven affair. In theory, the SNES’ greater capacity for orchestral timbres should have been a boon to a composer so steeped in Western classical traditions. In practice, Sugiyama’s ambitions may simply have exceeded the sound chip’s limitations. Take the string adagio “Cruel Reality”. Written more like a classical miniature than a typical game cue, with a melody less immediately articulated than on many other RPG scores, it comes across as rather dreary and monotonous on the SNES. This is music that depends on emotional expressiveness in performance, and the console’s samples are not quite up to the task.
The same issue affects other pieces as well. Dragon Quest V is an unusual RPG score in that its prevailing mood is rarely adventurous or bold. Much of the music instead possesses a curiously elusive quality, as though the entire journey were unfolding within a hazy summer dream. This leads to thinner-than-usual orchestrations that require delicacy and feeling to bring out their subtleties. Often, the SNES versions fall short of that refinement — witness the stiff, rather than emotional, woodwind soli of “Childhood Memories”, “Theme of Love”, and “Travelling Alone”, or the patently odd string glissandi in “Higher and Higher”. One can hear what Sugiyama was aiming for, but the results feel less than fully realised.
Once again, as with the NES Dragon Quest games, it is the orchestral arrangements that present the music as it was meant to be heard. On the London Philharmonic Orchestra recording in particular, Dragon Quest V reveals itself as a heady evocation of unusual moods and timbres. Consider “Higher and Higher”, a rather peculiar dungeon theme. Its opening flute melody is almost idyllic in its calmness, yet danger lurks beneath the surface through disorienting string glissandi and an increasingly chromatic, unpredictable flute line. The effect is one of floating on clouds while never quite forgetting the possibility of a fall.
“Taking to the Skies” works in a similar way. It is not quite as radical a departure as Dragon Quest IV’s “Balloon’s Flight”, but its elegantly distanced atmosphere, carried by an intricate and extended flute solo, offers far more harmonic and melodic surprises than most RPG flight themes. Again, the atmosphere is dreamy, but never in the sense of a careless lull.
The hushed nocturnal mystery of “Deep Underground” is equally beguiling, thanks to its swirling string ostinati and a flute lead that combines elegance with caution. Sugiyama’s attraction to emotionally ambiguous moods and textures reaches a peak in the first half of “Ocean Voyage”. At first, the composition relies entirely on the intoxicating effect of its exquisite, otherworldly string melodies and harmonies. The cue’s second half arguably strains a little too hard to transform that melody into something grander, complete with unison brass counterpoint and woodwind flurries. Yet even this unexpected turn serves as a reminder that Dragon Quest V can, at times, become passionately and unabashedly sweeping.
Indeed, despite the music’s often understated surface, its depth of feeling is never in doubt. In the hands of a capable orchestra, “Cruel Reality” and “Theme of Love” reveal the full heart-rending force of their carefully shaped melodies, unfolding slowly until they land with all the gravitas and patiently accumulated drama Sugiyama intended.
Where, then, does the specific problem with this version lie? For the first time, a Dragon Quest remake does not merely approximate the orchestral arrangements through the console’s sound chip. The PlayStation 2 version of Dragon Quest V uses an actual orchestral recording. The difficulty is that the producers chose what is arguably the weakest of the three available recordings: the NHK Symphony Orchestra performance. A comparison with the LPO account quickly reveals its shortcomings. It is flat in too many respects, lacking both dynamic range and performance subtleties, while the muddy recording obscures crucial details of Sugiyama’s orchestration. In the NHK performance, music that is richly multifaceted at its best can end up sounding merely one-dimensional.
Even so, it says much for the innate strength of Sugiyama’s writing that these pieces still hold their own as some of game music’s most pleasurable orchestral compositions, even in a merely average performance and recording. So despite its limitations, and despite the fact that the PlayStation 2 remake offers no worthwhile new material beyond the NHK recording, this version of the Dragon Quest V soundtrack still earns its place on this site.
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