I.Q. Final Soundtrack

I.Q. Final Soundtrack, Takayuki Hattori, 1998

Thankfully, the 32-bit era still had room for games that were visually austere yet built around genuinely addictive gameplay. One such title was 1997’s PlayStation puzzler Intelligent Qube. Designed by Masahiko Sato, a professor and digital artist at the Tokyo University of the Arts, the game cast players as a lone figure clearing wave after wave of advancing cubes by marking spaces on a stage suspended in the blackness of space. Like the best puzzle games, Intelligent Qube took an extremely simple premise, one Sato reportedly devised within an hour, and spun it into a deeply engrossing experience. The result was both critical and commercial acclaim: by the end of 1997, the game had sold an astonishing 750,000 copies and won the Excellence Award for Interactive Art at the Japan Media Arts Festival.

Unsurprisingly, a sequel followed the next year in the form of I.Q. Final. The game did not innovate greatly on its predecessor’s winning formula, essentially offering more of the same with a handful of additions such as unlockable characters. Another carry-over from Intelligent Qube was the return of composer Takayuki Hattori. By the mid-1990s, few musicians were better versed in orchestral game music than Hattori. Together with his father, Katsuhisa Hattori, he had created the arrangements for the first orchestral Final Fantasy album, Symphonic Suite Final Fantasy. Following that album’s success, he also arranged music from Final Fantasy Legend and various Falcom titles for orchestra, before making his debut as a game composer with Romance of the Three Kingdoms V. At the same time, he had already begun the very successful film and television career that would later make him one of Japan’s most prominent screen composers.

Hattori’s score for Intelligent Qube had caught many reviewers’ attention, which is hardly surprising given the music’s central role in shaping the game’s aesthetic. While the visuals could scarcely have been simpler, Hattori’s score was anything but. Rather than providing the kind of electronica-heavy accompaniment one might have expected from a 32-bit puzzler, he wrote one of early game music’s orchestral scores, even drafting in the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus. The result did not merely intensify the game’s atmosphere; it almost overwhelmed it. The lavishness of the music, set against such abstract imagery, gave the whole experience an unexpectedly mythical quality, a feeling only strengthened by the presence of the choir.

For all its pleasures, however, the Intelligent Qube score did not ultimately contain enough substantial material to register as a wholly successful work. Thankfully, when Hattori returned for the I.Q. Final soundtrack, recorded only eight months after the first game’s release, he was given the opportunity to write on a larger scale. The ensemble grew accordingly: Hattori now wrote for a properly sized symphony orchestra while once again incorporating the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus.

What did not change was the music’s atmosphere, nor Hattori’s meticulous approach to scoring these games. Through exemplary handling of instrumental colour and fluid orchestration rich in supple counterpoint, he produces music one might expect to hear in a major RPG, such is its breadth and sense of occasion. Take “Compass Points to the Future”, which one suspects may have accompanied an end-of-level or high-score sequence. Hattori opens with adventurous, heroic brass fanfares, backed by such sweeping strings and excited cymbal strokes that it is difficult not to think fondly of John Williams’ Indiana Jones scores. The cue is brief, as all tracks here are looped, unusually for an orchestral soundtrack, but Hattori introduces welcome variation by handing the lead melody to the violins in the B section. It may end too soon, but what is there is delightful.

Other pieces continue this surprisingly adventurous, forward-driving mood while still fittingly serving the needs of a puzzle game. The score’s two standout cues are “The 2nd Tide” and “Theory”. Both are propelled by densely woven yet light-footed rhythmic textures, built from percussion and string ostinati. Clearly intended to mirror the relentless advance of the cube waves, these gently churning march figures support Hattori’s typically varied and interlacing brass and violin lines. His melodic gifts are on full display as he writes constantly evolving material that alternates between swooning lyricism and brave forward motion. “Theory” is the more dogged of the two, its triumphant conclusion feeling genuinely earned, whereas “The 2nd Tide” gradually increases in stature until it naturally opens into a wordless choral passage that lends the music both grandeur and a touch of mystery.

One of the longer cues on the soundtrack, “Pharaoh’s Treasure” takes a different route. Abandoning the propulsion and swagger of the earlier pieces, it instead unfolds through slow-moving, passionate string melodies whose Middle Eastern inflections are suggested far more tastefully than is usual in game music. Heavy with significance, the cue moves with considerable melodramatic force as its melodies rise and fall fervently, entirely suited to the title’s sense of weight and antiquity. At the opposite emotional pole stands “4-Horned Tower”, likely some kind of menu theme. Its beguiling, somewhat static nocturnal mood is created through a harp ostinato, tentative woodwind writing and muted female choir. Yet before the music can become too reverent, a borderline cheeky trumpet melody injects a welcome note of levity. Even in its more sombre moments, I.Q. Final remains upbeat and quietly optimistic.

Two choral pieces fittingly bookend the soundtrack, one raising the curtain with a grand gesture, the other reaping the emotional rewards of everything that precedes it. Opening track “Continental Shift” is a little too brief to make a major impression, but “Tectonics ~ Opened Gate” lands far more decisively. First, it carries the score’s sense of scale to its logical conclusion, with wordless chorus floating above dramatically crashing orchestral waves. Then Hattori pivots seamlessly towards the emotional opposite, as hushed choral voices fade away over tolling bells. The cue beautifully distils the awe that the choir brings to the score, both in its forceful proclamations and in its quieter passages.

Ultimately, “Healing Gate” closes the soundtrack in a spirit of calm elation, cleverly combining the contrasting timbres of two clarinets with the choir’s cooing voices. The I.Q. Final soundtrack may be short, but it contains richer rewards than the vast majority of orchestral game scores.