Kessen Soundtrack

Kessen Soundtrack, Reijiro Koroku, 2000

Since their emergence in the mid-1980s, Koei’s historical strategy games had largely remained an insider’s proposition. Series such as Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms seemed aimed at players willing to spend hours parsing menus and statistics while carefully planning their next move. Several of these titles did make it to the American market, but none became conspicuous best-sellers. That changed with Kessen, one of the PlayStation 2’s launch titles. Set once again in feudal Japan, Kessen placed greater emphasis on spectacular visuals and battlefield action, attracting far more international attention than any previous Koei game. It proved successful enough to spawn two sequels. Even so, several contemporary reviewers noted that the game lacked the usual complexity and depth of a Koei strategy title, making for an entertaining but comparatively shallow experience.

Kessen’s producer, Kou Shibusawa, conceived the project with cinematic ambitions in mind, and those ambitions had direct implications for the soundtrack. Throughout the first half of the 1990s, Koei had consistently pushed the production values of orchestral game music, even recording Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV and Nobunaga’s Ambition: Tenshouki with overseas symphony orchestras. In the years that followed, however, the company returned to smaller domestic ensembles or even synthesised scores. Kessen reversed that trend, once again being recorded abroad, this time by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, which had recently drawn attention with its demonstration-quality recording of Outcast the previous year.

Given Shibusawa’s aim of creating a film-like experience, hiring a film composer for Kessen almost seemed inevitable. As it had with Pacific Theatre of Operations a decade earlier, Koei treated the game as a prestige project and settled on Reijiro Koroku as composer. Having begun in the mid-1970s as an arranger, Koroku went on to build a distinguished career across film, television and anime. Among the highlights were his scores for franchise reboot The Return of Godzilla and the NHK taiga drama Hideyoshi.

All of this, a gifted composer with an impressive résumé and a developer willing to invest in premium production values, bodes well for the Kessen soundtrack, and Koroku’s score does not disappoint. This is a soundtrack that feels “old-fashioned” in the best possible sense. There is an immediate appeal to Koroku’s romantic glow, to his velvety melodies clothed in heavy yet elegant orchestration. Certainly, the score contains its fair share of action writing. Yet for much of its running time, Koroku approaches the game in the manner of a Hollywood Golden Age historical epic, writing sumptuous melodies that wear their heart openly on their sleeve without ever tipping into the overwrought or merely lachrymose.

It helps that Koroku introduces just enough counterpoint into these pieces, never so much as to distract from the expressive force of the main melodic line, but always enough to lend them added substance and refinement. In fact, comparing Kessen with later Koei scores in the Nobunaga’s Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms series is instructive. Those works often embrace a similar orchestral idiom, with slow tempi, a general air of solemn portent and string-heavy textures. Yet Kessen surpasses them in several respects. Its melodic invention is far superior: Koroku writes long-breathed, organically unfolding lines rather than the shorter, more repetitive melodic fragments on which other Koei scores of the era often rely. Add to that Kessen’s unabashed sentimentality, its greater willingness to draw every possible emotional resonance from slowly advancing phrases, and the result is a far more engaging and genuinely moving work.

Anyone requiring proof of the soundtrack’s sheer melodic beauty need only hear the closing track, “Denouement – Ending of Victory”. It is a glorious outpouring of elation, essentially one continuously unfolding string melody adorned with proudly reflective brass interjections, rising and falling with the poignancy of an operatic overture.

That is the score’s most stirring moment, but many other pieces similarly wear their broad, instantly attractive melodic writing with pride. The warm pathos of “Ieyasu” recalls both James Horner’s strain of Americana in Legends of the Fall and, in its solo trumpet episode, the language of classic Second World War scores. “Yodogimi” enriches the palette further with a swooning clarinet solo, while the hesitant melodic progression of “Echoes of Sorrow – Theme of Sadness” poignantly conveys a music determined to gather what strength it can and continue onwards. Here and elsewhere, Koroku’s material is not necessarily especially complex or densely worked. That matters little, however, when his instinct for heart-rending, expressive melody is so consistently unfailing.

Naturally, in a game centred on huge armies clashing on the battlefield, martial writing plays an important part in the Kessen soundtrack, though perhaps not as large a part as one might expect. “Kessen – Opening” encapsulates the score’s central duality beautifully. After an immensely ominous opening of extended double-bass drones, sinister timpani strokes and cymbal crescendi, Koroku unleashes a series of finely shaped brass fanfares to summon the player to war. Yet the real surprise comes in the track’s middle section, where the first appearance of those plush string melodies anticipates what will later dominate the score. “Battle at Sekigahara” continues this blend of moods. After a sombre opening for grave brass fanfares and heavy march rhythms, the cue opens out into one of the soundtrack’s most substantial pieces, by turns patriotic, nostalgic and finally uplifting.

Unsurprisingly, it is in these battle cues that the brass section makes its strongest contribution, lending further weight to the score’s already pervasive sense of gravity and consequence. Even so, the music never feels needlessly heavy. For all its melodrama, Koroku has both the melodic command and the orchestral imagination to bring it off. Listen, for instance, to the way the brusque brass fanfares that open “The Eastern Army” yield to a contemplative clarinet solo, or to the beguiling second half of “The Sweat of Battle – Battlefield – Superior Power”, with its nocturnal oboe lead set against hushed triangle strokes and trembling strings. And when Koroku finally does let rip on a cue such as “Western War Front – Battlefield – Western Army”, the brassy bombast he summons is genuinely earth-shaking. Kessen thus stands as a worthy successor to the classic orchestral Koei scores that came before it.