Mystic Ark Soundtrack, Akihiko Mori, 1995
Scarcity and nostalgia can be a potent combination, and Mystic Ark is a good example. As a representative of one of the most beloved genres among retro game fans, the 16-bit RPG, its status was further elevated by two facts: it arrived late in the SNES’s life and it never left Japan. Was this one of the great untranslated SNES treasures, like Star Ocean or Tales of Phantasia, another game that pushed the hardware and its cherished pixel art to their limits?
As later fan translations made clear, not really. Mystic Ark turned out to be a solid enough RPG, but not an especially inspired one, destined in the end for second-tier status within the SNES’s crowded library. The one thing that truly distinguished it was the inspired weirdness of the worlds its heroes traverse. Take your pick: a desert inhabited only by pirate cats and a witch named Matoya; realms where colour and sound disappear depending on where you stand; worlds where all adults have vanished; or cities built entirely out of fruit and vegetables.
And then there is the Mystic Ark soundtrack. No, it is not nearly as gleefully bizarre as the game’s setting. In fact, its orchestra-and-rock blend is fairly typical of a JRPG from this period, much more so than, say, its predecessor The 7th Saga with its more idiosyncratic and stylistically coherent approach. What makes this score so remarkable is not its eccentricity, but its sheer quality: the way it executes genre conventions with such mastery that it deserves to rank among the finest RPG soundtracks ever written.
In one sense, the level of artistry on display should not come as a surprise. Akihiko Mori had already established himself as one of the 16-bit era’s most gifted orchestral composers through Shien’s Revenge and Wonder Project J. Mystic Ark finally gave him the chance to work on the broad emotional canvas of an RPG, with all its shifting moods and manifold settings. Clearly, he relished the opportunity. Between the winter of 1994 and spring of 1995, Mori wrote more than one hundred pieces for the score while also handling the game’s sound effects. Ultimately, fifty-one tracks made it into the finished game, and it is remarkable how consistently excellent they are.
This is easily Mori’s most ambitious work, and that ambition shows on several levels. Take the soundtrack’s thematic construction. Given the game’s wildly varying locations and rather bland protagonists, it makes sense that Mori would develop other aspects of the narrative through recurring musical ideas, and the solution he arrives at is a distinctive one.
Two principal themes run through the Mystic Ark soundtrack. The first appears initially in “Mystic Ark” as a dramatically rising and falling flute melody, returning later in a range of colourful guises. More impressive still is the second theme, first heard in “The Mother Goddess” as an invincibly majestic melody whose irrepressibly square, hymn-like progression gives it an almost liturgical force. Here Mori takes a step that is, within game music, unprecedented: he develops the theme in three-way counterpoint, somehow keeping the individual lines intelligible despite the SNES’s inherently watery choir samples. He had already layered three melodies together in Wonder Project J, but here he uses the same technique to reshape a single melody from within. Game music has produced few demonstrations of contrapuntal mastery as striking as “The Mother Goddess”.
Mori’s real thematic masterstroke, however, operates on a smaller scale. Throughout the game he reprises not just the two main themes, but also more localised motifs, such as a cello run that reappears across several dungeon tracks. The purpose of these recurrences becomes fully clear once the monumental final boss piece, “Are You the True Form of Darkness?”, begins, spearheaded by the Mother Goddess theme. An absolute monster of a battle cue, it binds together a dozen motifs and melodies that have been drifting through the soundtrack and fuses them into one seamless orchestral epic. In doing so, it brings the entire score organically to its climax.
In every other respect, the soundtrack succeeds just as triumphantly. Mori is at the height of his melodic powers here. Just sample the gorgeous waltz pastiche of “Shall We Dance?”, the way “Alone” tugs at the heart with its delicately intertwined lines, or the beguilingly idyllic “Composers Are Always Quiet on Their Days Off” and “The Summer of Youth”, with their bright seaside-town warmth. While not as hyperactive as Shien’s Revenge, Mystic Ark is still packed with constantly evolving melodies and shifting orchestral colour, an embarrassment of musical riches. Mori had always possessed a gift for lush orchestration, but rarely does his writing sound more intoxicating than in “Water is the Mother of all Life”. Through cleverly handled ostinati, the cue poignantly evokes the constant motion of water, while solemn brass and cello interjections inspire a hushed kind of awe, as if drawing the listener into the very centre of a temple of nature.
Unsurprisingly, Mori’s battle themes are just as maximalist, drawing without restraint on orchestra, hard rock, and metal. Lock On had already allowed him to experiment with metal-laced jazz rock, and here he gets to lean more decisively into heavier territory. In turbulent cues such as “So the Fingers of the Dark Have Reached Even Here” and “I Am a Powerful Ally”, orchestra and rock band merge flawlessly, constantly trading prominence in some of the score’s most densely packed passages. “Hey! Don’t Attack Me!” contains some of the heaviest riffing the SNES’s SPC chip ever attempted, ranging from thrash to power metal and topped off by a surprisingly catchy choral hook.
At the same time, Mori knows perfectly well when to pull back and allow the music some breathing room. The results are every bit as convincing as when he is going all guns blazing. “In the Darkness”, for instance, needs little more than double-tracked, echoing harp arpeggios punctuated by hammering piano chords to evoke a vast subterranean space. “The Haunted Mansion” and “Look Behind You” are genuinely unsettling, taking this RPG score surprisingly deep into horror while retaining a degree of playfulness – as when “The Haunted Mansion” imitates the sudden slam of a grand piano lid. The best example of Mori working outside genre stereotypes is “Techno House”, a mutant kind of jazz that mixes electronics, choral voices, and cheerfully industrial percussion.
All of this leads to the closing track, “Birth”, one of the finest orchestral compositions ever written for a video game. This is concert-hall-quality music produced for the SNES, and clearly the peak of Mori’s career. Taking the score’s first main theme on a true rollercoaster ride, “Birth” delivers one melodic highlight after another, luxuriating in the chance to develop its material and moods across an unusually extended span. Constantly joyful and surging forward, especially during a brief fugal passage, it closes with the most triumphant, life-affirming version of the main theme imaginable: a colossal soaring string melody that gives this masterpiece of a soundtrack the genuinely epic conclusion it deserves.
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