Nessa no Hoshi Soundtrack

Nessa no Hoshi Soundtrack, Kiyoshi Yoshikawa, 1997

The 32-bit era deserves to be remembered as one of gaming’s most experimental periods. The shift from two-dimensional pixel graphics into polygonal 3D space forced developers to think creatively and devise new forms of play, sometimes through processes that in retrospect look distinctly trial-and-error. One such experiment, now rather bizarre, was Nessa no Hoshi. The game was an incongruous hybrid of first-person adventure and 3D fighting game. Its setting, an alien desert planet, may go some way towards explaining the less than appealing visuals, rendered in endless dreary shades of brown. Even so, there was real ambition behind the project. It made extensive use of full-motion video, to the point that Nessa no Hoshi was released across two CDs. The fact that developer Itochu belonged to one of Japan’s largest corporations may help explain the surprising amount of resources invested in it.

There were, however, other aspects of Nessa no Hoshi’s presentation that distinguished it far more decisively from its contemporaries, chief among them the soundtrack. Composing duties fell to Kiyoshi Yoshikawa. A prolific composer with dozens of credits across Japanese film, anime and television, Yoshikawa was still at a comparatively early stage of his career when he scored Nessa no Hoshi. The game turned out to be the kind of opportunity ambitious young composers dream of. Its producers wanted a cinematic score and approved a fully orchestral recording. Toei Music Publishing, which coordinated the sessions, recommended the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, since recording in Russia was relatively inexpensive at the time. This was the same ensemble that would soon appear on scores such as Outcast, Kessen and Age of Pirates: Caribbean Tales. The result was the largest orchestra used for a pre-2000 game soundtrack: 89 instrumentalists plus 12 female choristers.

Yoshikawa seized the opportunity with both hands and delivered one of the most audacious and impressive soundtracks in game music. Orchestral game scores, outside horror, rarely venture far into modernist territory, usually remaining within the stylistic orbit of 19th-century Romanticism. Yoshikawa, who quotes the opening melody of Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps at the beginning of Nessa no Hoshi’s “Ending”, looks elsewhere for inspiration. That Stravinsky citation accurately signals where much of the soundtrack is headed: into the demanding, fascinating depths of 20th-century classical music, where conventional tonality begins to dissolve. What is truly astonishing is not simply that Yoshikawa chooses such an idiom, but that he masters it so fully. The score often plays less like a game soundtrack than like a work of modern concert music.

Indeed, Nessa no Hoshi is one of game music’s most harmonically and melodically sophisticated scores, sustaining a level of endlessly intriguing ambiguity and subtlety that the medium has scarcely matched. Even in its more consonant passages, the music’s daring keeps the melodic progression uncertain; more often than not, it is impossible to predict where a cue is heading next. That makes it the ideal foundation for one of those rare science-fiction scores that truly does establish an alien sound world equal to its extraterrestrial setting. The blasted dissonances and, at times, stark string textures perfectly evoke a barren desert planet. It is a testament to Yoshikawa’s gifts that even in its most demanding stretches, Nessa no Hoshi remains utterly compelling.

Pieces such as “Stories [For Percussion & Strings]”, “Missing”, “Sand View” and “Alien’s Child” show this beautifully. Their prevailing mood is morose, as searching, whining and squealing strings seem to grope through darkness, surrounded by brass eruptions, faint woodwind interjections and chiming celesta figures. The celesta’s silvery tone is an unexpected presence in such lugubrious music. Yet it serves both to underline the score’s mystical undercurrent and to deepen the sense of bewilderment the music provokes. There is a two-minute stretch in “Missing” where Yoshikawa’s near-experimental writing seems to test just how little can happen without losing the listener’s attention, and it succeeds magnificently. “Sand View”, meanwhile, suggests Béla Bartók in the way its opening layers dissonant variations of a string motif on top of one another, mercilessly crescendoing into chaos as the walls appear to close in.

The soundtrack’s savage side is laid bare most clearly in the battle cues, which rank among the most ferocious in game music. “First Battle” opens with manically swirling strings, backed by pounding timpani, tolling bells and shrill flute cries. There is no real melodic material in sight. All Yoshikawa requires is the sound of an orchestra thrashing wildly, such is the force of his gut-punching command of dissonance. “Last Battle” likewise unfolds like a barbaric ballet, driven relentlessly forwards by grating string ostinati that hack at the music while dissonant brass chords explode like grenades. Both pieces ease temporarily into B sections whose calm proves deceptive, as if the quivering music is only holding its breath before erupting once more into a fury rivalled only by Eliot Goldenthal at his most savagely discordant.

And yet there is far more to Nessa no Hoshi than a violent orchestral assault on the senses. Yoshikawa pulls off a remarkable feat by merging his modernist instincts with hyper-Romantic writing that is every bit as harmonically refined as his harsher orchestral language. “Overture” introduces the score’s ten-note main theme, whose unusual length and repetitions allow it to build a richly cinematic sweep reminiscent of the most soaring passages in John Williams’ E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Yet this expansive lyricism suddenly collapses into a solemn nocturnal cello melody as the soundtrack first enters the gloomier territory it will later inhabit more consistently. Stamping strings and screaming brass chords eventually yield to another elated return of the main theme, though the final huge brass fanfare pointedly refuses to resolve in triumph and instead simply subsides.

Other cues do not force these contrasting idioms into open collision. Instead, they use the tension between them to intensify both. Before plunging into fluttering shadows, “Missing” beguiles with intoxicating wordless choral writing, then leads into a statement of the heroic main theme over syncopated brass rhythms, doubled by chromatic choral harmonies. It is the soundtrack’s most deliciously heady moment, uniting its epic and otherworldly strains while subtly rendering the main theme less reassuring than before. “Alien’s Child” similarly sets its almost avant-garde textures against a warmly glowing string melody of extraordinary beauty. Its harmonies are so sophisticated, and its melodic progression so inventive, that comparisons with late Scriabin feel entirely justified.

Then there are those cues wholly surrendered to the soundtrack’s romantic impulses. Once again, superlatives seem unavoidable, because this is music of genuine symphonic depth. “Prologue [Theme of Love]” and “Ending” may be the closest game music has come to the delirious emotional heights of late-19th-century piano concertos; both cues quote the same piano material. Yoshikawa’s idiosyncratic melodic and harmonic turns lend the music an emotional complexity that is almost unrivalled in game music, giving its swooning manner a bracing edge. Consider the unexpectedly rising four-note figure that repeatedly appears beneath the lush main melody of “Prologue [Theme of Love]”, urging the music onwards while keeping its rhythmic flow tantalisingly off balance. With such extraordinary attention to detail throughout, it is little wonder that the staggeringly brilliant Nessa no Hoshi belongs at the very summit of orchestral game music.