Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku Soundtrack (PC-88), Yoko Kanno, 1990
Developer Koei didn’t rock the boat much with this fourth instalment of its Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise. The game continued its predecessors’ brand of menu-heavy strategising, set among feuding warlords in 16th-century Japan. As before, it targeted players who preferred intensely in-depth gameplay to elaborate visuals. Despite the geographically specific subject matter, Koei evidently felt there was an overseas audience for Bushou Fuuunroku, bringing the SNES and Sega Genesis ports to the American market under the title Lord of Darkness.
While the early Nobunaga’s Ambition games were never visual stunners, their music was another matter entirely. Since the franchise’s second title, Zenkokuban, future film and television score legend Yoko Kanno had been responsible for the series’ soundtracks. The various PC and console chiptune scores did not strongly indicate the scale of her burgeoning talent. However, Koei had developed a fascinating concept dubbed “Soundware”. These albums contained Red Book audio scores for several Koei PC-88 games, replacing their chiptune soundtracks with upgraded music if the player’s computer was equipped with a CD drive. Sometimes incorrectly described as arrange albums, these CDs were sold with special retail editions of various Nobunaga’s Ambition games, though Koei also released them separately as stand-alone albums.
The Soundware line had allowed Kanno to write for studio-grade synths and small live ensembles since Genghis Khan, recorded mainly in 1987. Over the following years, she was given an extraordinary number of opportunities to record her game music with live musicians, including for Zenkokuban, Ishin no Arashi, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sengoku Gun’yuuden, Romance of the Three Kingdoms / Sangokushi, and Uncharted Waters / Daikoukai Jidai. These works showed promise and flashes of greatness, but they also suffered from inconsistent songwriting and often less-than-flattering recorded sound. Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku improves on those earlier efforts in every respect, standing as the first great score of Kanno’s career — and arguably the first great live orchestral score in game music.
With Bushou Fuuunroku, Kanno develops, for the first time, a consistent musical vision for the Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise, one capable of containing her trademark eclecticism within a coherent stylistic framework. As before, Western classical music informs much of the score, whether Kanno is deploying her full ensemble, 34 performers strong, or working with chamber-sized instrumental combinations. In these passages, she already hints at her 1991 masterpiece The Creation. Unsurprisingly, the full ensemble is heard most clearly in those compositions that either raise the curtain on the war-torn setting or herald the adventure’s conclusion.
“Signal Fire” sees Kanno coax an admirably grand sound from her relatively small group of performers. Even at this early stage in her career, she shows a gift for sweeping, elegant string melodies shaped by a strong classical sensibility. Just as importantly, she achieves a genuine sense of cinematic scale through the cue’s rich development, including the beguiling shakuhachi duet in its mid-section. The proud horn lead, performed solo, is arguably underpowered against the strident string backing, but the music’s rousing effect survives intact. “As Eternal as Heaven and Earth” opens intriguingly like the closing title of a 1940s Western, driven by memorable, riding brass fanfares. Contrapuntally denser than “Signal Fire”, it features another ravishing mid-section, this time led by solo flute.
Ideally, Kanno’s ensemble would be larger to sell these compositions more fully as the historical epics they clearly aspire to be. Yet there are advantages to the smaller group. Its lean sound is captured vividly by the album’s dry, natural recording, which particularly benefits the battle cues. Rather than relying on sheer weight or forceful displays of grandeur, these pieces draw their strength from the sinewy, gritty attack of the performers.
Some of the action cues on the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku soundtrack are relatively short. Like the slashed electric violin stabs of “Flame of the Battlefield”, they can register merely as intriguing experiments. They are decisively eclipsed, however, by highlights such as “Demon King of the Sixth Heaven First Chapter”. This cue throws various solo instruments and the ensemble into a fierce standoff, yielding the album’s most complex piece. It easily belies both its short running time and modest instrumental forces through its sheer density of musical ideas, colours, and detail, with Kanno teasing out emotional shades rarely heard in game music at the time. “A Dangerous Castle Entrance” is less ambitious, built on a standard, if effectively roiling, orchestral backdrop. Still, Kanno’s decision to pit a solo trumpet against this martial foundation, with freewheeling and abrasive interjections, gives the cue a jagged, jazz-inflected progression and an unpredictably aggressive edge.
While these pieces already rely heavily on solo instruments, other compositions reduce the forces further still. “The Helpful God of War’s Banner Last Chapter” displays a level of instrumental virtuosity previously unheard in game music. Kanno launches into a breathlessly rushing piano solo that allows her to showcase her formidable performing chops, even if the composition itself is not especially complex. Other pieces built around a single instrument have a deeper impact on the soundtrack’s stylistic profile, though. “Elegance” and “Shadows” consist of lengthy, impeccably composed shakuhachi soli that cast their spell with ease, once again demonstrating Kanno’s melodic gifts. Recorded in a spacious concert-hall acoustic, their notes seem to ring out across serene mountain peaks, transporting the listener to the distant era in which the game is set.
These compositions lean more heavily on traditional Japanese instruments than previous Nobunaga’s Ambition scores. Imbued, at least to Western ears, with a sense of spiritualism, they also subtly lay the groundwork for the soundtrack’s least expected stylistic turn: electronica. On “Distant Mountains and Rivers” and “Heart”, Kanno uses synthesised instruments to extend the score’s established aura of mysticism, carrying the listener into a realm that feels increasingly remote from the present day. It anticipates her still more original evocations of the past on projects such as The Inspired Dragon: Where To Now. “Distant Mountains and Rivers” leans a little too heavily on oriental clichés — chiming accompaniment, a soft pentatonic horn lead — to convince fully. “Heart” fares much better, however, as Kanno evokes an otherworldly atmosphere through a lush, flowing harp solo with an intriguingly syncopated, heady melody.
Arguably, not everything on this album works, and there is no doubt that Kanno would soon go on to greater things. Including the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku soundtrack on this site is therefore a slightly close call. Yet there is no denying that, at its best, this score is rivalled by few other orchestral game soundtracks, conjuring medieval Japan with grace, imagination, and remarkable attention to detail. It remains an early high watermark for orchestral game music from a rapidly maturing composer, roughly hewn edges and all, working in an idiom she would rarely revisit once larger ensembles became available to her.
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