Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden Soundtrack (PC-98), Yoko Kanno, 1992
As with previous instalments in the Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise, Koei only tweaked details for its fifth entry, Haouden. Clearly, the company had hit upon a winning formula and was content to keep serving an audience hungry for historical strategy games that prized depth of play over technical flash. Unsurprisingly, the element that stood out most in Haouden’s presentation was once again its soundtrack, provided by series regular Yoko Kanno.
Kanno had already been given the rare opportunity to record earlier franchise scores with live performers, and thankfully Koei seemed willing to increase the music budget with each subsequent Nobunaga’s Ambition title. Bushou Fuuunroku had benefited from a mostly live ensemble: a chamber-sized orchestra supplemented by a handful of soloists and synths. For the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden soundtrack, Koei went a step further and hired a larger group, now amounting to a small symphony orchestra.
Since Bushou Fuuunroku, Kanno had only grown more confident, delivering what was arguably her first masterpiece with The Creation in 1991. Haouden bears out just how rapidly she was maturing in the early 1990s. Bushou Fuuunroku, for all its creativity, could still be read fairly straightforwardly as the score to a history game set in medieval Japan, built on a tasteful blend of traditional Japanese and Western classical elements with touches of electronica.
The Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden soundtrack finds Kanno expanding that palette considerably, coming up with timbral combinations she had not explored before. Haouden is an important step in her transition towards the trademark eclecticism of her later work, while also demonstrating her ability to sustain stylistic coherence across an album. Uncharted Waters from 1990 may have been more diverse, but it was also more disjointed. Here, Kanno arrives at a broader, more individual language without sacrificing unity. The result is a period score that repeatedly takes unexpected but impeccably judged turns.
Take “Beyond the Auspicious Clouds”, with its gentle, lingering flute solo set against a sparse backdrop of traditional Japanese percussion and xylophone. Kanno shapes a long-spun, ravishing melody full of subtle harmonic surprises, making the piece a constant pleasure. Yet there is more going on here than pastoral atmosphere alone. On one level, the flute lead evokes serene landscapes and plays into familiar period-scoring conventions. On another, the melody carries a faint jazz inflection that becomes particularly clear in the second half, aided by the xylophone’s warm, almost sensuous accompaniment. It is a graceful way of introducing influences one would hardly expect in a game about feuding Japanese warlords.
This genial, and almost always successful, spirit of experimentation marks the entire Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden soundtrack. “Blue Whitecaps” pushes the score’s jazz leanings further, moving towards the light jazz style that would define Kanno’s Uncharted Waters II the following year. Any lingering expectation of solemn historical gravitas disappears when a clipped, buoyant cello melody dances over catchy piano accompaniment, before the piece slips into a laid-back guitar solo and hand-percussion rhythms. There is an easy-going sense of improvisation here that suits the cue’s jazzy inclinations beautifully.
“Unrecognised Genius” is similarly light in scoring, though more impassioned in mood. Essentially a nearly five-minute pan flute solo over gentle synth backing, it inevitably invites comparison with Ennio Morricone’s work on Once Upon a Time in America. But the fact that Kanno’s cue is just as moving, and arguably more melodically intricate, says a great deal about her gift for melody. Once again, her choice of solo instrument is inspired. The pan flute carries a sense of antiquity, but through a timbre one would not usually associate with games set in medieval Japan.
What “Unrecognised Genius” also shows is Kanno’s growing desire to develop her music beyond what game scoring often allowed at the time. The compositions on Haouden run noticeably longer than those on Bushou Fuuunroku. Moreover, where the chiptune and live versions on that earlier score were often relatively similar, that is no longer the case here. Kanno typically begins the live arrangement by stating the melodic core of the corresponding chiptune cue, but then diverges substantially, introducing entirely new material.
A further element setting the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden soundtrack apart from more conventional period scores is Kanno’s occasional use of synthesisers in a prominent role. “Gathering Under the Pleiades” is the album’s most intriguing hybrid. It places a quena solo against a subdued yet curiously unsettled synth backdrop that evokes not benign starlight but an uneasy vision of the otherworld. The cue’s effect is unexpectedly heady, and its emotional pull — pitting human fragility against a threatening universe — is as strong as anything on the album. Closing vocal piece “Comet” reaches for a similar sense of uneasy wonder, and in retrospect even anticipates the mood of “Sóra” from Kanno’s Escaflowne: The Movie. If one element distinguishes Haouden from previous Nobunaga’s Ambition scores, it is precisely this breadth of feeling, stretching from the comic to the cosmic and achieving a surprising sense of scale through unusual means.
That said, Kanno also delivers a measure of old-fashioned orchestral bombast. Album bookends “Supreme Ruler Introduction” and “Morning Bell” show just how quickly she had developed since Bushou Fuuunroku. Both are full of youthful Sturm und Drang — sample the Tchaikovskian pathos of “Supreme Ruler Introduction”’s piano-concerto-like opening. Later, rhythmically intricate motions in the lower strings provide an unexpectedly hard-edged counterweight to the romantic lead melody. It is here, however, that the album’s most obvious flaw also becomes apparent. The recording sounds boxy and muddy, especially in the denser, more richly layered cues. This is hardly unusual for soundtracks recorded on Japanese stages of the period, but it still leaves one wishing for a more faithful representation of Kanno’s achievement.
Even so, that does not alter the fact that “Morning Bell” is one of the finest orchestral game-music cues ever written: a piece of near-symphonic breadth that unfolds with astonishing assurance as it takes its main theme through an impressive range of transformations. The remaining orchestral pieces may not reach quite the same level, but they remain substantial. “Rainy Desolation” returns to the piano-concerto format, with an agitated string melody underpinned by a tightly woven piano line, sublimating emotional turmoil into music of great elegance and gripping tension.
“Destructive Army” is a comparatively straightforward orchestral treatment of its chiptune counterpart. Still, Kanno clothes the cue’s somewhat lean material in sufficiently dramatic colours while varying its contents just enough to sustain interest; the midsection’s urging rhythms, which knowingly nod towards Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”, certainly help. Interestingly, “Destructive Army” is the album’s only real battle cue. Then again, even the longer chiptune version offered only three action pieces. This too suggests how much Kanno’s approach to scoring the Nobunaga’s Ambition period setting was evolving, yielding results that grew more curious and more individual with each instalment.
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