Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV Soundtrack (PC-98), Jun Nagao, 1994
As with Nobunaga’s Ambition, developer Koei tended to make only incremental changes to the gameplay formula of its other flagship series, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Heavy on strategy, resource management and statistical processing, and set in feudal China, Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire differed little from its earlier historical turn-based predecessors. Even so, reviewers agreed that, for players attuned to this particular kind of game, one that favoured depth over action and visual spectacle, Wall of Fire provided addictive entertainment. As was common in the early 1990s, the game was ported to several computer and console platforms, even the 32X, though there was little obvious difference between them, with the 32-bit versions looking virtually identical to their 16-bit counterparts.
There was, however, one aspect of Wall of Fire’s presentation that stood out immediately: the soundtrack in the PC-98 Soundware version. In the years leading up to Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV, Koei had begun quietly revolutionising game music. This was, after all, the company that commissioned the first orchestral game score, Hiroshi Miyagawa’s Pacific Theatre of Operations in 1989. It also helped launch Yoko Kanno’s astonishing career through a series of live game-score recordings. By 1992, Kanno had been given access to a full-sized orchestra for Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden, and Koei must evidently have liked what it heard.
Where earlier Romance of the Three Kingdoms scores had used classical elements only sparingly, with II and III even veering into synth-rock, Wall of Fire dramatically reoriented the series’ musical language. It became the first Japanese orchestral game score to be recorded overseas. The ensemble credited in the liner notes is the “Hungary Philharmony Orchestra”, likely a mistranslation, perhaps referring to the Hungarian National Philharmonic, which recorded the score in December 1993. Koei’s choice of composer for this groundbreaking undertaking was equally intriguing: the young, classically trained Jun Nagao, who would deliver his first and only game soundtrack here. Otherwise focused on a career in concert music, Nagao later also worked as an orchestrator on Joe Hisaishi’s Le petit poucet and, notably, Spirited Away.
Keeping Nagao’s artistic background in mind is essential when confronting the unrestrained splendour of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV soundtrack. Put simply, few game scores feel so completely like works of serious classical composition. Nagao seems to treat the assignment less as functional scoring than as an opportunity to write a sequence of compact concert pieces. Broadly speaking, his idiom is one of post-Straussian opulence. He draws a head-spinning riot of orchestral colour from the ensemble while moving steadily away from traditional tonality, though never abandoning it altogether; Alexander Scriabin and Frederick Delius make apt points of comparison.
The result is a work whose harmonic language and orchestration reach a level of refinement virtually unmatched in game music. Think of the most luscious and virtuoso stretches of an already masterful score like EverQuest II, say “Antonica”, and then imagine that degree of sophistication raised another notch and sustained across an entire album. Such is the mind-boggling excellence on display here. Upon release, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV soundtrack set a new standard for orchestral game music, one that may well remain unmatched even now.
Put simply, every composition on this score is an embarrassment of riches. For all the opulence of the orchestration, Nagao generally avoids overt militarism or brute-force bombast, though when he does summon that kind of force, the results are staggering. “Opening: Soaring Heaven” fully earns its title: intricately arranged brass fanfares, backed by layers of trilling woodwinds and soaring strings, turn its opening into a spectacular curtain-raiser. From there, Nagao develops the piece into a genuinely epic concert overture, encapsulating an entire world in under six minutes while moving organically from one gorgeously scored passage to the next. The culmination is suitably overwhelming, as ascending strings drive the brass through one heroic fanfare after another amid swirling harps.
“Dragon Fortress ~ Blazing Hope ~ A Glorious Death ~ Field of Death” is more single-minded. After its monolithic opening, the cue transforms its sparse initial material into an animated battle piece of sustained high drama, whipping the music forward with a breathless intensity that few orchestral game scores have ever matched. “Sea God ~ Dark River ~ Funeral” brings its action writing more in line with the soundtrack’s luxuriant expressiveness before segueing into a terser episode of subdued tension that recalls the nocturnal passages of Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. It makes an ideal prelude to the cue’s funereal close, full of sombre pathos and revealing how effectively Nagao can shape more fractured melodic material.
Most of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV soundtrack luxuriates instead in more pastoral moods, with each cue uncovering a fresh and highly individual solution. “Bamboo Hermit” demonstrates how Nagao evokes the game’s exotic setting through imaginative orchestration without resorting to Chinese instruments. Here, a cor anglais solo with gentle folk inflections conjures the required Eastern atmosphere, supported by wooden xylophone and harp. More than that, Nagao’s colours suggest a world slightly removed from our own: welcoming, yet still touched by mystery. “Green Ripple” achieves a similarly intoxicating effect. It surrounds its dramatically undulating cello and flute soli with a busy, continually attacking dulcimer line on one stereo channel and a relentlessly pressing piano rhythm on the other. “Balmy Breeze”, meanwhile, emerges as nothing less than a fully fledged and utterly delectable chamber trio for French horn, piano and violin.
Other compositions combine these more romantic tendencies with the breadth and gravitas displayed so magnificently in “Opening: Soaring Heaven”. “Hazy Stream ~ Uprising ~ Heaven” is every bit as dazzlingly multifaceted as the opener. At times it enters piano-concerto territory and yields some of the score’s most meltingly beautiful melodies, before eventually climaxing in a finale worthy of a grand symphony, as multiple orchestral lines and melodic strands pile up to a genuinely triumphant effect. “Flower Banquet ~ Ending: Horizon of Light” closes the album with all the sweep, emotional resonance and retrospective glow one could hope for; it is as majestic and melodically ravishing as the finest closing cues from the Golden Age of film music.
Yet it is “Purple Swallow Palace” that may be the most striking piece of all, and that is saying something. Applying the soundtrack’s romantic language to an imperial setting, Nagao creates an almost exhaustingly monumental effect by contrasting the rigidity of his ostinato string material with its peerlessly varied treatment. The resulting textural density becomes still more intricate thanks to the unexpected warmth of the orchestration and melodic writing. After such an intense opening half, the music relaxes briefly, only for the piano to propel it forward again into ebbing and swelling crescendi and decrescendi of Ravel-like colour. Then comes the stunning conclusion: a trumpet solo gliding above bubbling, roiling orchestral dissonances, as though bringing order to cosmic chaos. What could be more fitting to underscore an emperor’s might? Very little, and there is no finer proof of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV soundtrack’s breathtaking brilliance.
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