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 amongst feuding warlords in Japan during the 16^th century. As before, it targeted those gamers who preferred intensely in-depth gameplay over elaborate visuals. Despite the geographically specific subject matter, KOEI felt that there was an overseas audience for Bushou Fuuunroko, bringing the SNES and Sega Genesis ports to the American market under the title of Lord of Darkness.

While the early Nobunaga’s Ambition games were never visual stunners, their music was an entirely different story. Since the franchise’s second title Zenkokuban, future film and TV score legend Yoko Kanno had been responsible for the games’ soundtracks. Their various PC and console chiptunes scores didn’t give a strong indication of Kanno’s burgeoning talents. However, KOEI had developed a fascinating concept dubbed “Soundware”. Soundware albums contained red book audio scores for a number of KOEI PC-88 games. These albums replaced the games’ chiptunes soundtracks with upgraded music in case the PC in question was equipped with a CD drive. Sometimes incorrectly referred to as arrange albums, these CDs were sold with special retail editions of various Nobunaga’s Ambition games. However, KOEI also sold them separately as simple music albums.

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Nobunaga’s Ambition: Tenshouki Soundtrack (PC-98), Yoko Kanno, 1994

Tenshouki, the sixth instalment of KOEI’s long-running Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise, heralded the end of an era in several ways (despite its strategy gameplay that focused on medieval Japanese warlords not changing much). It was the last Nobunaga’s Ambition game to be released on the PC-98 series of Japanese personal computers and the last franchise title to see the light of day on 16-bit platforms. Most importantly for our purpose, it was the final Nobunaga’s Ambition game to be scored by franchise mainstay Yoko Kanno.

Kanno’s star had been steadily rising throughout the early 1990s and by 1994, she was ready to focus on anime and film scoring – an area she had dabbled in as an arranger in recent years, with her breakthroughs Macross Plus and The Vision of Escaflowne just around the corner. For her farewell to the Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise, KOEI once more increased the budget allocation – and considerably so.

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Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden Soundtrack (PC-98), Yoko Kanno, 1992

As with previous instalments of the Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise, KOEI only tweaked details for its fifth instalment, Haouden. Clearly KOEI had hit upon a winning formula, happy to churn these games out to an audience hungry for their fix of historic strategy games that prioritised gameplay depth over fancy graphics. Not surprisingly, what stood out most about Haouden’s presentation was its soundtrack, provided by series regular Yoko Kanno.

Kanno had been given the opportunity to record previous franchise scores with live performers – a rare occurrence in video game music at the time. And thankfully, KOEI seemed willing to increase the music budget for each subsequent Nobunaga’s Ambition title. Bushou Fuuunroku had benefited from a mostly live ensemble – a chamber music-sized orchestra supplemented by a few solo performers and synths. For the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden soundtrack, KOEI went one step further and hired a larger ensemble, now amounting to a small symphony orchestra.

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