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.

The Soundware albums had allowed Kanno to write for studio-grade synths and small live ensembles since Genghis Khan, recorded largely in 1987. In the next few years, Kanno was given an amazing number of opportunities to record her game music with live musicians on Soundware albums including Zenkokuban, Ishin no Arashi, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Sengoku Gun’yuuden, Romance of the Three Kingdoms / Sangokushi and Uncharted Waters / Daikoukai Jidai. All of these works showed promise and flashes of greatness, but suffered from inconsistent songwriting quality and often less-than-complimentary recording sound. The Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku soundtrack is an improvement in all regards on Kanno’s earlier works, standing as the first great score of her career – and in fact the first great live orchestral game music score!

With Bushou Fuuunroku, Kanno for the first time develops a consistent musical vision for the Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise, able to contain her trademark eclecticism within a coherent stylistic framework. As previously, Western classical music inspires much of her music, be it when Kanno deploys her full ensemble (34 performers strong) or when she dabbles in chamber music-sized instrument combinations. During these moments, she already hints at her 1991 masterpiece The Creation. Not surprisingly, the full ensemble is heard most clearly on those compositions that either raise the curtain on the war-torn scenery or herald the conclusion of the adventure.

“Signal Fire” sees Kanno coax an admirably grand sound out of her small group of performers. At this early point in her career, she already showcases her talent for sweeping, elegant string melodies with a strong classical touch. She also confidently achieves a cinematic sense of scale for her compositions through their rich development – take the beguiling shakuhachi duet during “Signal Fire”’s mid-section. The cue’s proud horn lead – performed solo – is arguably underpowered against the strident string backing, but its rousing qualities persist. “As Eternal as Heaven and Earth” intriguingly starts out a bit like the closing title for a 1940s Western movie, with its riding, memorable brass fanfares. Contrapuntally denser than “Signal Fire”, “As Eternal as Heaven and Earth” features another ravishing mid-section, this time led by solo flute.

Ideally, Kanno’s ensemble would ideally be larger to sell these compositions even better as the historic epics that they clearly aim to be. However, there are also advantages to working with a smaller orchestral group. Its lean sound is vividly captured through the dry, natural album sound which particularly benefits the battle tracks. Rather than relying on forceful demonstrations of grandeur, these compositions rely on the sinewy, gritty attack of the performers.

Some of the action cues on the the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku soundtrack are rather short. Like the slashed electric violin stabs of “Flame of the Battlefield”, they sometimes register merely as intriguing experiments. But they are eclipsed by highlights like “Demon King of the Sixth Heaven First Chapter”. The cue leads various solo instruments and the ensemble into a fierce standoff that generates the album’s most complex piece. It easily belies its short run time and small instrumental forces thanks to its sheer amount of musical ideas, colours and subtlety, seeing Kanno tease emotional shades out of her compositions rarely heard before in game music. “A Dangerous Castle Entrance” isn’t quite as ambitious, with a standard, if effectively roiling orchestral background. But Kanno’s idea to have a solo trumpet perform against this martial backdrop with freewheeling, harsh inserts gives the music a intriguingly jagged, jazz-inspired progression and unpredictable aggression.

While these pieces already heavily rely on solo instruments, other compositions deploys smaller instrumental forces still. “The Helpful God of War’s Banner Last Chapter” is a display of instrumental virtuosity unheard of within game music when the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku soundtrack was released. Kanno launches into a breathlessly rushing piano solo that gives her an opportunity to display her impressive performing chops, even if the composition’s substance isn’t particularly complex. Other compositions carried by a single instrument have a greater impact on the soundtrack’s stylistic direction though. “Elegance” and “Shadows” consist of lengthy, impeccably composed shakuhachi soli that work their arresting spell with ease, as Kanno displays her melodic gifts once again. With both tracks recorded in a spacious concert hall acoustic, their shakuhachi notes seem to wring out over serene mountain tops, transporting listeners to the far distant time in which the game is set.

These compositions are more strongly carried by traditional Japanese instruments than previous Nobunaga’s Ambition scores. Imbued with an sense of spiritualism (at least to Western ears), these pieces subtly lay the groundwork for the least expected musical style found on the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku soundtrack: electronica. On “Distant Mountains and Rivers” and “Heart”, Kanno relies on synthesised instruments to build upon the established aura of mysticism, taking listener into a realm that feels further and further removed from the present day. It’s a precursor to Kanno’s still more original evocations of the past on projects like The Inspired Dragon: Where To Now. “Distant Mountains and Rivers” relies a bit too much on oriental clichés – a chiming background figure, a soft pentatonic horn lead – to convince. “Heart” fares significantly better, as Kanno evokes an otherworldly mood through a lushly flowing harp solo with an intriguingly syncopated, heady melody.

Arguably, not everything on this album works and there’s no doubt that Kanno would go on to greater things (quite soon, in fact). Including the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku soundtrack on this site is a bit of a close call then. However, there’s no denying that at its best, this score is rivalled by few other orchestral game soundtracks, as it conjures up images of medieval Japan with grace, fantastic attention to detail and great creativity. An early high watermark for orchestral game music from a rapidly maturing composer, roughly-hewn edges and all, in an idiom Kanno would rarely revisit once she had access to larger ensembles.

Conversion notes

Like its predecessors, Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku was ported to numerous other platforms. Interestingly enough, none of these ports are particularly worthwhile – apart from the PC Engine CD version, which reprises the redbook audio score. They all suffer from repetitive, thin material and an inherent inability to replicate Kanno’s expert instrumental effects and colours.

The lack of musical substance might come as a surprise. However, upon closer inspection, elements like the trumpet solo on “A Dangerous Castle Entrance” are simply impossible to replicate on chiptunes platforms and once the solo is removed, there’s little left to the composition. And the additional material that Kanno composes for these ports is arguably fairly lacklustre, again largely devoid of sufficient substance.

As all ports share almost the exact same material, questions of preference are mostly down to a matter of which platform produces the most pleasant and / or life-like sound. The Sharp X68000 version fares well on the first count, producing more realistic timbres than the PC-88 chiptunes score and sounding more spacious and less cramped than the Sega Genesis version. Naturally, the SNES port produces the most realistic timbres, but its alternately hollow or watery samples aren’t exactly a stunning example of what the platform is capable of. Of particular interest is the NES version. Due to hardware limitations, it doesn’t seek to replicate any authentic instrument timbres and instead simply presents the substance of Kanno’s compositions with little fuss – an approach that works surprisingly well, albeit without generating a consistently strong score.

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.

Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden had been recorded with a small domestic orchestra and on a local sound stage (to mixed results). Tenshouki, on the other hand, had the benefit of being performed by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra. A Japanese video game being recorded by a Polish orchestra might seem surprising, but the same ensemble had done a stellar job on Masamichi Amano’s Giant Robo score in 1992. Tenshouki was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between Kanno and the orchestra, including works like The Vision of Escaflowne, Brain Powerd and Genesis of Aquarion.

If you want to get a feel for the difference in performance and recording quality between Haouden and the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Tenshouki soundtrack, sample “Supreme Ruler Suite -Warsaw Edition–”. The piece is a compilation of Haouden’s “Supreme Ruler Introduction” and “Destructive Army” – and while it’s not a day-and-night difference, the clearer recording makes “Supreme Ruler Introduction”’s intricate layers that much more discernible.

With one of the world’s best scoring orchestras at her disposal, it’s no surprise that Kanno skews more classical on the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Tenshouki soundtrack than on Nobunaga’s Ambition: Bushou Fuuunroku and Haouden. Japanese solo instruments are used very sparingly – instead, Kanno evokes culturally-specific timbres through the clever use of orchestral colours and pentatonic melodies. Also gone are Haouden’s jazzy tendencies – this is classically-inspired music through and through, drawing both upon symphonic and chamber music.

At the same time, Tenshouki’s general character does have the capacity to surprise. One might expect Kanno to go big and bold, now that she finally has access to a large, first-rate symphony orchestra. But instead, Kanno seems to pull back, crafting a far mellower work than the sometimes tumultuous Bushou Fuuunroku. In fact, there’s not a single composition on the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Tenshouki soundtrack that one would call an action or battle cue. It’s worth noting that Kanno decided to not use a single one of the ‘War’ tracks from the PC-98 chiptunes original for the PC-98 Soundware version – so Tenshouki’s generally genial mood very much feels like a conscious decision.

Maybe Tenshouki’s lack of sturm and drang is a sign of Kanno’s increased confidence as a composer. She seems happy to identify precisely which ingredients a piece requires to work its spell – and leave it at that. Her restraint and impressive economy of means are particularly evident during the album’s mid-section. “The Cloudy Road” is a peaceful, sunny piano composition with a relatively simple, but lovely progression that’s a world away from Bushou Fuuunroku’s rampaging piano showpiece “The Helpful God of War’s Banner Last Chapter”. “Wind Orchid” follows in a similar vein. An elegant air for piano and strings, “Wind Orchid” is an exquisite miniature that belies its short running time and seemingly uncomplicated surface. Dig deeper and you find a composition that repeatedly changes momentum, tempo and rhythm, without ever sacrificing its lightly dancing motion.

Closing vocal ballad “Distant Blue” is similarly sparsely orchestrated, relying on acoustic guitar, piano and subtle synth pads to back Akino Arai’s intimate, moving delivery. With an almost meditative lilt, “Distant Blue” lacks the hushed grandeur of Haouden’s vocal piece but feels warmer and more soothing. What’s remarkable is how Kanno manages to extend the track’s run time to nearly seven minutes, without ever stretching its material – the composition just naturally flows from one beautiful melody to the next.

More fully orchestrated tracks reprise the same general atmosphere, usually to gorgeous results. A particular standout is “Crescent Moon on the Lake”. It pairs a pentatonic, plaintive cello melody with iridescent, beguiling violin chords that evoke the cue’s location to perfection. There’s not much counterpoint or busy musical activity here – Kanno can simply rely on her ability to create the most bewitching harmonies, as the violins’ impressionistic chords glisten in the pale, white moon light. “Distant Fields” is less heady but features one of Kanno’s best melodies up to this point – a delectable, swooning string tune that carries listeners into a dreamy haze. The addition of castanets in the track’s second half is a creative way to add some colour and energy to the music’s gentility.

Indeed, “Distant Fields” seems to crystallise the feeling of nostalgia that runs through much of the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Tenshouki soundtrack – and it’s hard not to read this sentiment as a result of Kanno saying goodbye to the franchise that started her career. That being said, Tenshouki does have its moments of outright, if often brief drama. It’s on these compositions that Kanno’s increased maturity writing for full orchestra becomes entirely obvious. Opening track “The Hawk of Turbulent Times” sets the scene to wonderfully startling effect as brass chords build, only to rapidly descent in a frenzied chromatic motion and disappear. This game of bait and switch continues, as the piece moves back and forth between elegant 5/4 rhythms, brutal outbursts of brassy ferocity and a strained flute melody over quivering strings that creates breathless tension.

Previously, Kanno’s orchestral compositions were most definitely rich, subtle creations, but usually fairly obvious in the emotions they sought to elicit. On Tenshouki, Kanno crafts pieces that combine conflicting moods and create more complicated tonal juxtapositions. “Summer Squall” opens in similarly fragmented, edge-of-your-seat fashion as “The Hawk of Turbulent Times”. Finally, the piece settles on a bouncy march whose almost overly jolly mood is undermined by the expert use of acidic, dissonant undertones from the brass and strings – maybe consciously recalling Dimitri Shostakovich’s use of musical irony. “Spring Waves” sees Kanno continuing her exploration of more complex emotional territory, the cue’s mock-pompous brass backing a violin lead that is both imposing and cantankerous – like a mighty warlord throwing a temper tantrum, while the music subtly pokes fun at his presumptuousness.

Kanno closes the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Tenshouki soundtrack on a pitch-perfect note with “Yonder Dreams”, adding tons of romantic sweep and elegant grandeur to the album’s mostly peaceful template. Proceeding with utmost assurance, “Yonder Dreams” is fantastically melodic from the start and only keeps getting more and more beautiful and moving. Part of Kanno’s flawless melody writing is the way she throws in sufficient harmonic surprises to sustain the cue’s extended run time – listen how increasingly passionate phrases end in unexpected chromatic harmonies at 0:45 and 3:13, complicating the music’s emotional flow. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting goodbye to the Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise and Tenshouki left no doubt that there were great things ahead – both for Kanno and for orchestral game music, a genre she helped pioneer.

Conversion notes

Tenshouki continued the trend of Nobunaga’s Ambition games receiving fewer and fewer contemporary ports. Different to Haouden – and more similar to Bushou Fuuunroku – the score’s chiptunes versions effectively use the same material as the orchestral score. As a result, the FM Towns and SNES ports rank as some of the best soundtracks on their respective system (and of course the SNES version does the orchestrally-minded compositions more justice). However, this similarity in material also means that the orchestral version ultimately makes the chiptunes scores redundant. They do provide some additional material not heard on the orchestral recording – specifically several battle cues – but these aren’t quite strong enough to warrant considering the chiptunes scores as valid alternatives. That being said, listeners enjoying the characteristic sound of the FM Towns or SNES’ soundchips should give these versions of Tenshouki a listen.

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.

Since Bushou Fuuuroko, Kanno had only become more confident in her writing, delivering what was arguably her first masterpiece with The Creation in 1991. And Haouden clearly bears out the fact that the early 1990s saw Kanno quickly maturing as a composer. Bushou Fuuuroku – despite its creative treatment of its subject matter – was easily read as the score for a history game set in medieval Japan, based on a tasteful mix of classical Japanese and Western music with dashes of electronica.

The Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden soundtrack sees Kanno expanding her palette further, coming up with timbre and instrument combinations she hadn’t tapped into before. Haouden is an important work in Kanno’s transition towards her trademark eclecticism, while showcasing her ability to deliver a stylistically consistent work (1990’s Uncharted Waters was arguably more diverse than Haouden, but also fairly disjointed). As a result, Haouden comes up with some unexpected but immaculately executed approaches to scoring its time period.

Take “Beyond the Auspicious Clouds” and its gentle, languid flute solo set against a sparse backdrop of traditional Japanese percussion – and xylophone. Kanno constructs a long-spun, ravishing melody with a dreamy lull and full of subtle harmonic surprises, making the piece an constant delight. But there’s more to the composition still. On the one hand, its flute lead evokes pastoral images of serene landscape and plays into scoring conventions for period settings. On the other hand, there’s a jazzy undercurrent to the flute melody that becomes particularly obvious during the piece’s second half, aided by the xylophone’s warm, almost sensuous backing. It’s an elegant way to mix in genre influences you wouldn’t expect to see in a game about feuding Japanese warlords.

This sense of genial – and almost always successful – experimentation marks the entire Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden soundtrack. “Blue Whitecaps” furthers the game’s jazz credentials, switching to the sort of light jazz that would characterise Kanno’s Uncharted Waters II the following year. Any lingering thoughts of serious, historic subject matter are gone when a clipped, bouncy cello melody dances with catchy piano backing to charm listeners, before the piece leads into a laid-back guitar solo and hand percussion rhythms. There’s an easy-going feel of improvisation here that suits “Blue Whitecaps”’ jazzy inclinations perfectly.

“Unrecognised Genius” is equally light in its orchestration, but turns out more impassioned. A nearly five-minute pan flute solo with gentle synth backing, “Unrecognised Genius” can’t avoid comparisons with Ennio Morricone’s masterful Once Upon a Time in America. However, the fact that Kanno’s composition is as moving – and arguable melodically more complex – than Morricone’s work speaks volumes about her melodic genius. Again, her choice of solo instrument is inspired, as it does evoke a sense of ancient history, but again using timbres not usually heard in games set in medieval Japan.

What “Unrecognised Genius” also proves is Kanno’s desire to develop her compositions beyond the confines of what was often feasible within game music at the time. Her compositions on Haouden run significantly longer than those on Bushou Fuuuroku. Also, many of the chiptunes and live versions of that earlier soundtrack’s pieces were fairly similar. That’s not the case on Haouden. Here, Kanno usually opens her live piece by stating the melodic material of the respective chiptunes cue, but then deviates significantly, composing entirely new material.

Setting the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden soundtrack further apart from typical period scores are a couple of compositions where synthesisers play a significant role. “Gathering Under the Pleiades” is the soundtrack’s most intriguing concoction. It pits a quena solo against a subdued, but curiously unsettled synth background that doesn’t evoke benign starry skies, but instead an unsettling view of the otherworld. The cue’s heady effect is quite unexpected and its emotional pull – pitting man against a threatening universe – is as strong as anything Kanno creates on this album. Closing vocal piece “Comet” creates the same sense of uneasy wonder, evoking a similar mood to “Sóra” from Kanno’s Escaflowne: The Movie. If there is one thing that sets Haouden apart from previous Nobunaga’s Ambition scores then, it’s the album breadth of moods, ranging from the comical to the cosmic – achieving a sense of sweeping scale through unusual means.

That being said, Kanno does deliver some good old-fashioned orchestral bombast on the Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden soundtrack as well. Album bookends “Supreme Ruler Introduction” and “Morning Bell” showcase how quickly Kanno has matured since Bushou Fuuuroku. Both compositions are full of youthful sturm und drang – sample the Tchaikovskian pathos of “Supreme Ruler Introduction”’s piano concerto-style introduction. Later on, rhythmically complex contrapuntal motions in the deep strings provide surprisingly hard-edged, exciting counterpoint to the romantic lead melody. However, it’s also here that the album’s biggest drawback becomes obvious. The recording sounds boxy and muddy, particularly effecting the album’s richly layered and densely orchestrated pieces. It’s a shortcoming that befalls many soundtracks recorded on Japanese soundstages and not a big surprise, but it’s still hard not to wish for a better representation of Kanno’s stellar work.

Still, that doesn’t change the fact that a composition like “Morning Bell” is among the greatest orchestral game music cues ever written, a piece of nearly symphonic scale that flows with astonishing confidence as it takes its theme through an astonishing number of variations. Haouden’s remaining orchestral pieces are less breathtaking, but still substantial. “Rainy Desolation” reprises the piano concerto-format, with an agitated string melody backed by a tightly-woven piano line, sublimating the cue’s emotional turmoil into music of great elegance and riveting emotional tension.

“Destructive Army” is a fairly straightforward take on its chiptunes equivalent. However, Kanno clads the cue’s relatively thin material in sufficiently dramatic orchestrations while also varying the composition’s substance just enough (the fact that the mid-section’s urging rhythms effectively pay homage to Richard Wagner’s perennial favourite “Ride of the Valkyries” helps). Interestingly, “Destructive Army” is the only battle cue on the album – then again, even the soundtrack’s longer chiptunes equivalents only had three action pieces. It’s another sign that Kanno’s approach to scoring the Nobunaga’s Ambition franchise’s period setting kept changing, producing ever more intriguing results.

Conversion notes

Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden saw the number of ports that these games received decline – a result of consolidation within the Japanese console and PC market. As previously, the chiptunes versions of the score effectively all use the same material. Said material is significantly more substantial than on Bushou Fuuuroku and far more melodic. That being said, pieces are still rather short and generally pleasant rather than great (with exceptions like “Morning Bell”).

The Sharp X68000 and FM Towns versions of the score are fairly similar, with the FM Towns port a bit less synthy sounding and with a slightly greater range of colours. The Sega Genesis port doesn’t sound too different either, but has fewer tracks than the computer versions. For some reason, the SNES game is also lacking some tracks. At least the sample quality is better than on Bushou Fuuuroku, although it’s still not outstanding. The Sega CD port simply includes the redbook audio found on the PC-98 CD version, while the 3DO game interestingly includes a range of compositions from Haouden and previous Nobunaga’s Ambition live instrumental scores – a consistently strong franchise best of, if you want.