PC-98 Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Nobunaga’s Ambition: Tenshouki Soundtrack (PC-98 – Soundware Version)

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 – Soundware Version)

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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Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV Soundtrack (PC-98 – Soundware Version)

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 strategising, resource management and processing stats while set in feudal China, Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire differed little from its franchise predecessors of historical turn-based strategy titles. Still, reviewers agreed that as long as you were tuned into this particular kind of games that favoured depth over action and fancy visuals, Wall of Fire provided addictive entertainment. As was common during the early 1990s, the game was ported to several computer and console platforms (even the 32X!) – not that there was much perceivable difference between the ports, with the 32-bit versions of the game looking virtually identical to their 16-bit brethren.

However, there was one component of Wall of Fire’s presentation that quickly stood out – and that was the soundtrack of the PC-98’s Soundware version. In the years before Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV, KOEI had begun to revolutionise game music. After all, this was the company that commissioned the first orchestral game score (Hiroshi Miyagawa’s Pacific Theatre of Operations in 1989). It also launched Yoko Kanno’s astonishing career with a series of game score recordings using live ensembles. In 1992, for the first time, Kanno had been given access to a standard-sized orchestra to record Nobunaga’s Ambition: Haouden and KOEI must have liked what they heard.

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Tamashii no Mon – Dante Shinkyoku yori Soundtrack (Soundware Version)

Tamashii no Mon – Dante Shinkyoku yori Soundtrack, Masumi Ito / Yoshiyuki Ito / Fiori Wakakuwa, 1992

It turns out 2010’s God of War clone Dante’s Inferno wasn’t the first video game based on Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century poem The Divine Comedy. But maybe that’s no surprise, given the work’s towering literary status and its vivid imagery of Hell’s nine circles, making it ripe for adaptations into other media. Another game inspired by The Divine Comedy was Koei’s Tamashii no Mon – Dante no Shinkyoku yori (literally: Gate of Souls – From Dante’s Divine Comedy). As one might expect, players assume Dante’s role as he struggles to find his way through the depths of Hell. The developers cast the game as an adventure title with platforming and melee elements while making excellent use of the ageing PC-98’s graphical capabilities. The clever use of a limited colour palette combined with fantastic sprite art truly brought the game’s nightmarish settings to live.

For the game’s soundtrack, the developers turned to Masumi Ito, Yoshiyuki Ito and Fiori Wakakuwa, who composed the Tamashii no Mon – Dante no Shinkyoku yori soundtrack under the moniker of hyym. There’s little information available on Wakakuwa’s work – his only other credits seem to be Koei’s Super Mahjong Taikai and Inindo: Way of the Ninja. The opposite is true for the wife and husband team of Masumi and Yoshiyuki Ito. Starting their careers as arrangers and composers on various Koei titles, they continued to arrange game music into the mid-1990s for numerous album releases – including Super Metroid, Virtua Fighter and Donkey Kong Country. They then moved into anime scoring. Masumi Ito also launched a career as a singer with several solo albums and Yoshiyuki Ito worked as Head Music Producer of Lantis – both artists amassing an impressive discography of 100+ titles each.

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