Overview

The Wizardry series is best known for its five classically-oriented symphonic suites from Kentaro Haneda that were released from 1987 onwards. In 2007, its music came to the attention of plenty of game music fans again with the release of Basiscape's joint soundtrack to the PlayStation 2's Wizardry Gaiden: Prisoner of the Battles (tracks 1-20) and the PC's Wizardry Gaiden: Five Ordeals (tracks 21-25). Masaharu Iwata leads the Prisoner of the Battles tracks, scoring mostly orchestral themes that are often reminiscent of the series' early styles. However, the highlights on the disc tend to be the array of experiments from him and his collaborator Mitsuhiro Kaneda, as well as the Five Ordeals tracks from Kenichi Koyano and Hitoshi Sakimoto.

Body

Masaharu Iwata is chiefly responsible for the album's orchestral tracks. The opener "Prisoners of the Battles" reminds me a lot of Kentaro Haneda's main themes used in the title screen of each Wizardry game. It boasts rich brass melodies and thick orchestration that sounds impressive thanks to Basiscape's ever effective sound programming. However, I find its charm largely superficial, as Iwata's orchestration is weak. It's bombastic, rhythmically static, and full of parallelisms. Iwata fails to capture the romanticism of Haneda's earlier themes and, while the quieter reflective sections are better, it doesn't make the body of the track any better. Also unfortunate is how the compelling but unpleasant orchestral discords of "Annihilation" introduce an otherwise dreary work featuring more semi-epic trumpet work, suspended strings, and a derivative mystical section. The more oriental-influenced "Fortress" is also weakened by the lumpiness of its harpsichord work and ear-piercing brashness of its trumpet fanfares while the heartfelt melodies of "Rest" are opposed by a saccharin-coated suspended string backing. Though all are listenable, their lack of originality and intricacy is disappointing. They ultimately provide a mediocre and fortunately misleading headline to the album.

When Iwata creates music outside his quasi-orchestral rut, he usually succeeds. While "Inn" starts off in a clichéd way with a falling string melody against harp, it ends up becoming the most multifaceted piece on the soundtrack due to a vocal- and chime-based spiritual section and a childish interlude. Iwata's two labyrinth themes bring back memories of his Baroque soundtrack with their eerie ambience. "Labyrinth 1" growls with a slow-developing 'celli line and some deep bassoon fragments creating a gloomy timbre for eerie synth vocals, spiritual gongs, and some piano fragments to colour. "Labyrinth 2" is instantly more intense due to the intrusive sound of drums throughout and often enters the boundaries of noise music with its ingenious use of instruments, particularly strings. "Battle 2" also makes a big entrance with its dissonant brass opening and develops into a very good boss theme; many will draw parallels with Iwata's Final Fantasy Tactics battle themes here, though there is appropriately little militaristic feel. Iwata's other offerings are a shop theme that buzzes with Germanic instruments and "Outskirts", another dark theme that uses the same melody in a different context.

Mitsuhiro Kaneda's nine tracks provide the creative core of the soundtrack. "Bar" is a laidback flamenco track led by the crisp catchy phrases from a Spanish guitar; it develops to incorporate violin and woodwinds in an unusual way, creating a fusion a little reminiscent of Hyper Street Fighter II's "Cammy Stage" remix. "Temple" is a Messiaen-inspired organ-led track in which a celestial chorale is twisted by lots of dissonant chords, jagged phrasing, and some intricate but largely monophonic passagework. "Museum" flaunts the composer's acoustic sound with its calming acoustic guitar arpeggios and some and a mixture of elegant and whimsical woodwind work. What else? "Training Place" is a gorgeous two-tiered oriental piece that interchanges between light and dark sections, "Chest from After the Battle" is a charming minimalistic ditty, while "Event" is gorgeously layered to create a lot of mood. Kaneda's normal and final boss battle themes are complex modernist works that soar with jagged wind melodies, drive with percussion polyrhythms, and boom with a barrage of dissonant chords. Though "Battle 1" is a little more fun, they're both coherent, accessible, and inspired efforts. If all that weren't enough, Kaneda's "Labyrinth 3" trumps Iwata's dungeon themes, mostly thanks to the emergence of the impressionistic wails of a saxophone from a dark ambient background.

Sakimoto produces two contributions to the soundtrack. He concludes the Prisoners of the Battles score by providing a symphonic ending theme. While attempts are made to make it comparable to his excellent ending themes for his Square Enix works, this theme emulates them too much while having little melodic substance of its own. Aside the brief and unconvincing introductory reference to Iwata's main theme, it focuses on a lulling string melody reminiscent of Final Fantasy XII's "White Room" but without the development or many quirks in the orchestration. More interesting is Sakimoto's "Town" contribution for Five Ordeals. He composed it in an industrial rock style like he did for Hyper Street Fighter II's "Vega Stage" remix. He focuses on a grungy bass guitar figures but supports them with exotic percussion and a degree of orchestration. I can't imagine how it could fit in a town, but it's still a rhythmically enticing and atmospheric piece that will be enjoyed by those with experimental leanings. Overall the soundtrack certainly isn't a must-have for a Sakimoto fan, though his contributions are something of a bonus here, as intended.

Iwata's friend and mentor Kenichi Koyano concludes the soundtrack with four tracks featured in Five Ordeals. They're all led by the electric guitar and hard rock in nature. His arrangement of Iwata's "Prisoners of the Battles" in "Scorching Wheel" sounds like a new track altogether given the complete shift of style from its orchestral roots; it's a well done little addition, though two guitars playing the melody does sound strange making me wonder why such an arrangement was inspired in the first place. "Labyrinth" uses just a rhythm guitar and lead guitar for much of the piece, but is just as atmospheric as Iwata and Kaneda's dungeon themes, grungy yet ethereal; as well as its rhythmical impetus, it stands out for its improvised sections that are synonymous with aspects of Sakimoto's "Town". And finally there's the two battle themes, which both get the rhythm going before moving into some great electric guitar solos. These are among the best video game rock tracks I've heard in recent years.

Summary

This soundtrack is recommended for a significant few. It's probably unworthy of a purchase for most people as it is rather short and doesn't really have any sort of dramatic arch to make it an entirely satisfying listen start to finish. Also, the target audience certainly isn't fans of Basiscape's orchestral works or those expecting a Haneda-style Wizardry soundtrack; the few orchestral tracks on here disappoint. The highlights are the many experiments from the eclectic Kaneda and, to a lesser extent, Iwata that make the soundtrack diverse and worthwhile. Koyano's rock tracks are a wonderful bonus.

Overview

The Wizardry series is, without doubt, a massive franchise, with eight main games and endless spin-offs from various game studios. I have only played the eighth installment, which is a better-than-decent western RPG with good graphics, music, and a plot combining spaceships with cold arms and magic. From today's point of view, Wizardry 8 marked the end of the series. Although the brand is still being used by other game studios, but games they produced seems to be mostly inferior compared to the main games.

The two gaiden games whose music featured in this CD are no exception either. I've briefly played both games and they are horrifyingly primitive. They played just like the old-school RPGs in the 80s without flashy graphics like those in Etrian Odyssey. To be honest, I can come up with no reason why anybody would release games like this to torture players and gamemakers. Thus, the background music became the sole strength of these games.

The first 20 themes are from Prisoners of the Battles, and the last five are from Five Ordeals. The former pieces are orchestral, distinct from the latter which are mostly rock and jazz/fusion pieces. Unfortunately, all of these themes are devoid of a decent name with a decent character, but names like "Town" or "Shop" cannot conceal the fact that they are better than decent. This album is the product of multiple composers, so I am going to analyse it according to different composers.

Body

Masaharu Iwata wrote ten pieces in this album, which is the most from the four composers. They almost all exhibit similar styles from Iwata's past works, so do not expect any new grounds in this album. One aspect that Iwata specializes in is the majestic quality of music. The main theme "Prisoners of the Battles" is a fine example of this. It featured epic and not-so-lyrical themes with a rigid structure that reminds me of classical music. "Fortress" utilized harpsichord which is a favorite of Iwata when expressing majesty. The masculinity is quite evident in here, yet its sound seems lacking in substance, and the short length of the piece prevented it from better development.

Iwata is also famous for his representation of the dark side. "The Pervert" in Final Fantasy Tactics showcased that perfectly. Yet in this game, Iwata's contributions in the dark side just lack variety. When Iwata used eerie passages in his piece, it would be all over without any contrast. As a result, the music becomes monotonous and boring. Labyrinth 1 and 2 are based on this methodology of writing dark music, so the result is exactly what I expected. Between them, "Labyrinth 2" is slightly better. It seems that Iwata knew his approach, so he just abandoned all melody and utilized weird percussions and tremolo strings to create tension. This approach is effective, yet the end product is not satisfying enough for most average listeners. "Battle 2" is a quite similar piece to Iwata's battle themes in Tactics and Stella Deus. "Annilation" has a good opening, but soon become a tedium afterwards.

The real highlight of Iwata's music is in the more soothing ones. The opening "Inn" seems like yet another warm "potion" music, but it has its moments when a whimsical passage appears in the middle of all this warmth. "Shop" also looks like a standard Iwata shop music, but it soon transformes into a brilliantly composed mazurka-like folk dance. In summary, Iwata's contributions are not bad, but aside from one or two pieces, they are average at most.

Mitsuhiro Kaneda's name is relatively unknown compared to the first three members (Sakimoto, Iwata, Namiki) in Basiscape, and the project experience he had is much less than those big names. However, to many people's surprise, his pieces in the recent Basiscape collaboration projects such as this are among the best. Here "Bar" and "Temple" showcased the individual instruments very well, and we can see that Kaneda has good understanding on the usage of various instruments.

But the first piece reeked with Kaneda-ism is "Museum", which has good development, playful melody and the most important of all, brilliant orchestrations. The technique reminds me of Sakimoto, but here Kaneda used a much lighter instrumentation with only pizzicato strings and woodwinds, but what it created is something playful and history-laden at the same time. "Chest from After the Battle" is in the same realm, but it also has some suspense in the music.

The rest of the Kaneda pieces are mostly dark-oriented. However, the Kaneda dark is much different from the Iwata dark, in the sense that Kaneda would never feature monotonous, grayish darkness in his pieces. They are dark and colorful at the same time. "Labyrinth 3" is a fine example of this, with the brilliant use of sax, ethical percussion, and harmony. This is also my favorite piece in the whole album. The two battle pieces (1 and 3) not only have great power, but also meticulous design like the ferocious cello passage in the latter part of "Battle 1". All in all, Kaneda did a better job overall than Iwata, which comes from colorful orchestrations and better development of pieces.

Hitoshi Sakimoto only has two pieces in this album. The first piece, "Ending", if not for the majestic reiteration of the main theme in the opening, is just a standard, if not a little boring, Sakimoto string piece. The strings wander without direction. The other piece, "Town", is far more interesting, though. It has a good amount of influence from Jazz/Fusion genre. The melody from bass is very improvised, and the accompaniment of strange percussions and ambient sound effects makes the song stand out from the composer's usual styles, although the trademark harmony in all of Sakimoto's music is still evident here.

Kenichi Koyano is the only non-Basiscape composer that worked on this album. I am not familiar with Koyano's music at all, but judging from the four pieces he had composed in this album, he's at the very least a decent composer. Although these four pieces are rock songs which I don't usually enjoy, they are still very delicate melodically and harmonically, especially the two battle songs which makes me very excited. Also the arrangement of Iwata's main them is quite good. Another point of attention is that, these four pieces are not played by live instruments, aside from the eletric guitar, and are mixed at Sakimoto's studios. What great technology they have (laugh).

Summary

A musical friend of mine once told me that Basiscape composers are distinctive in the sense that each of them has distinct styles. Although they all wear the mask of orchestral music, the meat behind the mask are totally different. What this CD has showed us is mainly the distinctive styles from two Basiscape composers, Masaharu Iwata and Mitsuhiro Kaneda, as well as a small window of style change from Hitoshi Sakimoto. Although the game in which the music has featured is extremely low-budgeted, the music itself is of high production value, which makes me very satisfied.

Basiscape has a great (and busy at the same time) year of 2007 with over ten projects, but judging from the two collaboration projects that is already released (Odin Sphere, Grim Grimoire) they are still doing a great job. Let us hope they continue to make fantastic music in the upcoming Deltora Quest: The Seven Jewels, Opoona, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, and Archaic Sealed Heat.