Overview

Back in 1995, Square partnered with G-Craft in order to create a futuristic strategy-RPG for the Super Nintendo. Barely a year after composing for Live-A-Live, Yoko Shimomura returns, but she is accompanied by a newcomer that will soon make herself known to the world, Noriko Matsueda. Both composers worked together on a very tight schedule, but, in the end, both women managed to create one of the most interesting Super Nintendo scores: Front Mission.

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One thing to notice is that both composers have their own unique approach at composing. Shimomura had handled most of the battle themes, which were full of intensity and power. A great example is the enjoyable "Take the Offensive," which starts off similar to Live-A-Live's opening theme. This theme is just as epic, as heroic as they get. One of the faster-paced themes is "Manifold Irons," which has 'panic' written all over it; this was used during enemy movement sequences during the first real battle, and it was fitting, as I was a bit nervous about losing on my first try into this game. The battle theme during your team's turn, "Holic Shot," comes armed with drums and trumpets, representing a huge conflict between Wanzers. "Hard Drag," which is used during the enemy's turn, is basic techno, but it still manages to get the point across that you need to watch yourself or you'll end up messing up.

Shimomura has a few more aces up her sleeve, such as the instrumental "Arena," which gets you pumped up before you choose to practice against a fellow fighter. "Win Back," the first mission victory theme, is short and simple, but it makes the player feel the satisfaction of victory really well. "Martial Ecologist" starts off with a rapid drumroll, then trumpets, drums, and a bit of synth thrown in for good measure. It makes it one of the more interesting battle themes. Shimomura's staple organ touch makes an appearance in the gloomy and gripping "Destructive Logic." The piece couldn't be any better as you're fighting against the ultimate evil, probably a political mastermind behind the entire mess, and it must be one heck of a wanzer to deserve such an awesome theme.

Matsueda chose a more modern, jazzy approach with her music. The most obvious example of this is "Shop" — it is mind-numbingly simple yet so catchy. It just gets you in the mood to lay back and take your time to choose your parts and items for your wanzers. It only gets better with "Bar," a wonderful lounge jazz piece like no other. Right here, Matsueda shows off her mastery of using a piano just right. More piano goodness is found in "Natalie" — it shows off the sweet side of the character, yet it carries hope into the piece as if she is encouraging her companions to hold on a little longer and they will succeed in overthrowing the mastermind behind a lot of chaos.

Matsueda's crowning achievements, however, are the two ending themes, being "Within Living Memory..." and "Next Resolution." "Within Living Memory..." is a wonderful arrangement of "Kalen," the theme of a tragic character. It starts off with wind SFX, then synth choirs come into play. It is almost depressing as you recall a certain tragic event, yet Matsueda turns the tide and makes it one of the most epic ending themes ever created. "Next Resolution" wraps it all up as you've managed to end this war between two governments, very similar to her future Bahamut Lagoon score. With these two themes, I think that Matsueda was the most talented of both despite the fact that she handled the less epic tracks.

Summary

Overall, this soundtrack is an impressive introduction to the Front Mission series. Yoko Shimomura and Noriko Matsueda gave Front Mission a fitting sound while channeling the melodic magic of Square's RPG soundtracks. It isn't quite as dramatic or refined as subsequent titles, but it's still worthwhile.

Overview

Perhaps the most underappreciated of Square Enix's major franchises is the Front Mission franchise, which first appeared on the Super Nintendo in 1995. Just as the series has gone mostly overlooked, the Front Mission series has had a continually high standard in soundtracks that has never gained much mainstream exposure. The Front Mission Original Sound Version, composed by Yoko Shimomura and Noriko Matsueda, manages to hold the two composers' styles to create a convincing game atmosphere while exploring each composer's different expressive strengths. Though the score has its moments of naïvety and some stale tracks, the whole of the album sets a solid standard for music in the Front Mission series.

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The first track on the album, "A Minefield", is a fabulous musical representation of the game as a whole. The piece opens with ambience, adds an ominous low string sample, a score of industrial sounding noises, and a rhythmic bit of low register. The piece develops around rhythm, eventually adding drums and background arpeggios underneath dramatic string melodies. After the strings disappear, rhythm is given even more focus as brass is added to the arrangement and plays lines focused more on rhythm than harmony. The piece is a fairly good capsulation of what to expect from the rest of the soundtrack, and although there are certainly more tricks up Shimomura's and Matsueda's sleeves, the general atmosphere of the game is set up right from the outset.

Though the difference between composers never hinders the continuity of the soundtrack, the two composers have very distinctive styles that make it easy to tell each composer apart. Shimomura has a very distinctive rhythmic sense, and even in her melodies, a great deal of rhythmic emphasis is noticeable. "Take the Offensive" is a good example of this trait. Listen to the rhythm in the first melody especially, which is emphasized by wide melodic leaps and florid ornamentation on important melodic areas. Matsueda is by no means rhythmically boring, but her rhythms typically follow more conventional, generally feel looser, and have less immediately identifiable patterns. It is easier to identify Matsueda by her harmonies, which tend to derive less from different melodic lines interweaving and more from pure harmonic motivation. Her harmonies are on average more dissonant than Shimomura's which contributes to Matsueda's jazzy sound.

Dramatic action tracks are the main strength of soundtrack. Pieces like "Manifold Irons" with its inspired rhythms paired with energetic woodwind figurations that support the intense but almost melancholy main melody. "Terrible Destiny" also manages to capture an energized mood though its rhythm is much more rudimentary, the piece remains effective thanks to its almost oppressive repetition of the main rhythm in the snare drum and timpani. "The Evils of War" takes idiomatic Shimomura rhythms and places them in one of the best melodic offerings on the album. Not all of the dramatic tracks work to success though; there are some pieces such as "Hard Drag" which places accenting stabs in almost random rhythmic locations and thanks to its relative lack of melody and uninspired harmony succeeds only in being annoying. "Holic Shot" is almost identical to "Hard Drag" and in addition to creating a sense of redundancy on the album, the piece is no more musically interesting than "Hard Drag". Despite a few problems in "Hard Drag" and "Holic Shot", the game's action pieces are very inspiring and are the definite strength of the soundtrack.

Outside of combat, there are some nice little setting pieces across the soundtrack. Some of these pieces really show off Matsueda's jazzy style. Though simple and overly repetitive, "Shop" and "Bar" reflect the atmosphere of the two locations quite well. "Rise to Action" may well be one of Matsueda's best contributions to the album as well, with the composer's most energetic piece and most interesting interplay between instruments. Shimomura's contributions of this nature are not nearly as strong. "Arena", despite its quick tempo, never manages to feel all that energized, and even feels somewhat forced. "Field Hospital" does little to set up any mood or atmosphere but is not obtrusive either, and is one of the more average tracks on the album.

Front Mission Original Sound Version's main disappointments are in its more lyrical moments. "Kalen" never really finds its melodic drive, and ends up emotionally lifeless and unmemorable. "The General Situation" comes close to expressing a sense of dramatic piece, but is too melodically stiff to elicit any real response. There are some fine lyric pieces; "Natalie" and "Elegie" are both expressive and musically interesting, but these are rarities. "Natalie" is perhaps the most effective instance of Matsueda's jazzy progressions over the course of the album, and shows her melodic strengths as well. "Elegie" combines Shimomura's rhythmic energy with what I consider to be the strongest progression in the game. The remainder of the album's sensitive moments are either not memorable, are inexpressive, or are a combination of the two. Fortunately enough, there is not all that much music on the album that attempts lyricism.

Part of the trouble with the album is that so many of the tracks fall so securely into one of the major groupings I've set up here, and there is not always a great deal of variety within those categories. Once a listener has heard a couple of the pieces in each category that each composer has to offer, the novelty of the style of the album can wear off. That's not to say that the album ever feels like it is repeating itself, but there is a sense that a little bit more stylistic diversity could have helped make the album as a whole more interesting to listen to.

Summary

Though the Front Mission Original Sound Version is not especially memorable and often fails to support the game from an emotional standpoint, the soundtrack does to a good job of expressing the futuristic atmosphere of the game, and supports the dramatic action of the game well. Perhaps the greatest weakness of the album is its unevenness, sometimes showing signs of a great soundtrack, but sometimes showing an almost complete lack of inspiration and emotional drive. On the same hand, the soundtrack has no single piece that really grabs my attention as a truly extraordinary theme. While there are some very good moments, none jump out as spectacular, and in light of some of the album's weaker tracks, I cannot recommend this album for independent listening. The soundtrack suits its game well, and is a good introduction to a series whose music continues to impress, but is not a remarkable accomplishment itself.

Overview

Front Mission probably has the richest musical background of any RPG series I've seen. Sure, Dragon Quest has about 73 different speciality albums (DQ3 in Concert! DQ7 Shower Karaoke Remix! Best of Dragon Quest... on Kazoo!) and Final Fantasy and its offshoots have been around the block as well. But Front Mission's been handled by a multitude of artists, from the well-known Uematsu and Mitsuda to the experimental Riow Arai. Front Mission has seen seven games (including Front Mission Online) and eleven musicians, and only three of them — Noriko Matsueda, Hidenori Iwasaki, and Ryo Yamazaki — returned to work on a second FM soundtrack. The result is a brilliant combination of coherence and individuality. Each soundtrack blends together perfectly, often so well that it's impossible to guess which artist composed which track. At the same time, the soundtracks are all individually quite different from each other.

The Front Mission Original Sound Version is a good place to start, not only because it's the first in the series, but also because it really shows the evolution of the later soundtracks quite well. The music is quite simple in structure, often having no key or tempo changes that make writing soundtrack reviews easier. The synthesizer used for the soundtrack sounds fairly dated, even for the Super Famicom days. Don't take these as negative qualities just yet, as there's a lot more to the music than that.

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The Front Mission Original Sound Version doesn't have a single specific genre. Actually, most of the tracks don't really fit into any musical genre at all. One of the soundtrack's contributors, Yoko Shimomura, is well-known for creating music that defies normal classification. Even the moods are hard to define. Tracks like "Advanced Guard" and "Shallow Twilight" are great examples of music which shortly precedes or follows a battle. The former makes good use of drums and chimes to get more of a military feel, from the standpoint of a tactician which makes sense, since this track is played during the unit movement sequences. The latter is a slower event piece which uses percussion in the same way, but this time giving you the impression of a band of warriors after an exhausting battle. My personal favorite track on the OST, "Destructive Logic", is a wonderful buildup of tension. The rhythm is very slow, deliberate, and march-like. It features deeper harmonies and more variation than most of the other songs. Another good one that stands out a ways from the others is a piano duet titled "Elegie." It's a Classical-style piece that sounds very mournful, with interesting little intertwinings between the two parts. Beautiful pieces like this and "Destructive Logic" make me long for an orchestrated version of this soundtrack.

But Shimomura's contributions are not exclusively mood pieces, far from it. The main battle tracks are all hers, the ones that really get your blood pumping. "Holic Shot" and "Hard Drag" are probably the hardest of these, the most battle-like. They don't consist of much more than pounding synth and drums, however, though they do get their point across. My preference leans toward the more involved "The Evils of War." Played during the enemy's tactical phase, this piece definitely has a sinister twist about it. The harmonies here are really good, but I think it's the instrumentation that really drives the point home. Along a similar vein are the tracks "Martial Ecologist" and "Rage! Rage! Rege!" And as if this wasn't enough of a mix, Shimomura also throws in a couple of slow electronic tracks, like "Setting Up" and "Coaxial Town." The second of these is particularly cool, featuring instruments heard nowhere else on the entire CD.

As much as I am a big Yoko Shimomura fan, we can't forget the other musician who composed for Front Mission — Noriko Matsueda. Most of her pieces blend right in with Shimomura's, but some of them have minor instrumental differences that can be used to tell them apart. Careful listeners might recognize instruments from the Live A Live Original Sound Version used in some of Shimomura's tracks — you'll find none of that in Matsueda's work. In general, Matsueda's tracks seem to be a bit more modal and jazzy. To put it in another way, where Shimomura's tend to be relatively black or white, Matsueda's are shades of gray. Some of them, like "Relative Thinking," don't even feature a strong melody, and instead rely on the background ambience to carry the mood. Speaking of jazz, "Bar" is exactly that. It's a simple little track whose inclusion really speaks volumes about the diversity of music in the soundtrack.

Sometimes even Matsueda likes to use black and white along with her shades of gray, though. "The General Situation" is by far the brighest track of Front Mission. It's very slow and brassy, and features probably the best instrumentation out of them all. The synth quality is so much better here, and it really brings out the richness of the harmony. "Natalie" is the counterpart, which is unmistakeably sad. Even here, though, we have the drums in the background to remind us of the military nature of the game, and of how these things happen in war. Again, this really makes me want a live orchestral version of Front Mission so very badly.

Summary

Probably my only complaint about this soundtrack would be the quality of the sound generating equipment. But let's face it, some music sounds just fine even cranked out of square wave generators, and some music just doesn't. For sure, Front Mission's outstanding soundtrack is not "ruined" by the sound quality, by any means. But it is a flaw. The music just begs to be played on real instruments, and I think that's the way the composers envisioned it. It's very good background music, and I think it's kind of hard to listen to in its present form in the background, as it's just not smooth enough. Still, there are many things that aren't wrong with this Original Sound Version. It's a great mix of several genres and plenty of stuff that crosses genre boundaries, with almost no filler. It's interesting because I think this soundtrack, more than any other, embodies what I mean when I think of "pure" game music. It's not trying to emulate any existing style, but carving out something new. I think that's worth listening to.