Overview

The Genso Sangokushi Original Soundtrack accompanies the soundtrack to the Chinese developed Genso Sangokushi. Unlike most Falcom published games, this was composed by China's UserJoy Technology as opposed to Falcom Sound Team J.D.K. Considering this seems to be a Chinese inspired RPG, how does the music turn out, especially when it's not composed by Falcom's staple soundteam?

Body

As is the norm, this soundtrack also features vocal themes. "Eternal Melody" is a beautiful string and piano led vocal theme sung in Chinese. It features a very strong melody and the piano really helps lend some dynamics to the piece. The electric guitar is also a surprising addition, but I guess UserJoy was studying a bit of Falcom's normal style with that one. The other vocal theme, "Head," is also quite beautiful and I probably enjoy it more than "Eternal Melody". It's a very calm theme, featuring some beautiful acoustic work that seems to give it a bit of Spanish flair. The vocalist's voice, who happens to be male, works quite well with this theme. This is definitely a highlight of the soundtrack for sure.

Unfortunately, those themes also clock in as the longest. The rest of the soundtrack usually falls under the two minute mark. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, I think it doesn't really give a lot of the pieces a chance to develop too much. What is there, though, is pretty decent. As I suspected, many of the themes are composed utilizing traditional Chinese instrumentation and they boast interesting melodies and harmonies. Despite this, I found many of them to be unmemorable, mainly due to their short running times.

Themes that were put on the arrange album were probably the most interesting of the bunch. "Broken Troops" features an interesting militaristic/Asian fusion where "Above Fairyland" is one of the more memorable Asian themes with quite a vibrant palette of instruments used. I wish I could say more about the rest of the album, but I just found it to be pretty lackluster. The battle themes were quite weak and didn't really innovate or even stick to a strong formula. Variety was seen among them, but nothing was really worth it.

Summary

In the end, this album isn't worth it. The vocal themes and a few of the BGM pieces were nice, but in the end, I found it unmemorable for the most part. Others who enjoy Asian inspired soundtracks may want to give this a listen, as it does utilize a nice variety of traditional Chinese instruments, but I think the running time of many of these themes is what hurt it the most.