Listening: soundtrack album, YouTube, SPC set
Credits
Music Produce: Yukihiro Takahashi
Sound Programmer: Hiroya Hatsushiba
Sound Effect: Motoi Sakuraba, Shinji Tamura, Ryota Furuya
Info
So Yukihiro Takahashi died last week, which extremely fucking sucks. It extremely fucking sucks a lot. Extremely influential musician on a lot of stuff I listen to because of his work with Yellow Magic Orchestra, but he's had a long career of work with other groups and solo material. Among which are some video games!
Neugier is some kind of action RPG with music that mostly sounds like some kind of action RPG, but it's kinda funny that in a number of piece you can hear bits of Takahashi/YMO coming through, either in the synth samples or some parts of the composition evoking synthpop tracks. Some tracks are also kinda... weird, in the way they progress ("Wrath of the Sea") or are dissonant ("All for a Greater Purpose").
Recommended tracks:
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"Duke" sounds like a YMO song but with RPG instrumentation
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"Three magic circles" sounds like a YMO song but with YMO instrumentation
So chaotic Japanese game music label CASSETRON, whose publishing strategy seems to be "we throw a dart at a list of old console games and then see if we can get the rights to whatever we hit," just released a CD soundtrack to Neugier today, and in a very surprising turn of events also put it up on Bandcamp. With official English titles! Which were probably DeepL translated, but—
CASSETRON puts some real effort into their CD releases, and the booklet has an interview with Motoi Sakuraba, who goes into a little further detail about what the Wolf Team sound team did, with the caveat that the game is 30 years old so he might be misremembering some things. He said that all three of the people credited with sound effects also converted the music sequence data received from Takahashi (presumably MIDIs) for in-game use, that Hatsushiba was responsible for the SNES instrumentation of the music and sound effects, and that he also worked on some of the music instrumentation while having a general supervising role over the sampling and conversion. Pretty standard details, I think.