Jam of the Day: Warlock Battle by GUIDO (Chrono Trigger Arranged Version: The Brink of Time)

With a bazillion remixes of Yasunori Mitsuda’s beloved Chrono Trigger score in existence, it’s nice that GUIDO (Hiroshi Hata and Kalta Ohtsuki) took the road less traveled in their arrangements featured on The Brink of Time. If you’ve never heard the album, you should really seek it out.

Warlock Battle is my favorite track on there and it takes some interesting creative liberties with the Magus battle theme. Everytime I hear the guitar “laugh” about 47 seconds in, I can’t help but smile. It gets pretty insane at the end and honestly the last 30 seconds or so completely loses me, but the rest is so solid that it’s hard to complain.

Jam of the Day: Balto by Yasunori Mitsuda (CREID Yasunori Mitsuda & Millennial Fair)

Given that I consider Yasunori Mitsuda my favorite game music composer, it’s a bit odd that I haven’t featured him on this blog very much. Better late than never, I guess!

CREID is a Xenogears arrange album that’s really something special. It’s filled with full band Celtic-style arrangements and hits me in all the right places. There really aren’t enough uses of this type of style in videogames. If the first half is too slow for your taste, make sure to give it a chance. By 2 and a half minutes in, it really takes off and is just a really wonderful arrangement.

Credit where credit is due: Yasunori Mitsuda (Composition/Arrangement), Maria Kalaniemi (Accordion), Maire Breatnach (Fiddle), Kinya Sogawa (Shakuhachi), Laurie Kaszas (Tin Whistle), HATA (Acoustic Guitar), Tomohiko Kira (Bouzouki), Hitoshi Watanabe (Electric Upright Bass), Tamao Fujii (Glockenspiel), KALTA (Drums & Programming).

Jam of the Day: Ring Tower by Yasunori Mitsuda (Soma Bringer Original Soundtrack)

Let me get this part out of the way: Yasunori Mitsuda is my favorite videogame composer of all time. I love his stuff and try to seek out all of it. That has led to some interesting finds.

Soma Bringer is an action RPG for the DS that never made it outside of Japan. All of its music is composed by Yasunori Mitsuda. “Ring Tower” sounds like it could’ve easily been dungeon music for Chrono Cross. The shuffle groove, the amount of range on the bass, the chromatic percussion, the acoustic guitar, the occasional staccato chorus bits… it’s all working together to make that signature sound I love so much.