Weekly Game Music: moony [advanced] (Futari No FantaVision)


New week, new music.  Since the holidays is just around the corner, here’s a little festive trance music from the Japan-only puzzle game, Futari No FantaVision.  Introducing moony [advanced] by Soichi Terada.

Futari No FantaVision is actually just a 2-player version of a game that was released in the US, FantaVision.  In FantaVision, you control a ray that can detonate rising fireworks if you’ve successfully aimed at three or more like-colored fireballs.  The game becomes a sort of rhythmic puzzle game, where you attempt to detonate as many fireworks as possible.

Futari No FantaVision was released only in Japan on the PS2 in 2002.  It’s “prequel,” FantaVision was released in the US on 2000.

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Weekly Game Music: Inugami Village (Shadow Hearts: Covenant)


New week, new music.  Don’t have a good turkey day music, but I will break the electric trend and go with a relaxing piano solo.  Here’s Inugami Village(better translated, Village of the Dog God), composed by Yasunori Mitsuda.  It’s from the JRPG, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, which has a strange retelling of World War I with demons and monsters.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant starts where its prequel left off: the former game’s hero, Yuri Hyuga, stays within the town of Domremy, defending it from German invaders.  Unfortunately for Yuri, an Inquistor from the Vatican (Nicolas Conrad) breaks through his defense, and worse, curses him to an incredibly weak state.  It turns out the so-called Inquistor is actually a sorcerous from an evil clan, Sapientes Gladio.  Before the sorcerer finishes him, though, Karin Koenig and the villagers saves Yuri.  Once they’ve both gathered some strength, they devise a plan to get their revenge back on Nicloas.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a turn-based, random encounter JRPG.  The player can have up to 3 characters in its party, placed on a 3-by-3 grid.  The farther away the character is placed from the enemies, the less likely they’re going to get hurt at a cost of diminishing their attack power.  To spice up the old formula, Shadow Hearts adds a Sanity Meter per character.  If it reaches 0, the player loses control of that character.  Lastly, most attacks and magics uses the Judgement Ring, a spinning dial where one must stop its spinning needle to a colored area to execute damage.  The smaller the area, typically the better the attack.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant was released on the PS2 in 2004.

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Weekly Game Music: Co-op (Magnetis)


New week, new music.  More techno, now with 90% more jazz.  Here’s a music from MagnetisCo-op.  It’s composed by Romain Gauthier, the same composer as Edge.

Magnetis is a Tetris-based puzzle game that involves dropping a pair of blocks to clear more blocks.  Unlike Tetris, however, you clear blocks by creating a line segment where two like-colored magnet blocks faces towards each other.  This eliminates any blocks in-between the two magnets.  If, however, two magnets of different colors are matched together, everything in-between becomes garbage blocks, potentially blocking any other formations.

Magnetis was released on the Wii in 2009.  It was later released on the PC via Steam.

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Weekly Game Music: Mind Mapping (Beatmania IIDX 16: Empress)


New week, new music.  Continuing the techno trend, here’s Mind Mapping by Ryutaro Nakahata (hey, another Taro).  It comes from a popular Japanese arcade game, Beatmania IIDX 16: Empress.

Beatmania IIDX 16 EMPRESS simulates a DJ deck using 5 buttons and a disk.  Much like any rhythm game, the object is to hit the right button when the “notes” hit the bottom of the screen.  The arcade was released in 2008 in Japan.  It was later ported to the Playstation 2 in 2009.

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