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: 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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Weekly Game Music: Around the World (The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift)


New week, new music.  This week: a music track from a game based off of a movie. Around the World, composed by Atlus Plug, provides a speed-inducing experience using Asian instrumentals.  A fitting composition for the frankly titled game, The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift.

As expected from the title, The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift is a simple racing game that takes place on Japanese highways.  Apart from your own rival you’re driving against, you have to swerve around non-racing cars, lest you spin out inappropriately.  As with the movie, Tokyo Drift opts for realism, using real-world models for racing.

The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift was released on the Playstation 2 in 2006.
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