Games for which there are two soundtracks, and both are good

video games
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@billy#19252 I first heard of this only a few months ago when I fell down a youtube rabbit hole and the algorithm eventually pointed me in the direction of a couple of pommy kids picking through a bulk lot of Japanese Tetris carts hoping to find Minuets to resell for profit.

To contribute - an obvious one perhaps, but I really dig the different versions of the Snatcher soundtrack. I know they're mostly the same tunes (apart from some additional tracks added in the CD era) but I think the arrangements are different enough to qualify.

I'm most familiar with the Sega CD version as that's the one I've actually played (not finished though - some day!), but I've also listened to a bunch of the PC Engine CD version and it often wins out for me in side by side comparisons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58ypDT7yfYQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCojuGxlP6E
Totally subjective, but here I prefer the vibe of the latter.

Writing this post prompted me to have a quick listen to a couple of the comparison videos people have made putting together snippets of the same song from different Snatcher releases and wow, check out the MSX version of Innocent Girl - move over, CD versions!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8XGaBmDSy8

44

@milo#18779 super cool. iā€˜ve been really soaking up the genesis ecco soundtrack over the past few days, iā€™m shocked to hear how much they changed ā€œthe ventsā€ā€¦almost unrecognizable.

how would you say are the other ecco version OSTs on the whole? is there a clear second best? (presuming none top the genesis, which i am.) i found the official 1996 arrangement album to be an interesting curio but pretty much a dud, beyond one or two great tracks.

45

@goonbag#22156 oh and nice, yeah, snatcher's a great example. as with all things to do with that game, i think the sega cd iteration is the definitive. i prefer most of the redone versions, though that OST wins most of all for having a completely new ā€œtheme of jamieā€ that is the single best piece of music to come out of the entire franchise. beats john carpenter at his own game

46

@coughsoda#22396

Haha definitely agree that the first genesis one is the best. Honestly no other Ecco soundtrack ever jumped out at me, other than defender of the future for dreamcast. That one definitely did the "ambient ocean" thing, but a bit more jaunty.

47

@coughsoda

I would say Tides of Time for Sega CD's OST is also worth listening to.

I also really like the intro theme for Ecco Jr! The rest of the soundtrack I can take or leave, but this first track here has a nice vibe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gACxzskLjo

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@exodus#22411 amazing, thanks. had no idea an <ecco jr.> even existed. i guess they found out about how much the original game had traumatized kids like me lol

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@exodus#21895 I really wish I could play brandish! I am incapable of parsing the directional stuff. every turn disorients me completely. itā€™s stupid as heck.

If you're a fan of dungeon crawlers, then you probably have great spatial memory, which is a requirement. I am really good at remembering maps in my head. But the main thing I recommend off the top to make it accessible for anyone playing is to go to the options menu and switch to control scheme #2. It makes it so D-pad is for movement only, and you hold shoulders+d-pad to turn the facing direction. I think the default controls are less intuitive, and that's what throws off 90% of people from the start.

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@kory#22154 Have you tried the PSP remake? Iā€™m not sure how well it holds up, but at least the 3D remake doesnā€™t have the bewildering insta-turn of the original.

The PSP remake is just your typical 3D rendering of 2D sprites, so, like everything else like that, I think it cheapens the beautiful graphics of the original and recommend playing the original only. The PSP version was generally well received though and virtually identical to the original, with some censorship thrown in. Better for people who absolutely can't play old games, I guess. But then what are you doing playing Brandish. Lol

50

Tomba 2 was the first game in japanese that I played and finished that had some light rpg elements. I was a eleven years old kid and it required some reading that would be hard already even in english cause it is not my birth language, the fact that the important things I need to get were written in colors helped me to make a pattern memorization of the japanese characters and get through it. One of the other games in japanese that I would try to play afterwards was Final Fantasy 7 and I even got to the second cd on that first try, I would latter get an english copy and finished with a somewhat better grasp of the actual plot (wasnā€˜t a fluent english reader at the time so would still not understand a lot of what was being said). For those wondering why I had this japanese games, the prices for gaming related stuff has always been absurdly high in my country, so especially on the CD/DVD era and before the digital storefronts most people who had consoles played pirated games, I donā€™t remember ever knew or seeing someone playing an original copy of a playstation 1 or 2 game my entire life.

A decade later I decided to play Tomba 2 again but this time in english to finally understand the plot and noticed that the music I was hearing was nothing like the old tunes I remembered. Ashif Hakik re-record the music for the western release, I couldnā€˜t find much information on the original composer listed on wikipedia, Shiina Ozawa. People online appear to hold the western soundtrack in high regard and I even saw some comments saying the original was bad in comparison.

I donā€™t know, maybe it's my nostalgia speaking but, for example, when I first entered the clown town this piece put me on the right mood of wandering into a place where time had been frozen, the inhabitants no longer capable of speaking with you because of some fairy tale curse that I had to break, also heightened by the fact that I was already playing a game that I did not understand the language since the beginning:

https://youtu.be/RGxxC5xzJPA

The western one, on the other hand, has a goofy upbeat tone that feels wrong in comparison:
https://youtu.be/QXhZONaA--U

Also when you solve the curse the town music changes, the japanese one has a happy tone that feels like a expected change from the more somber tune from the cursed version, the western uncursed on the other hand is so similar to the cursed that it gives a fell that it's like nothing has changed at all in this place:
https://youtu.be/toqzG0bg0Tc

https://youtu.be/KbttQwds5g8

Not to say that I think the western one is always bad, there's some tunes that I enjoy like from the ranch area
https://youtu.be/LwFlPKBzDzE

Again the japanese has a different flair
https://youtu.be/l5tgN39knS4

The cursed water temple in both versions give some similar vibes, but go to complete opposite directions for the uncursed versions:

Water Temple Cursed
https://youtu.be/irZWjEPievg
https://youtu.be/BrUhOoYXang

Water Temple Uncursed
https://youtu.be/aUz4mLzZ9ng
https://youtu.be/tMPduSrrCy8

Comparing the western version it feels like they wanted to give a more Disney animation or Donkey Kong type of vibe but maybe because of my particular experience the game was a more mysterious, kinda melancholic place I was walking on that I think the japanese soundtrack was better suited to.

Kujara Summit western:
https://youtu.be/5OHiuUFJe28

Kujara Summit original:
https://youtu.be/eQTJpxdPjwk

Also I was seeing some playthroughts while writing and completely erased from my mind that's this game western version was voice acted, must have played the european that has less voice lines than the american one.

51

@fiodanavalha#22553 Great post! Tomba 2 is definitely one few people have actually played to completion. Iā€˜ve never once touched it, because Iā€™m still in the middle of Tomba 1 after all these years. I used to rent tomba 1 all the time as a kid.

I might change my mind when I finally play Tomba 2, butā€¦. I think both the US and JP soundtracks sound pretty bad! Tomba 1ā€˜s music had a cheeky charm to it though, it might be my nostalgia only.

Itā€™s so weird when stuff like this happens though. Clown village seemed really chill, then for the localization they decided it's time to give it a nightmare carnival theme. Jeez

52

@treefroggy#22503 Iā€˜m not and I donā€™t, lol

so I guess thatā€˜s the answer! silent hill games are ruined for me because Iā€™m checking the map every 3 steps.

@fiodanavalha I had no idea these soundtracks were so different! I have to say that both of these are a bit too bouncy/carnival for me. It's interesting how in some cases the western one feels like a riff on the original japanese version.

53

@treefroggy#22569 I never touched Tomba 1 and didnā€˜t even knew I was playing the second game in a series cause it didnā€™t had a number 2 on the japanese intro. My father bought me a playstation 1 mod chipped as I think 90% of the people here at the time did and the vendor just threw a bunch of different games there enough to fill those CD wallet cases, I wouldnā€˜t knew lots of weird different japanese games at that time if not for this. Also, I only had a super nintendo before and was never much interested on the sony console until I had one, I played playstation games on other peoples houses sometimes, knew what was resident evil and winning eleven but that was it, the videogames that dominated my childhood mind were the sega saturn and nintendo 64 that I saw the ads on TV and magazines but never even touched and the arcade coin machines from namco, capcom and snk. It was in the middle of the pokemon craze and I had been asking for a gameboy color for some years at that point, iā€™m glad my parents wisely ignored my requests when finally decided to give me a new console, they did this at the same year the playstation 2 was launched so it was definitively a weird experience finally playing and enjoying all this different games and seeing on magazines that this whole new thing for me was already old news.

Yeah, I have nostalgia for the game but the soundtracks in general were not ones that I would listen if I was not playing the game, but it filled the ā€œtwo versionsā€ requirement of the thread and I wanted to talk about it so I treated the ā€œbe goodā€ definition more loosely.

54

oh yeah, Iā€˜m not critiquing your choice to share this, itā€™s definitely interesting to hear about. I shouldā€˜ve mentioned that above - it was a half-formed thought Iā€™ve been having about this kind of ā€œbouncyā€ music that populates a lot of japanese games of the era which nobody in the west seems to have any particular fondness for, but which Iā€˜m realizing they must actually like in Japan, because in the 16-bit rhythm land cart for example, half the songs are this kind of thing. I always naively assumed it was just something they did to ā€œfill spaceā€ which is a weird projection of my own interests onto someone elseā€™s work, but thatā€˜s what I thought - and itā€™s clearly false, because here are a bunch of music luminaries doing it on purposeā€¦!?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ4K-1Usdys

55

@exodus#22584 LOL! Iā€˜m glad to hear someone else besides me saying Silent Hill is secretly a dungeon crawler! ;j

Silent Hill was one of the first games that clicked with me to realize that virtual spaces can follow the same rules as a real space. Oh, Iā€™m in an apartment building, need to hit room 2A or whatever, that must be on the second floor, towards the front.

@fiodanavalha hey, just because we unanimously agree neither soundtrack is hot, doesn't mean it doesn't belong here! I think we all needed a strong reminder that Tomba 2 had a soundtrack differing by region!

56

@exodus#22593 I had similar thoughts recently while listening to 70ā€˜s 80ā€™s japanese jazz and pop records and realizing that some of it remind me of my country jazz and pop records from the same period. I always assumed that their appreciation of the music from here was in the same kind of passing fad that was the bossa nova at the united states in the 60's, it seems that japanese folks sure liked their brazilian records.

57

Another Tomba 2 curiosity is that the intro also had different music and had part of movie cut on the western release. It also appears that when Tokuro Fujiwara leave Capcom he took with it the charge beam sound from Megaman to put it at the Tomba 2 intro, it's funny that I never realized this until now cause at the time when I was not playing Tomba 2 I was playing Megaman X4 (which also had different intro music in the west).

Japanese Intro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3UMbXz3nlU

Western Intro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d78-TfEGhgg

58

A bit late but let's talk a bit about Futari no Fantavision!

@wexley#19156 yup! it's got three versions, one for each console region.

The Japanese one by Ape Escape's Soichi Terada is most definetely the best one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-2ZI4_XeNc

I really like the PAL version as well! It's a bit more trance-y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwq0uKLDLZY

The American one sucks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3hTjNFMKzs

59

@fugazi57#23284 omg i'm such a fricking noob. sorry, how do I embed videos?

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@fugazi57#23285 just paste the link in to the post raw without the markup. the computer will figure it out all on its own.

61

Aw man did everyone just forget about the Khan Super Session?

Soul Edge on the PS1 had two completely different soundtracks all on the same disc, no need to get an import copy and swap back and forth to compare. The original soundtrack (and an arranged version of it too!) plus the just as awesome Khan Super Session which was just a complete alternate soundtrack. I have no idea who Khan is but I've always wanted to find out more about why they just went and made another soundtrack. I'm not the most musically inclined so I'm not really picking out major differences between the two soundtracks myself, all I know is that I pretty much love every track on both versions. Maybe based on the two Seong Mina tracks, the original was going for more of a standard epic fantasy type soundtrack and Khan was a lot more variety and modern influence.

Mina's original theme: Kkaduri
https://youtu.be/8wh_f0vEK0M
Khan Super Session: Tiny Amulet
https://youtu.be/wxFbwWncx0Y

Rock's stage in the original version: Recollect Continent
https://youtu.be/FY5j74JiQ-Q
Rock's stage in the Khan Super Session: Continental Divide
https://youtu.be/T5VtaqiTNOI

Also if I recall correctly the legendary PS1 opening song Edge of Soul is part of the Khan Super Session!

Also just for reference, the original and arranged versions of Cervantes' sea shanty (again, both on the disc! Just go to the options, pick which soundtrack you want, and if you're me turn on instant health regen and set the computer to the highest level and just fight against Siegfried as Li Long for one never-ending battle) :
Original
https://youtu.be/xqhXxwRCA3E
Arranged
https://youtu.be/Wor87p2AYcg

Soul Edge and Tekken 3 pretty much ruined any future console fighting game for me with all of the extra content crammed into them at that perfect age where excess free time meant more was always better.

63

@thebryanjzx90#23363 Oh, counting Arcade / Home OSTs, I didnā€˜t think of that!

Tekken 2 should come as no surprise then because itā€™s the same as Soul Edge, both arcade and home versions on one disc, both are amazing soundtracks.