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By Kuniaki Haishima, Sachiko Miyano
Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube, extracted audio
Audio Director: Ryo Koike
Sound Design: Takumi Saito, Michihiro Sato, Hiroyuki Akiyama, Makoto Hosoi, Shunichi Shigematsu
-Cinematic Team-
Music: Kuniaki Haishima
Sound Effects: Yukimura Yazawa (ALIVE Co.,Ltd.)
Sound Mixing: Kazumi Inamura
-Music-
Musical Performance: ARIGAT-ORCHESTRA (Tokyo Session), Asian Philharmonic Orchestra (Beijing Session)
Music Programming & Manipulation: Tadashi Yatabe
Orchestration & Arrangement: Sachiko Miyano
Recording & Mixing: Toru Okitsu
Music Preparation: Yoshiko Uchida
Sound Coordinator: Tsutomu Satomi
Recording Studio: AVACO CREATIVE STUDIO (Tokyo)
Mixing Studio: e-mixing (Tokyo)
Beijing Session Coordinator: Yuesong Li (Hear Heart Studio)
Translation: Yan Fung
-Sound Effects-
Sound Mixing: Hirokazu Kawamoto (ALIVE CO.,Ltd.)
Sound Design: Takashi Kaneko, Shunpei Arai, Kota Matsubara
Other M is one of the three Metroid games I haven’t actually played, along with Pinball and Federation Force; the instant terrible reputation it got somewhat deprioritized it for me and I never got around to picking it up, and Wii emulation is somewhat problematic for my computer so I’ve never played it in that way. And since the composer was Kuniaki Haishima, a non-Nintendo composer I was unfamiliar with until right now, I never bothered to listen to its soundtrack either.
The Metroid series has had a bit of a space horror cinematic bent in it from the start—the original game was pretty heavily inspired by the movie Alien—and Other M is the game that tries the hardest to be a space horror flick in its plot, characters, and cinematics, so of all the games in the series, it makes a lot of sense that this is the one they got movie dude Haishima to score. This is a much more orchestral score than Forbidden Siren 2, featuring live performances in a lot of the tracks, and the orchestrations and some amount of arrangement therein were done by his primary orchestrator over the years, Sachiko Miyano.
You can divide the soundtrack up into four major parts by in-game usage, which also ends up grouping the tracks stylistically:
The area themes are generally synthy dark ambient with some incorporation of orchestra, similar to Forbidden Siren 2 but a little less unhinged (… more hinged?) in their composition and sound design.
The boss themes are generally in a more stock action horror orchestral style with plenty of odd time and scary stabs and wailing, often mixed with clanking metallic percussion and electronics.
The prerendered cutscene music, which unfortunately is mixed with sound effects and voices in the movie files and so can’t really be listened to cleanly, is understandably the most “film score” section of the soundtrack with a lot of cinema-style underscoring, though there’s electronic and action music mixed in too.
The realtime cutscene music, which tends to be synthy dark ambient like the area themes but sometimes more driving or otherwise narrative-feeling (well duh), though there are some boss theme segments and variations mixed in there too for cutscenes around boss battles.
So the end result is that this a little more normal-sounding soundtrack than Forbidden Siren 2’s, a little less strange and hostile, but I think there’s still a good amount of interesting music here; Haishima definitely had room to flex with sound design in the area themes and weird tonal shit in the boss themes and so on. This is honestly probably a top 5 Metroid soundtrack for me now, it’s pretty nice!
A really interesting and surprising thing about this soundtrack is that a lot of the composition and electronic sound production is a bit reminiscent of Dread’s soundtrack, which was done 11 years later by actual Nintendo staff. It makes me really curious about to what extent this kind of stuff was already formalized by Nintendo internally and provided to Haishima as part of a reference package… and also to what extent Sayako Doi and especially Soshi Abe might just be directly influenced by Haishima.
Recommended tracks:
“Title” is one of a small number of series remixes in the game and I felt like I should include one, this is a more sound design-y version of the original Metroid title theme without ever getting to the main melody (good)
“New Mission” is one of a few area themes that sound like they’re intentionally trying to use some Prime-style instrumentation, though there are still Haishima-style random noises occurring throughout
“Bio Sphere Experimental Floor” compositionally reminds me of “Waterfall” from Super Castlevania IV with its repeated figures and chime melodic fragment that comes in at 0:50
“Looking for Madeline Bergman” is one of the more driving cutscene tracks, feels a bit like tense VN music at times
“Vs. Space Pirates” was the battle track that reminded me most of Metroid Dread’s boss themes
“Sector 2 (North)” has a really nice crunchy sound in it at 0:26
“The Burning Lava Fish” is a bit Rite of Spring-ish and I’ll always be a sucker for boss themes that crib off that
“Vs. Desbrachian” is one of the more electronic boss themes, it feels like Drakengard but EDM
“Staff Roll” is the one movie track that exists cleanly, it’s not a bad orchestral piece honestly
(track titles are unofficial except for “The Burning Lava Fish”)
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By Eriko Azuma, Ichifujinitaka, Kazuo Kuwabara, Keiichi Kitahara, Kuniaki Haishima
Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (w/music info), extracted audio
BGM: Kuniaki Haishima
Vocal composition: Kuniaki Haishima, Eriko Azuma, Keiichi Kitahara, Ichifujinitaka
Vocal arrangement: Kazuo Kuwabara
I got a recommendation from my friend Chimeratio to check out Kuniaki Haishima, a relatively famous Japanese media composer of mostly anime/film whom I’ve never really checked out despite him having a Metroid soundtrack under his belt (more on that in a future post!). I was under the impression that he was a traditional orchestra composer, and it’s true that he does have some orchestral music in his catalog, but that’s not what he’s famous for. His reputation is for writing wack-ass horror music with spooky synths and dissonance in it, so much so that this 2018 interview leans into it with the top photo having horror lighting from below. So he was a pretty natural fit for Sony to hire to do the music for the second Siren game, part of a series of moody stealth horror games that take place in cursed areas where the boundaries between times and realities merge.
The soundtrack album is two discs, and the music seems to have been split across them more thematically than chronologically. The first disc’s tracks all have somewhat terse titles that are just nouns, and the music here is almost entirely very dark ambient with barely a melody in sight, instead packed with a lot of drones and deep pads, strange sounds, warpy bending, and noisy effects and production. It’s not just cool sounds though; compositionally a number of tracks slip in a nice clustery chord stack or some other weird nonsense that at times gave me a hint of Shadow Hearts berserk themes, or Metroid, or Planet Laika. It kicks ass! It overall feels to me like an Espio the Chameleon soundtrack, to a really ridiculous degree.
Disc 2’s tracks bring in verbs and phrases into the titles and it’s also more musically varied to match; rather than being 99% synthy dark ambient, a number of pieces get much louder or more chaotic, or incorporate orchestra or vocals, or even, in a shocking twist, have a melody composed of multiple pitches arranged in a linear sequence! So this side of the soundtrack is much more in-your-face about being from a horror game, whether it’s blasting you with spooky choir or Drakengard-ish orchestral cacophony or uneasy string melodies, though there’s still a lot of the sound design and electronic effects from the ambient side so most of it doesn’t sound wildly out of place. There are also a few nicer, melodic tracks that aren’t scary, though most of them tend to eventually get scary. This part of the soundtrack kicks ass too! Of these tracks I generally preferred the more aggressive ones that threaten to kill you, but there is some pretty nice subtle music on this disc as well.
The soundtrack album ends with four vocals. One of them, “Kounagihishouka,” was composed by Haishima and is very much in the vein of the rest of the soundtrack, except if it was also a Japanese folk song at the same time. The other three were written by other people and are completely out of place stylistically with everything else; I believe these are all diegetic or otherwise related to characters in the game and not just, like, a random pop song that plays during the credits.
Recommended tracks:
“Unease” sounds like a more ambient version of “Crack Your Mind” from Shadow Hearts: Covenant
“Understudy” has some nice background chimes doing weird things
“Wandering” is one of the loudest and most distorted of the disc 1 ambient tracks
“Crazy Laugh” has a short synth line at 1:06 that sounds pretty Metroid
“Red Tsunami” was the most Drakengard-esque “fucked up orchestra manipulation” track in the game
“Takeaki Misawa’s Theme” has a really nice, deeply distorted yowl playing the melody
“Beyond the Mirror” gave me vibes of the mysterious-sounding orchestral sci-fi soundtrack of The Dig, which I just replayed recently, though there’s much more of a dissonant edge here
“Ichiko Yagura’s Theme” is one of the extremely rare pieces that doesn’t ever sound evil, though occasionally there are two extra beats in the accompaniment so it keeps getting desynced and resynced with the melody
(track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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