1170: Easy Listening, Part 1

I am, as you probably know, a big fan of video game soundtracks. They’ve come on a very long way since the bleep-bleep-bloop of yore, and in many cases these days are eminently worth listening to in their own right.

Over the next few posts I’d like to take a mildly self-indulgent tour around some of my favourite tracks from some of my favourite soundtrack albums. YouTube-heavy post ahead… you have been warned.

Trauma Team

Let’s start with something that’s fresh in my memory. The Trauma Center series as a whole has pretty consistently great soundtracks, largely composed by Atlus mainstays Shoji Meguro and Atsushi Kitajoh. Both of them have a very distinctive (and quite similar) sound to their compositions, and this is very much in evidence throughout the Trauma Team soundtrack.

What’s most striking about the Trauma Team soundtrack, though, is how well the various pieces of music reflect the different characters. For example, for the cool “ice maiden” that is forensic investigator Dr Naomi Kimishima, we have this wonderfully chilled-out number called, appropriately enough, Cool Beauty:

Dr Naomi’s segments, as it happens, have some of the best music in the game. For the uninitiated (or those of you who haven’t read my enthusing at length about this wonderful game), Dr Naomi’s levels are adventure game-style puzzles in which you must unravel the mystery of what happened to one or more corpses using various forensic investigation techniques. As you progress through them, the truth gradually gets closer and closer until finally everything clicks into place and you understand exactly what happened to the poor person lying on the slab in your examination room.

That gradual uncovering of the truth is something beautifully captured by this piece, imaginatively titled Uncover the Truth, which starts out simple and gradually builds up in complexity as it progresses through. Accompanying this piece on screen is Dr Naomi piecing together all the case’s various pieces — with a little help from you, of course — and coming to a firm conclusion about what happened. It’s pretty great — and surprisingly powerful in context:

Dr Naomi is just one of six different doctors who star in Trauma Team, however, and each of them has their own distinctive “sound” throughout. For example, nameless surgeon “CR-S01″‘s pieces are all rather electronic-rock in nature and wouldn’t sound out of place in a Shin Megami Tensei game — unsurprising, considering the composers:

Meanwhile, Dr Hank Freebird’s pieces focus a lot more on gradually-building tension, such as this piece, which in-game builds itself up as your “combo” of moves made without mistakes (or taking a break) grows:

Dr Cunningham the diagnostician, meanwhile, is a much more laid-back sort of dude for the most part:

Except when things get serious, of course.

Trauma Team’s story is split into two distinct segments. The first half sees the six doctors working largely independently from one another, following their own parallel storylines that do nonetheless make a coherent narrative if played in the correct order. However, the really interesting stuff starts happening in the second half, which is completely linear, and follows the entire team’s attempts to battle against a disease known as the Rosalia virus.

This part of the game makes use of one of my favourite compositional techniques for soundtracks, which is to take one theme and gradually evolve and adapt it over the course of the story. Rosalia’s theme goes through a number of changes throughout the second half of Trauma Team, culminating in something pretty spectacular.

Here we have Spread of Rosalia, a piece that plays during the endoscopy sequences of the game while battling against the Rosalia virus. The recognisable chord sequence and strings backing of the Rosalia theme is present and correct here, with a nervous, tense, slow-moving melody overlaid over the top of it. Treating Rosalia is something that requires care, precision and nerves of steel; this piece of music reflects that rather nicely.

Encounter Rosalia during Maria’s First Response missions, meanwhile, and you get treated to this wonderfully intense number that really gets the pulse pounding. Just the thing you need while you’re running back and forth between five different patients trying not to let any of them die, huh?

This piece of music, meanwhile, plays during Dr Hank Freebird’s orthopaedic surgery missions where he comes across Rosalia. Hank’s missions aren’t as time-sensitive as many of the other operations throughout Trauma Team, but the high level of accuracy required in them makes them some of the most tense, most physically-exhausting levels you’ll be challenged with:

This track, on the other hand, plays while discussing Rosalia and how best to treat it. It’s less intense than the other Rosalia pieces, but has a certain air of desperation about it, while at the same time offering a sense of hope… before exploding in intensity towards the end.

Finally, spoilers I guess, our final showdown with Rosalia comes pre-packed with this rockin’ piece of music — beautifully fitting for an intense surgical battle against a thoroughly unpleasant illness. Will our heroes make it through…? Well, that’s up to you, really…

More tomorrow.