Music Analysis with Evan Davis

The Gameboy SaGa trilogy ( Final Fantasy Legend in the west) is the brain child of the highly controversial developer, Akitoshi Kawazu. He invented a system that rewards players statistical increases to stats based on usage. While he absolutely butchered this system in Final Fantasy II , he sought to prove the soundness of his concept with the SaGa series. Even though you do not hear a lot of discussion about SaGa , it was actually more popular than Final Fantasy when it originally came out, and had a massive following in Japan.  SaGa 1  ( Makai Toushi SaGa ) was even one of the main inspirations for Pokémon. Its success was largely due to the overhaul to the implementation of usage based stat increases. In addition to having the ability to build a party from scratch with a variety of customization options, the HP stat no longer required taking damage to train, so multiple hour long "hitting yourself" sessions are not required to make it through the game. Stat decrease...

When I was in middle school, I played my real copy of Chrono Trigger DS on a one-hundred percent existent and legal DS. As a music obsessed kid, I spent a ridiculous amount of time figuring out how to play the music from the game on the piano.  Now, over a decade later, I will finally reveal the secret of the harmony of the main theme that I figured out all those years ago. I remember hearing a rumor circulating around the internet, at that time, that Yasunori Mitsuda wrote the Chrono Trigger theme in one unhealthy composition session. Now that I am a composer myself, that doesn't seem too unbelievable, but that doesn't make it any less badass. Chrono Trigger was his first soundtrack at Square Soft, and it worked that poor man into the ground. He actually had to get Uematsu's help because he was under so much stress that he developed chronic stomach ulcers and couldn't spend enough time in the office to finish writing. Under all this stress, it is understandable that...

Okay fine, I'll talk about something mainstream for once. People who study Japanese music with me eventually learn how much I dislike Junichi Masuda's music. Early Pokémon music was characterized by ugly counterpoint and a juvenile palate of harmonic sonority. I know 5th graders with a better musical taste then him. It's not all terrible, but there is no doubt that he is the weakest composer to ever work on a main series Pokémon game. With that said, the generation 2 composer, Go Ichinose, is one of my favorites from my childhood. He famously arranged a bunch of the  Pokémon R/B/Y music in G/S/C and improved or massively iterated on Masuda's tracks, breathing way more life into them. For example, old "Viridian Forest" was a bunch of discordant screeching of tritones on a 10 second loop  while Ichinose turned it into a funk ballad. For Arkoos' sake, listen to this: Old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wufz_8FOMzE New: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL...