The Fascinating World of Falcom's Music

Rush Hour | The Music of Falcom and Ys VIII

I just scratched the surface of Falcom's musical history with this video, but hopefully it gives you enough of a taste to learn more about these wonderful composers and the incredible music they've produced.

From popular games like Trails of Cold Steel and Ys VIII, to forgotten gems like Xanadu Next and Brandish, Falcom has decades worth of musical masterpieces to enjoy. It helps that the gameplay is good, too. The next time you're itching to play an action rpg, check out Gurumin, Zwei 2, or the mid 2000's Ys games like Origin, The Oath in Felghana, and The Ark of Napishtim. Games that are short, sweet, and to the point - all with killer soundtracks.

Some fun behind the scenes notes:

- If you notice some footage of Ys VIII running poorly, that's because I originally captured footage from my Switch. I stopped a few hours in and started capturing from Steam instead, and the difference is night and day. Definitely skip the Switch version of the game if you can; not only is the framerate worse, the input lag is pretty gnarly.
- Capturing footage of Zwei 2 was a pain in the ass. When you run the configuration tool, you can set the game to run at 60 or 144hz. When I captured footage in OBS, the footage came out with this nasty ghosting effect. Turns out the game runs at a fake 60 fps. I spent way too long messing around until I eventually changed my OBS settings to capture the game at 30fps, and voila, it came out perfect.

0:00 A Community of Dedicated Fans
1:06 Mini Review of Ys VIII
3:26 Operating on a Budget
4:23 Composer Snippet - Jindo
6:16 Composer Snippet - Singa
10:56 Composer Snippet - Sonoda
12:20 Composer Snippet - Unisuga
15:04 Messy Sound Direction
16:26 The Golden Era of Falcom's Games

[YourVinished]

this is probably the most fair/unbiased & detailed video on the current state of falcom music. nice job

[fen]

soo um funfact, one of the person pushing Singa as a composer is Meiko Ishikawa, a former falcom composer, and she says that "music isn't that important anyways" and is the one opposed to composers of the sound team gaining individual fame.

[quinceymorris]

I'm very glad to see a video about Falcom's music history in my feed, it's really fascinating and doesn't get talked about enough. I think the big drop-off in quality probably started around 2007, shortly after Takeshita left the company and around the time Momiyama and Osaki joined. Falcom has always placed a rather large workload on its internal composers, and Takeshita's departure (rather shortly after he joined the sound team, likely because of said workload and lack of proper crediting) was the beginning of it showing that it was unsustainable, with both Momiyama and especially Osaki being known to have struggled with the strenuous deadlines Falcom enforced (Falcom was releasing a new game practically every year at this point, a trend which they've continued to keep up; and keep in mind, sound team employees at Falcom were tasked with jobs outside of composition as well, with Sonoda working on storyboard, Unisuga as webmaster, etc.) Outsourced composers such as Jindo started to be used as a quick fix to sort of maintain some of the quality of past (you'll notice the number of Jindo-arranged Osaki tracks is rather high, that's no coincidence) and for a while, this worked well enough, with even new outsourced composers such as Okajima and Kamikura being brought in to contribute as well.

However, Falcom would experience yet another set-back around the time Trails of Cold Steel came out, after Hagiuda, Momiyama, and Kamikura stopped working on Falcom music. This was bad enough as is, however around the same time, the jdkband scandal happened which resulted in Okajima (and shortly after every jdkband member besides Mizutani) leaving the band. The rest goes without saying, Falcom starts hiring Singa to pick up the new slack left behind, cuts Jindo's budget... etc. Funnily enough, we know Okajima had done a couple of tracks for Ys 8, but they had to seemingly be scrapped because of his departure.

Falcom continues to employ the same policies that lead to the degradation of its sound quality today as it did back then, and I can only imagine this'll eventually result in about what you'd expect: Koguchi's quick burn-out and likely inevitable departure, resulting in more mismanaged outsourcing to compensate (like seriously I don't even particularly dislike Singa but at least give the guy some context to work with when writing tracks, Jindo too for that matter). On the bright side, we'll probably still get like a couple of Jindo bangers per game, so it could be worse!

[AokiKatsumata]

Your video highlights the devastating effects of selling yourself short as an artist. Far from just making life difficult for yourself, you end up cutting corners for a whole fanbase to see... or hear, in this case, and it drags fellow artists down by making it hard for them to actually charge the amount they need in order to do their work properly, or sometimes just make a living wage.

Anyway, thank you for articulating all of this so well.

[BioPhoenixReviews]

falcom has so many amazing soundtracks even back in the 80's there was so many bangers. very cool to hear you mention brandish which is a lesser known game i enjoy. one of my other favorites they did was Popful mail. that game is really good and also has many great tracks. i hope to play Dinosaur resurrection once its fan translated, the music in that game is fire.

wow never realized his rates were that cheap even we could hire him to make random songs lol

[amyjess]

I'm actually surprised you didn't mention the incident where Kato sabotaged a jdk band concert in a fit of paranoia, which IMO is the most likely explanation for why Falcom's music changed so suddenly in 2015. It's why the last iteration of the jdk band all quit, and it's probably why they couldn't recruit any new full-time composers even if they wanted to.

And supposedly the reason Unisuga isn't composing anymore is because he's also Falcom's sysadmin, and in 2020 he had to give up composing so he could get Falcom set up for WFH. God, Kato is such a cheapskate, I can't imagine having a composer as brilliant as Unisuga and wasting him on maintaining VPN software!

[NaroniPichu]

Falcom doesn't really have any real reason to continue old IPs as much as they used to do considering how much more mileage Ys and Trails get, which is why I don't think they're milking them dry. I would think that way if games like Zwei II weren't such an outright commercial failure that made them not want to touch anything non-Ys or Trails for a while. Considering that these two are the ones the vast majority of players are interested in, both in the west AND east, that Tokyo Xanadu wasn't very good, and how small of a studio they are, I think it's unfair calling giving players what they want a "cash cow". At least, you have the future to look forward to, considering Falcom's younger staff are itching to make a new IP, and Kondo has said that the new Tokyo Xanadu would be "basically a new IP".

Also, unfortunate that Ys X brings out the worst in Singa, lol

[olemortensen]

this was my first learning a little more of how falcom operates. very interesting video. it's truly fasinating how the sounds I hear today isn't done by a more cordinated sound team. I equally sad to discover that falcom for a while has been keeping their full music portencial artificially on a low boil and playing it safe and close instead of brach out to some new discoveries.

"when you're granted the power of good, you have an obligation to use it on others, instead of hiding that power. hoarding what little good you could do, to yourself"


"Knowledge which is felt
to be boring is of little use,

but knowledge which is assimilated eagerly
becomes a permanent possession."

[firebreather]

Thank you, that was very insightful. Falcom used to make some of the best soundtracks in the medium, but the quality dropped by a lot after Ys VIII / the transition from Vita to PS4. But I'm happy that Koguchi seems to bring a breath of fresh air to the soundtracks.

[diegoarmando]

Square got it right by giving their composers due credit while generally retaining the rights to everything in their games, thereby avoiding both the Dragon Quest problem (which was inherited form Enix due to merger) and the Falcom problem.

[biosonic]

Man... thank you SO MUCH for making this video, geniunely.
i'm a very new falcom fan, just discovering it about 3-4 years ago, and since then i've played every YS game, and i'm on my way to play the trails series.
one thing that always catched my attention was how hateful the comment section in most youtube ost releases tend to be, specially on singa works, and it always baffled me how much discontent there is with both the music and even falcom itself. at some point i wanted to know a bit more to see what was wrong, but then i kinda discovered that it was... rather hard to learn the history of such a niche company without REALLY digging in, so i ended up thinking it was just "old good new bad" type of thing.
but now that i ACTUALLY have some context... yeah, i absolutely understand now where the hate comes from, and it's really sad to see such great talented people being treated like dirt... just because? i geniunely don't know what they get out of not properly crediting their composers and their work, or overworking them to the bone like that.
for the time being, i will still be fan, since their games keep being insanely good, but i really hope that the situation gets better, because all these people deserve so much better for their work.

[Taffery]

As someone who loves Falcom games I think this video opened by eyes to the issues in the music in the current age of Falcom, the quality overall dropped a bit but theres still a lot of newer tracks I love, I do hope maybe it gets better but they keep using Singa cause its cheap and easy to cut corners so they can churn out more games.

[lolailo]

It's nice to see YS content that isn't just "Why you should play YS

I know there's not a lot of us but there's so much dissect from these games.

[Ekce]

Iclucian Dance is top tier and imo the way they use it in game it works really well.

[seymourflux]

I hope Unisuga is happy where he is rn of course but I hope he considers freelance at some point so he can actually get the credit he beyond rightfully deserves..

[peterparker]

This video barely scratches the surface. I’m surprised you didn’t mention Ryo Takeshita or Saki Momiyama. Takeshita was cooking hard during the Napishtim era Ys Games and Sky the Third while Crossbell’s OSTs identity was formed by Momiyama. Their contributions will be sorely missed

[Paltheos]

I've seen every excuse under the sun defending Singa (including in these comments), and the AAS squad generally ignore or downplay the core issue - That music in games that we love is noticeably and identifiably worse, and we're rightfully upset about it. There are differences in the quality of OSTs, and these differences extend beyond a gap in a quality between a technical genius like Unisuga and Sonoda's usually more basic work. There are whole layers of polish missing most of the time.

Sure, *I* like Singa tracks too: Some of them, a small body of his overall work. Most of his music is, to quote another man, "aggressively mediocre", a sad reminder what has been before and maybe what could be now, especially when I can make direct comparisons. Pleasure Smile vs. Mishelam Wonderland? Synchronicity #23 vs. Unplanned Residue? Feel Force vs. Monstrum Spectrum? Come on.

[RaifSeverence]

Funnily enough, you STILL rely on charge attacks in Ys 8 to build SP.
Its just that charging is automatic and NEARLY instantaneous

[GustavoOliveira-wmjy]

Ys vi ark of napishtin’s mighthy obstacle and release of the far west ocean are the best IMO

[bman]

While the video is mostly factual. I think the critisism around the quality of music falcom pumps out of a bit of a stretch. Despite all the issues pointed, the music falcom uses for the most is still better than many game soundtracks.