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《J》 · #1 Aug 14, 2014, 08:44 AM

The time has come to put an end to one of the oldest mysteries of all VGM: a (possible and almost complete) composer breakdown of "Ys IV" - one of the best soundtracks in the entire series and (IMO!) a masterpiece of VGM. The content of this post is the result of a few days of investigation, now that I have a bit of free time to do so.

A bit of backstory:

Quote:

· Sometime around 1992/3, Falcom wrote up a basic story/scenario and composed the soundtrack (composed by Falcom's internal sound team, the Falcom Sound Team J.D.K.) for "Ys IV", and then gave them to Tonkin House (Mask of the Sun) and Hudson Soft (The Dawn of Ys) to make their own versions of the game. A version of Mask of the Sun for the Sega-CD was also planned under the Sega-Falcom joint development agreement, but it was never released. The end result is that you have two versions of Ys IV, neither of which was actually made by Falcom. Tonkin House's offering (Mask of the Sun) stuck to Falcom's outline while Hudson took the outline, then took liberties and gave us The Dawn of Ys. Both games tell the same general story using the same general cast of characters, but beyond the basics the games are very different. MotS was released on the Super Nintendo in November of 1993, while TDoY was released in December of the same year on the PC Engine CD.

· Falcom released a year later (1994) three Perfect Collection albums, containing a total of 55 tracks (+ 3 Super Mega Mixes) arranged by Ryo Yonemitsu. The Perfect Collections follows the naming scheme and track order of the PC Engine CD version.

· It is believed (or speculated by fans) that the music on both the Ys IV J.D.K. Special and the Falcom Special Box '95 (Ys IV J.D.K. Special Part 2, disc 3) was the source that Falcom gave to Hudson Soft (The Dawn of Ys) and Tonkin House/Advance Communication/CUBE (Mask of the Sun) to make their versions instead. Those tracks were produced with FM Synthesis (i.e. likely done on PC-98 hardware, as it sounds very similar to Falcom computer games of the same era), and they are the closest thing you will find to an original soundtrack of "Ys IV" (i.e. pure, original sound versions not arranged by someone other than Falcom's own composers).

As some of you people may know, Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys has a Developer's Room in where you can watch all the animated movies, see some unused stuff and also talk with the Hudson's staff who worked on this game (and also read some hilarious stuff). There's also a monster who says he'll play any song from the game you would like to hear, but in the end he doesn't. What a tease!

What most people don't seem to know (i.e. no one unless you're a die-hard Falcom nutcase from East Asia completely obsessed with their glorious Sound Team) is that DoY has ANOTHER debug mode according to this Chinese blog post (in which you CAN actually hear all the CD-DA/PSG songs with some kind of in-game music player!). The post itself didn't draw my attention... until I saw THIS:

If you didn't know, that "KIM" thing is actually the alias of Naoki Kaneda - one of the four composers that joined to the Falcom Sound Team J.D.K. in 1992 (and thus resulting in some of my all-time favourite Falcom scores: Brandish 2 and 3, Ys IV and V, LoH III and IV...). Then there's also this thing I found on an area called "Cemetery" while playing Brandish 3...

His birthday on VGMdb coincides with the in-game date. With isdapi's post + this, we can pretty much confirm at this point that KIM = Naoki Kaneda.

What impressed (or left me utterly SHOCKED and confused!) me the most was... why there was a mention to "KIM" in The Dawn of Ys, a game not developed by Falcom themselves? The blog post mentioned Sugimo, so I decided to lurk around the archives of his "Falcom Daisuki!" website and found THIS page. Look at all these codes - Google Translate doesn't allows me to make out very much, but from what I can understand, looks like these codes are actually suspected composer codes. It seems that Hudson left untouched the original filenames of the songs that Falcom sent to them in order to make their versions instead for The Dawn of Ys, a "mistake" they just made my fucking life as this may be the closest thing that ever existed to a Ys IV composer breakdown.

So, in summary, this is all we have so far:

Spoiler:

TL;DR: Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys has suspected composer codes in it. Shirakawa and Kaneda freaking killed it with this one. Naoki Kaneda is the GOAT (I must simply check-out his post-Sound Team jdk output!).

I might be overthinking it or just plain wrong, so feel free to say what you think/have in mind and if you agree or not - I look forward to discussing this with you all!

P.S. So, should we edit all the Ys IV albums and add the known credits at the notes? ;p