STARFOX Arrange Version

[Chris Porter]

I stumbled upon this oddity on Mercari and knew it should be added to the database. I had no idea what to title it since there's no label on the tape, and the letter doesn't give a title either.

I've estimated 1996 as the release date since Miki Naoya states in the letter that it has been 2.5 years since the STARFOX Original Soundtrack release, which was in September of 1993.

Here's the URL of the completed listing for this item on Mercari: https://item.mercari.com/jp/m8241087...iyaLahKSWSQ4KE

[cal]

No search results for this anywhere. Must be extremely rare.

The only hit for Star Fox + Yoshio Nagashima is this Kinokuniya shop link. According to their data, Nagashima arranged almost all the tracks on the original soundtrack.

Arranger credits:
Kisho Yamanaka (1, 2)
Yoshio Nagashima (3~44)

This is interesting because the soundtrack booklet only lists Kisho Yamanaka. There is no mention of Nagashima.

Kinokuniya is one of the most reliable shops for finding track-by-track breakdowns for older CDs from the 80s and 90s. I would assume their data is accurate and that the booklet made a mistake.

[Carl]

Dang! It had a pretty cheap price too. Wonder who the lucky chap is that got it.
Nice finding, Chris.

[LuxKiller65]

3500yen is free for this thing!!

[Chris Porter]

Originally Posted by Carl

Dang! It had a pretty cheap price too. Wonder who the lucky chap is that got it.
Nice finding, Chris.

It'll be interesting to see if it appears right back up on Yahoo Auction at a hugely inflated starting bid. I wish I had checked Mercari just a few hours earlier. I would have bought it in a second.

[cal]

I wish Mercari had keyword email alerts like YJA. I've missed out on rare items like this because I don't check every single day...

[Chris Porter]

Originally Posted by nextday

I wish Mercari had keyword email alerts like YJA. I've missed out on rare items like this because I don't check every single day...

If you download the app, you can save a search term (for example: ゲームサウンドトラック) so that you can easily click on your list of saved searches right from the main page of the app. It will also let you decide whether you want to get email notifications when an item gets listed that falls under your saved search term (you can choose to get notified "infrequently" (once every three days), "normal" (once per day), or "frequently" (twice per day).

[cal]

As it turns out, you can't make a Mercari account without a Japanese phone number. There used to be a workaround but they seem to have disabled it.

I had an account a couple years ago but it got deactivated at some point (maybe my foreign IP address got flagged).

[Rrolack]

I've ordered a few items from Mercari using White Rabbit Express. All transactions have been very smooth.

The only caveat is there are tons of fees, so I only use it when it's an item I really want.


One question for the other Mercari users here. As far as I can tell, items aren't categorized as "Game Music" the same way they are in YJA. This means the only way to filter for game music is to use a search term, where items which don't match on that term will "fall through the cracks."

If that's indeed the case: what search terms are folks using?

[Aifread]

Correct, there is no game music category or really that many useful categories at all. This is conflated by the fact that Mercari's search terms are utter shite. You'll get different results if you write ゲーム サントラ (with a space) and ゲームサントラ (without a space). This isn't a problem on any other Japanese buying and selling site.