Saturday, August 22, 2009

Doujin CD Review - Detana!! K-STYLE - School Mizugi de Daiabare!



01 There in The Sea - Twinbee Yahhoo
02 Mirage - Lighting Legend
03 Wisdom of Living - Lighting Legend
04 Main Theme - The Goonies
05 GTR Attack !! - Contra Hard Corps
06 Ruins of Bacaros - Metamorphic Force
07 Lucky Zone - Gradius 3 SFC
08 End Demo - Labyrinth Runner
09 Tears of Dracula - Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow
10 Riddle - Castlevania
11 Theme of Simon - Castlevania 4
12 Wiched Child - Castlevania 4
13 One Night in Neo Kobe City - Snatcher
14 Memoire - Space Manbow

Circle: Woodsoft

VGMDB Entry

Konami music is always a good source for arranged music, even if the topic is pretty broad. As such, there’s a huge variety of songs, spanning older stuff to obscure releases, along with a few newer songs. The opening track, “Umi no Kanata e”, is the third stage theme from Twinbee Yahho!, and while the expanded intro is decent, the instrumentation is lacking the energy that made the original version so fun. The next two tracks are taken from the awful PSOne 3D fighter Lightning Legend – the opening vocal theme isn’t bad for anime-style J-Pop, but the arrangement barely changes anything, and the second song isn’t all that interesting either. Next is an arrangement of The Goonies theme – that’s right, Cyndi Lauper’s “Goonies R Good Enough” – done on a piano. It’s so altered that it’s hard to pick out the main melody, but it’s still surprisingly well done.

“GTR Attack!!” Contra Hard Corps theme is well done, but I never really liked the original music that much to begin with. “Ruins of Bacaros” is from the arcade fighter Metamorphic Force which featured a rock soundtrack. The synth guitars used here aren’t much different than the actual game, but it’s cool representation of an excellent song from an obscure game. Labyrinth Runner (AKA Trick Trap) is even more obscure, although the song is actually quite dull, and seems to exist just to show Woodsoft's knowledge of old, unknown Konami arcade games. The Castlevania remixes are mixed – the “Theme of Simon” rendition is a bit too close the official arrangement on the Dracula Battle album, and “Riddle” is plain unremarkable, but “Wicked Child” features a live guitar with 80s style synth that almost makes it sounds like an Ys song. It also features a never-arranged song from Dawn of Sorrow, “Dracula’s Tears”. It was probably the best song in the game and while this arrangement doesn’t do much other than improving the rather fuzzy instrumentation of the original and expanded it a bit, it still sounds pretty good – it wouldn’t sound out of place on a PC Engine game. The shamisens in the original song never fit, anyway. The version of “One Night in Neo Kobe City”, the opening credits song from the CD versions of Snatcher, is a bit more laid back and snazzier, with a particularly nice live sax. “Memoire”, the end theme from the MSX shooter Space Manbow, isn’t bad, but it’s hardly a standout amongst classic Konami canon.

Overall, it’s a decent album, even if it’s not entirely consistent.

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