@@r3dzonewr247 Not for people here in America, most people listen to shitty rap or pop songs about drugs and shit. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to listen to Sabaton's Devil Dogs and Powerwolf's cover of Gods of War Arise for the hundredth time.
Yeah, it was a different time, and when it's 8-bit bleeps and bloops it's a lot harder to catch, these were in CD Quality and were basically instrumental covers lol
@@uncannyx You could say the same thing about the 16-bit era somewhat too. Everything changed once games went 3D in the mid and late 1990's, and especially with the PS2's debut in 2000 which was the first system that could truly handle a CD quality soundtrack.
Agreed. You could definitely get away with it during the 16-bit era. I think you could even get away with it on the N64, but... I think PS1 is where it really went to the next level, once that CD quality came, people had higher expectations and didn't really want bleeps and bloops
Somebody in my country did this fairly recently, for major productions too. But i think he was caught because it suddenly stopped. Used music from VERY POPULAR AAA games and got paid for it. To non-gamers its just a random beat but to the initiated you begin wondering why the FFXIII battle theme is blasting in the middle of a toothpaste ad.
The Game was in the english dub done by Funimation, the choice of that song had no correlation with Toei's original soundtrack and yamamoto had no connection with it since their soundtrack was completely different for the Japanese dub.
@@phillip9579 very true but taking inspiration from the song that's in the movie of the anime game your working is considered inspiring.. just like how bleach opening 13 is the same as bleach soul resurrection with a bit of a different tone. that one gets a pass.
I feel kind of bad that I actively like the the Budokai versions of the tracks. My absolute favourite is “Embrace the Blue Sky,” which rips off Journey’s “Be Good to Yourself.”
What's most confusing to me, as someone who knows even a bit of composition, is that Kenji has skill. In the tracks that aren't outright stealing of melodies and harmonies and shifting them a few semitones, he has a grasp of music theory in his own compositions that aren't outright stolen. The Smoke on the Water one is definitely not straight theft, but the question is then why he didn't just make his whole soundtrack at that level of INSPIRATION rather than theft?
My guess is, being the composer for so many games and series of DBZ must be exhausting. Even a great OST composer's catalogue has material that is reused often.
@@TheyBenefit Meh, even when he was tasked with composing _one_ insert theme for the series, he used not one, not two, but _three_ songs from the *same* album to make it. He was never a true composer and there’s no equivalency between him just arranging and actual OST composers quoting either themselves or others (while still having their own unique signatures).
Its been a long time since we fight seriously uh? -wait is that tenkaichi 3? i played both too much and i got everything mixed in my mind, except the soundtracks , now that i saw this vid i got sad
Agreed. I can hear some basic structural similarities to Smoke on the Water, but I don't know if I can call it plagiarism. Everything else is obvious though.
Felipe M. Stop with the excuses....if this was reversed You be cursing out all the real producers if they had copied from ya DBZ smh....this was wrong point blank...unlike the samples and remix’s ur drawing a false equivalence with....gaymer and weaboos lawd
It's completely unacceptable and I honestly have no idea what the fuck he was thinking, but goddamn I can't say I don't thoroughly enjoy his versions over the originals. This isn't an excuse for him since I'm glad he was punished for it. I just enjoy the tracks
Fuck... When I first heard budokai 2 theme in the background fighting in the "snow stage" I immediately noticed that it was "Hunting High and low" from stratovarius And ever since I'd thought that it had been a tribute or something to the band but today I Just found out it was plagiarism and it wasn't the only one but actually 10 soundtracks But I think you guys agree with me when I say that the music from budokai was way better in most of the sountracks than the originals 😆
I had no idea that so much of the original soundtrack was ripped off. My favorite was 'Challengers' from Budokai 3. Now i want to listen to the real song it ripped off. Also you make a great point about the number one slot. Why not at least take from DBZ anime music? Heck even the american Bruce Faulcuner music had some great tracks for the show that could have been reworked for the games.
I think I might have enough for a second DBZ episode, but it will include more than just Budokai songs. I found some songs from other DBZ games! btw... Nice name. Sailor Mercury was always my fav lol
Smoke on the Water is a stretch but some of them really are ripped off. Especially Stratovarius and Disturbed ones. Also, Black Sabbath is not only Iron Man but the song Black Sabbath was also ripped off.
Nah I *totally* hear it. It's really not a stretch; exact same cadence, same tempo, same key. Only differences are that the drum groove is a bit different and some of the notes from the main riff are mixed up a bit, but those are the same notes and everything in a very similar sequence. It's not *as* egreguous as the others, but it's really close enough.
A lot of video game composers did this back in the day for many video games. However, it is worth noting that they at least had permission to base their work on the material they based their tracks on. Considering Yamamoto got fired, that is clearly not the case for his works.
It’s not that they had permission. It’s that video games weren’t that mainstream so nobody cared. Now they make millions of dollars so copyright kicks in.
@@YophiGames You're right actually, I looked into it more over time and a lot of composers got away with it, no permissions or anything. One of the most famous examples was with the classic DooM soundtrack, composer Bobby Prince (who also happened to be a lawyer) was sure id was going to get sued for having him compose music based on songs from various metal artists, but they got off clean on that one. But yeah no way that could be pulled off today.
@@boreasthenortherndragon6217 That's what bugs me about this. He didn't do anything that anybody else wasn't doing before. But because Dragonball Z is a famous franchise that makes money, now all of a sudden, it's a crime. If copyright is only a crime when you make money, it's sort of a double standard you know? Not defending Budokai of course. As much as I love the renditions, it's still wrong to take credit for these. I think they should have paid the money, credited the artists, and said the music was inspired by them. All of this would have been avoided.
The soundtrack of the budokai and clearly the best of all, it's a pity that you can never have it in the games because of this plagiarism case. Imagine a fight of Xenoverse with Budokai 1 "Challenger" background, the fighting will be so much more epic.
Music has literally been stealing from each other for years. He should have been upfront about it but it doesn't change that people profit from other people's work constantly. Just listen to the radio and you're gonna be thinking one song is another constantly.
@@Hieillua you can legally sample music you're right but the lawsuits against many artists prove they didn't. I am just saying it's unfair he gets hated on because he couldn't pay to make it go away. Artists steal nowadays and still get most played on the radio. Just noticing the hypocrisy that's all.
And his plagiarism is literally off the charts and egregious. Never seen and heard of anyone copying so many absurdly popular and well known songs so prolifically as this guy in my life.
they actually discovered that while he used some of his plagiarized songs on dbkai. in 2011. this was unprecedented. they had to replaced the songs from all the video games he worked on on the later released and the songs from the blu ray of dbkai. this is ridiculous. but the guy has good taste in music though, lol
Damn...most of the the tracks shown here are effectively instrumental covers, but in fairness, #5 and #3 feel like a medley of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath riffs.
Some of them are better but is hardly call them remixes the iron man song I got straight away. I will say though the first one was better than the original
I think #3 and #5 both have remnants of the pieces I named, but I also think there were multiple influences. Like the Iron Man one for example, it's some other guitar riff for almost 75% of the riff, and then out comes Iron Man all of a sudden... If Kenji Yamamoto didn't have so many blatant rip-offs, I think one could argue against it and look passed those 2 .... but considering the fact he has made a career on this, I can't defend it, and I heard the riff in there, even if it was only a portion of it.
For the Iron Man one, I thought a good chunk of that ripped off elements from For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Metallica, and shifted towards Iron Man at the end. I'm baffled as to why he would choose to steal from such highly successful tracks. Yes, they all sound great, and fit nicely within the game, but they're far too noticeable, and can be recognized almost immediately.
#3 was definitely a rip off or Iron Man, but also (and very obviously) another Black Sabbath song that is named after the band itself, Black Sabbath. Prove me wrong.
And that's, ladies and gentlemen, how I became a Stratovarius fan. To think that they're my second favourite band of all time (Iron Maiden being my absolute fav). Please everybody go and listen to Stratovarius as quickly as possible.
@@uncannyx And having listened to the Doom and Doom 2 soundtracks, there are a few original pieces and/or different takes on the songs they are based on unlike this DBZ guy which stole practically 100% of all his work.
@@GiordanDiodato Kinda blows my mind, because his rip-offs are so shameless that a game inspired by Doom went ahead and just named itself after the track that E1M1 was a rip-off of (it's Painkiller by Judas Priest).
Whenever I write songs for various personal projects, I sometimes notice that sometimes, certain melodies/leitmotifs I make sound similar to other existing melodies/leifmotifs. I've decided to refer to this phenomenon as "Subconcious Inspiration". I'm sure it's probably self-explanatory, but a basic description of it is when you are writing a song and you come up with a melody without realizing that it's similar to a song you may like, have stuck in your head, etc. A bit of an example of this is this one song I heard in a video. It had a short 23 note melody that I can't describe in words. Later, when I remembered the song, I kinda remembered it wrong, and it ended up sounding like a jazzy version of that song. Boom. I had a melody that later became a reoccurring leitmotif for the soundtrack of something I'm working on.
Unintentionally subconsciously copying a melody, theme, or rhythm is one thing. But when you copy all of them together along with similar instrumentation it becomes very hard to say it was unintentional.
what you say reminds me of something that Aphex Twin once said/wrote in an interview, heavily paraphrasing but he stated how he’ll often think up melodies or progressions, and because he’ll come back to such ideas in his head a while later, he often thinks - is this familiar because I’ve heard it somewhere else? Or did I really think that up? Difficult to discern between the two sometimes, especially if it’s just a tune in your mind
Sadly I think the same can somewhat be applied to Touhou fans. since some of the music can in a sense be considered rip offs most notably Flowering Night. Just listen to The Trooper by Iron Maiden.
@@NealCamerlengo I came across some random Touhou ost on RU-vid & it sounded too much like Highway Star. I'm no Touhou fan so I ain't sure if Touhou fans mad defend plagiarism like DBtards do, which'd be more surprising if they didn't
@@ThomasTheCure I agree and love lost courage and check out the 2nd half of "hold it against me" by britney spears its uncanny I think it came full circle and pop stars ripped off Bt2 xD
Not original, he was just smart enough to have the actual original composers of the songs to help out, making it a "arrangement" instead of a case of plagiarism.
Good job with the video! This subject sure is fascinating. I was in complete shock when I first discovered the September knockoff; and then for the sake of having fun, I tried to do a mashup of it with the actual vocals from September and, with some speed corrections, it syncs very well since the similarities remain beyond the sample of the video.
Actually yes. If you look at his non plagiarized work it's actually VERYYY good. Idk why he felt he needed to do this. From the minimal effort he made in changing them I would say he was probably burnt out as a whole
@L Jeans I can't really lie I know that the songs are plagiarized but....they're good....like really good. I can't get over the old budokai soundtracks.
I can’t even be mad at the simple fact that the soundtracks were completely changed. I whole heartily love the original soundtrack but plagiarism I can’t get down with. It’s very understandable for how the direction of that sound producer’s career and the DBZ games went to be honest
Hmm. Well the Smoke on the Water one was off enough that you could say it was simply inspired by. The Iron Man one actually sounds like a mixture of the self-titled song, Black Sabbath, and Iron Man. So I guess its sort of original to combine those (technically). Most of the rest are much closer, but the RHCP one and the one from Cowboy Bebop... kinda indefensible. Overall, this dude was definitely guilty of some plagiarism, but I don't think all of the songs are counts of that offense.
There's a couple songs i feel are different enough but there are some that are too similar to argue for, this controversy did introduce me to stratovarius so in a way I'm glad people found out
One of my favorite OSTs of all time...was *completely aped.* Also, there are *SERIOUSLY* people defending this man stealing music because they like the soundtrack that much. You guys can love the soundtrack, but that doesn't make theft okay. *Stop. Defending. It.*
Not only is "September" an incredibly popular song, but it's also the most popular pharmaceutical commercial song. There's absolutely no recovery from this 😆
I love the Original Soundtrack better idc if it was copyrighted , Now I know why i like it dude put a bunch of hits together 😭😭 we need a version with the old songs ill pay for that
Whether the songs were plagiarized or not has no bearing on their quality. heck, songs are plagiarized most of the time because they are good. However it is literally illegal for Bandai to reuse the old songs in any way. No matter how much you pay
The one they did with Smoke on the Water doesn't sound exactly the same initially, but if you listen carefully you'll notice that the timing of the notes was changed a bit, probably in an attempt to hide they stole it.
Gamedraco no it's the fact that he just flat out smacked him in the face with his own plagiarism that had me. "You may not have the rights, but has it stop you so far?" I flat out LOST it at that! XD
The Game, Warped, and the Stratovarius rips were especially egregious. Like it's almost as if he just surgically removed the vocals and added a few guitar widdlies and said "Alright, next song!" At least many of the other examples changed up dynamics and/or genre but those? I'm amazed he wasn't shot on sight by an angry record label suit.
Wow something I found really funny is the game by disturbed is in the English dub of Coolers Revenge as a licensed song and Yamamoto pretty much used it in BK3 I never noticed that till now.
The thing is, Kenji Yamamoto is very talented and skilled, he took various songs as an inspiration or rather as a basis then he made legit very good songs that fit dragon ball very well.
@@hermityt1663He was also the _only_ guy who got soundtrack CD’s of his DB game projects sold. No one else aside from him, and after his fall there haven’t been any proper soundtrack CD releases for DB games.
Ayo say what you will, his plagiarism really made Budokai's atmosphere. Replacing the songs with the Tenkaichi soundtrack in the HD version really showed that... It was ass.
I always noticed that some of these sounded similar to songs, especially Thrilling Time to Iron Man. As a kid, I didn’t even know what copyright was, so I never thought about it. I hate that dragon ball had this happen because a lot of games got strikes and even the DB Kai series too because of Yamamoto. I enjoy and love the soundtrack music from all of those works. Such a shame that was the truth behind it.
"Move forwards fearlessly" is also a song from Budokai 1 to got ripped off by Stratovarius and I'm surprised it's not in that too. It's THE best battle song.
For Budokai 3, there's a song named "Flight in the Dark Side" which is one of the exploration theme songs in Dragon Universe. That song is a rip off of Marilyn Manson's "Antichrist Superstar".
This Dragon Ball Z Budokai Episode has left me firmly convinced that Mewtwo from Pokemon is for certain based royally on Frieza from Dragonball Z even more than I already noticed since my comment on the character special. The Dragonball Z Anime ran in Japan from 1989 to 1996 looking at the dates before the main part of the episode. The very first Pokemon games where Mewtwo debuted came out in Japan in 1996, and Mewtwo remains one of the most well known and used Pokemon characters since. I cannot defend this similarity at all now knowing these dates, and how extremely similar both are right down to the color palette.
I remember play budokai 3 for the first time as and 11 year old and being able to hear some of these knock offs. Everyone thought I was crazy no doubt lol
As plagiarist as he is, Kenji is a GOD-tier arranger, and I, for one, stand for "Battle Point Unlimited". He took samples from three Propaganda (the band) songs, not the entire pieces, thankfully, and somehow he combines them into an epic cohesive mashup. I'm not saying it's at "Paul's Boutique" level but still you gotta give it to the man's skill.
I really like your work, man, keep it up. While checking your videos, I came to think that the most difficult part of your work isn't all the researches and double, triple, checks: it probably is all the pre-excuses you "have to" express in order to not be flamed by others... Peace and again, good work. PS: you should make a video dedicated to the greatest Sega Genesis' composer (and also a great music copier) Yuzo Koshiro. Just listen to the soundtrack from the first two streets of rage and you'll understand.
Imagine the scene: Bands: Toei we are sueing you! Toei: But why?! Bands: our musics were stolen to be put on your game Toei: This must be a mistake, Yamamoto said he composed the songs, rigth? Yamamoto: I said that i got inspiration from music not that i would create one Toei: Oh...fuck
Also again... Check out the theme for the planet Titania on the classic SNES Star Fox. To me it sounds oddly familiar to the ET movie theme. If you change the speed just slightly and add a couple beats here and there, the melody seems the same
When I was listening to the cowboy bebop sound track couple weeks ago, and that song came on, I was in shock since I remembered years ago that DBZ budokai music got copyrighted lol
Basically Yamamoto sucked so hard at making his own music that he had to go and steal from others. You may or may not like his versions, but personally I think he got what he deserved in the end. Plagiarism is not good, if you're gonna use similar notes and riffs to someone else, you need to give credit to the original artist.
And Kenji Yamamoto is the first composer I have ever heard of that had nothing original in work at all. Egregious is the first thing that comes to my mind with Yamamoto's prolific stealing.
Dbz Budokai 3's 'Move forward fearlessly' is also a rip of Stratovarius' 'Glory of the World' And in Burst limit 'Hatred at 2 power' is a rip of Bullet for my Valentine's 'Just another Star' The crazy thing is that most of the music he ripped was either from 1 band or released just a few years before the games.
