The Fascinating World of Falcom's Music 

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

I intend to start my Trails journey with Daybreak, its OST is considered by many to be one of the best in Falcom‘s catalogue. What do you think? :)

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

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!

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

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

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.

Cool video, if someone in house haven't leaked a bunch of credits for some game we would never know who composed what let alone deduce the rest. Kinda hard to say why exactly their modern soundtracks dont sound as good, could be that they are cheap on that front? Yes, but pushing a 60 hour JRPG every year must put alot of pressure in the composers, specially the in-house ones

Great video and very informative! Did you consider extend the music analysis to other rpg as well in further videos?

you focused way too much on ys, falcom make other games you know

I hate the fact that people thrash on all the osts in the trails series that’s not trails in the sky. It’s so dumb. If you read a lot of the comments in certain modern osts, ppl throw hate and shade towards it. Idk why this is a thing.

The only person that matters is Ryo Yonemitsu, while not a composer of the music, he made the best arrangements and ultimately the best soundtracks in the entire YS series without question, he is god tier, the rest? They're good but Ryo Yonemitsu is on a whole other level, he elevated Falcom's compositions to a level that no one even knew was possible. The fact that the guy stopped working on videogame music after Tokimeki Memorial 2 on PS2 is very sad, he was a legend. Aside from the Yonemitsu games, I think YS VIII is the best of the bunch, though YS VI isn't too far behind. Memories Of Celceta is good too but Ryo Yonemitsu's arrangements of the songs are way better, the original songs for Memories Of Celceta are the best ones, the arrangements are kinda meh though, aside for Crater and Lava Zone which were rather well done.

Best music in the industry is stretching it by quite a mile in a half.

To me, the peak of Falcom music will always be Trails of Cold Steel 1-4. Granted, I haven't actually played any of the games after that yet, so maybe (and hopefully) I'll change my mind, but I get the impression from what I've heard, that the soundtracks have drastically fallen off.

Singa's hater base is just a *massive* echo chamber, like most minorities. I enjoy his songs, most of us do. Bar the occasional truly bad one, the nitpicks people find are stuff only a musician or someone what actively wants to badmouth him would find. Maybe it makes no sense to merge two songs into one, maybe his guitar sounds like chickens at times; Falcom needed a compromise between good music to boost their sales and a tight budget (or stingy executives). They wouldn't fill Kuro with his music and sell it as a new entry point if they thought it'd drive new players away, no?

You have zero clue what you are talking about. Falcom isnt milking the trails series. It simply shows their dedication to long form story telling. Would you say the same to Eichiro Oda? Trails games are good from the first hour. If they are not, you are not the audience.

They had good song but I am gonna be honest they are not too memorable and that is why they are really underground , they are just fine but never gonna had the same impact as FF or Personas series , and the main issue is the way the guitarr sounds is too same, is never remarkable

This video while informative is very cynical and comes off as very negatively charged which kinda made it not fun to watch

I like Singa's discordant style, reminds me a little of Ali Project!