A few days ago, Secret of Mana: Genesis, an arrangement album of tracks taken from Secret of Mana, was released by Square Enix. It contains 16 tracks arranged by Kikuta himself, though they do not deviate very far from the originals. His intent with the album is to keep the original feel of the songs and refine the sound to make it more beautiful. He says it was a difficult challenge, but he’s happy with the end result.

You can find the album on iTunes, or can purchase the CD from retailers such as YesAsia for around $30.

The tracklist is as follows:

1. Genesis: Angel’s Fear (title screen)
2. Fantasies: Tell a Strange Tale (Empire towns theme)
3. Friends: Always Together (Overworld for waterfall)
4. Wilderness: The Boy Aims for Wild Fields (Overworld around Pandora area)
5. Memories: Colour of the Summer Sky (happy town theme)
6. Fairies: The Fairy Child (Salamando’s / Happy Kakkara theme)
7. Mystics: What the Forest Taught Me (Upperland forest)
8. Avengers: Danger! (boss theme)
9. Winds: The Orphan of the Storm (you beat a boss)
10. Gremlins: Flight Bound for the Unknown (Flammie theme 1)
11. Prophecies: Premonition (Flammie theme 3)
12. Machineries: Steel and Traps (Undergruond City, Scorpion Army, and such)
13. Secrets: Give Love it’s Rightful Time (Mana Fortress inside)
14. Ballads: Pure Night (Pureland)
15. Mass: The Prayer of the Arctic Circle (Boss Battle v Mana Beast)
16. Truth: The Second Truth from the End (Ending theme 2)

Since the site rebuild a number of pages were missing from the Soundtracks section, primarily relating to the Fan Doujin Albums and original composer solo work. These pages have now been restored, and a number of broken links fixed (whoops!).

These will hopefully be expanded upon not long from now to include more recent Doujin work, a few additional compilations in which SD music appears, and the upcoming Arrange albums from the original componsers (Itoken’s one is already there).

Thank you for your continued patience with the on-going restoration.

At this point there aren’t any solid details, and I’ll be looking further into this to see what I can dig up, but rumour has it that Hiroki Kukuta and Yoko Shimomura will also be releasing arrangement albums for their contributions to the Mana series, in the same way that we know Kenji Ito is doing with Re:Birth. Watch this space.

You can find a sampler of all the tracks for SQ Chips here.

Now this is not normally something I would do, but I want to raise a rather serious point here. Everyone here, I’m sure, knows that I, admitedly, hold a certain bias when it comes to the works of Kikuta in soundtracks, which some may find is swaying my view on this matter, but hear me out for a second.

I’m listening through the samples for all the tracks on this album right now, and I can spot a rather severe drop off at one point. Read the rest of this entry »

Ustream will host a live streaming event featuring music from Square Enix’s SQ Chips game music remix CD on September 29 from 8:00 – 11:00 p.m. (JST). The CD includes remixed songs from game series like Final Fantasy and Seiken Densetsu (Mana). Thirteen Japanese remixers created the tracks for the CD. Among them, artists DJ OMKT、SEXY-SYNTHESIZER feat.(S_S)、Deadball P, and others will attend and perform at “SQUARE ENIX MUSIC presents SQ Party LEVEL1”. Streaming worldwide, the event will take place at 2.5D in Tokyo.

The SQ Chips game music remix album shipped in Japan on September 7 for the retail price of 1,890 yen (about US$25). Most of the CD’s eighteen tracks are remixed versions of songs from the Final Fantasy role-playing game series. Soul Eater manga artist Atsushi Ohkubo drew the jacket art for SQ Chips. Video game and publishing company Square Enix previously released several other game music remix albums in its SQ Music series.

Ustream hosted a similar live streaming event for the CD on August 3, before the album’s release.

Via Kimiko (thank you!), via ANN, via Famitsu

Sheexy tipped me off on this one after finding an auction on Yahoo.co.jp, and after a quick search, it turns out that an official album is on the way from the hands of Kenji Ito.

Re:Birth/聖剣伝説 伊藤賢治アレンジアルバム, will be hitting stores on October the 19th to celebrate 20 years of Seiken Densetsu, and will consist of a series of tracks originally composed by Kenji Ito, arranged by… Kenji Ito. It will apparently cover a variety of styles, and although the full track list has not been released yet, it will include the following:

Rising Sun (No, really, ya think?)
Mana’s Mission (SD1)
In Search of the Holy Sword (SD1)
Final Battle (SD1)
The Fool’s Dance (SD4)
The Endless Dream (SD4)

It will be available for the price of 2,500 yen from Amazon.co.jp and The Square Enix e-Store. A sample is available here of the track that includes, are we at all surprised, Rising Sun.

The CD will also be included in the Box Set due to hit stores around the same time for 21,000 yen.

Square Enix are soon to be releasing an album of chiptune versions for songs from several of their later gen titles. SQChips will include songs from Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3. Among other titles of interest are Chrono Trigger, several Final Fantasy games, and a couple from the Saga series. The album is due out on September 7 for ¥1890, and will be available from Amazon Japan, the Sony Music Shop and the Square Enix eStore.

Thanks to Bastian from the forums for pointing this one out to us. Source: GamePro

It’s back online, thanks to Kassidy.

很好!

One of our favourite composers here at Seikens, Hiroki Kikuta, has just released over the course of the past couple of months 3 new albums of material:

Nice Life as Wife (OST of Niisuma wa Sailor Fuku)
Love Relaxation (OST of Sakura Relaxation)
In the Sky, on the Water (OST of Sora no Iro, Mizu no Iro)

All of these are music from previously released games, but haven’t been released as albums before. They are music from his days of composing for eroge games (if you don’t know what that means, you probably shouldn’t be looking it up), not too long after his work for Square on the Seiken Densetsu soundtracks. The second track from Love Relaxation sounds remarkably similar to Colour of the Summer Sky.

OK, I know, I’m making this far too much of a habit, but I have been working on stuff, I promise. Anyway, as proof of that very thing, you will find another Doujin album added to our Soundtracks section, entitled Sanctuary of Mana, by project-Delta. An excellent up-beat arrange album that not only revisits the tracks from Seiken Densetsu 2/3 instrumentally, but adds lyrics to them from the hand of Saori, as well as some short Drama lines to some of the tracks.

Not only do we have short samples of every track available for you to listen to on the doujin page, as well as a description of each track (there’s only 4 so it didn’t take that long), but as part of Triple MMM we bring you the whole first track for your acoustic delight. Fear’s Night starts with a rhythm section that evolves into a xylophone and violin rendition of the latter part of Premonition from SD2 and builds up to an upbeat arrangement of Angel’s Fear, with lyrics.

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