5 out of 5

Label: Black Screen Records, Brave Wave, Limited Run Games

Produced by: Alexander Aniel

I was mentally prepared for how good this was going to be, but my socks still blew off completely to the other side of the house. I say this up front as a PSA for sock care.

While Yuzo Koshiro has certainly remained busy with his score work across plenty of games – more orchestral stuff, retro stuff, and all inbetween – and his founded video game company Ancient has been active as well, and old school style shmups have been back in popular circulation for a decade+ at this point, Earthion – an old school shmup developed by Ancient, scored by Koshiro – still tingles a particular nostalgia buzz, helped along by it being made to work on Sega Genesis, alongside modern platforms. I mean, this is leaning in, and I’m there for it, but that’s made easier by how legit it all is.

Musically, take the bop and momentum of a Konami Club score, but filter it through Koshiro’s Streets of Rage 2 / 3 use of electro, dance music, and experimentation: you get close to Earthion. My initial gripe with the score was going to be its aggression – it hits hard on BPM from the outset – but once you’re past “Stage Completion A,” it’s clear that there’s actual sequencing / storytelling at work, here, and tunes progress from subterranean style grooves, to Genesis-styled grinds (a crunchier, meaner sound), and then blown out to a kind of traditional, glittery, fast-paced shmupness as we peel into the album’s latter half. That opening is purposefully there to go all out and dazzle, and just when your ears are getting a bit exhausted, Koshiro / the music eases up.

The production on this is what’s especially insane, though. I realize this isn’t a requirement for the rating – or it shouldn’t be – but that this music can be piped through a Genesis is wild. It was already a spectacle X years ago when Koshiro made everyone step up their game (no pun intended) via Streets of Rage 1, but how this balances out the system’s infamous musical limitations with modern-sounding bleeps is, literally, unlike anything the Genesis has outputted before. I don’t know if modern games for the platform have some kind of workaround that makes those limitations not a thing, but regardless: even if you weren’t aware of the pedigree and just bought this game as part of a Sega library, the music would stand apart. And to clarify, it’s not that you can’t hear the Genesis crunchiness, it’s that Koshiro knows how to take advantage of it so it is part of the package and doesn’t sound like it’s holding the vision back.

Separating out the bonus tracks and consolidating all of the effects to the end of the album is a choice. Ultimately, I’m for it; the bonus tracks – even though they’re repetitive when paired together – make sense, but the sound effects are a different question. Like, should you put these between tracks, as second long clips? Maybe. Do you make them separate tracks, then, or call them out on the tracklist? So I sort of logistically get consolidating them.

I got the cassette edition of the soundtrack; I can’t speak to the vinyl, but I’d at least suggest the cassette over the digital. The latter is obviously a more “portable” way to listen – one day I’ll get that BT-enabled cassette player – but the mastering on the digital is, to my ears, not ideal, and makes it pretty harsh. You get used to it, but I found the cassette mastering tempers the beat and high-end synths better.