Daily Music—ActRaiser Symphonic Suite
Jul 2nd, 2008 by Butter
Among the best video games ever created is a lovely hybrid from Quintet and Enix called ActRaiser. Released for the SNES in 1990, it’s half side-scrolling platformer and half a Sim City-style menu-based simulation of world construction. The austere concept has you playing as a god, and your job is to descend to the earth, clear it of demons and monsters who serve the devil Tanzra, and repopulate it with peaceful, loving village-folk. That’s it. You accomplish this in the two play modes, each of which are given equal screen time and are fun by themselves.
But this simple concept is ornamented with what I think is the best video game score of all time. Here’s a sample of the Orchestral Suite that Japanese game composer Yuzo Koshiro arranged from the original music:
This, obviously, is from the action mode of the game; it’s from Fillmore, the first land you have to conquer and repeople. It only scratches the surface of the emotional range of the soundtrack; see the YouTube user’s other videos for other samples. That range is truly astounding: You have the warlike, brave action tunes like “Fillmore”; the bittersweet, almost rustic “Birth of the People” that plays during the town-building; the sublime, peaceful “Kasandora” theme that appears when the people of that land discover music and present it to you as an offering, and the triumphal but sad “Peaceful World” melody that plays when the fight is over. The reason, incidentally, that the ending is tinged with sadness and loss is that you, as god, see that you’ve cast away all the evil monsters and created a happy, peaceful, intellectually fulfilled, and self-sustaining world; you’re happy that the people no longer need your help; then you shoot off into the sky and let them be. Now that’s my idea of a god: kicks ass against evil, gives you a home, then goes the fuck away. Beats that petulant, needy Yahweh character, at least.
This performance of the Suite is by The Shinsei Nihon Symphony. The suite was released as a CD not long after the game, but it’s now out of print and extremely rare. (Fortunately, mp3’s are available with a little Googling.) The only live performance I’ve ever heard of was at the Symphonic Game Music festival in Leipzig in 2004. Also, for comparison here is how the music sounded in the original MIDI.
