![]() The soundtracks of these later sequels are heavily dominated by more modern industrial and techno, with a few pure hard rock tunes in between. Tatsutoshi Narita would be only one who’d put his musical stamp on all following games, although one Fumio Ito should return for Virtua Fighter 5, and Shinichi Goto contributed to both VF4 and 5. Virtua Fighter 3‘s credits list almost as many “Sound Designers” as there are music numbers in the game. With On the Vocal it got once again a compilation of mostly terrible pop songs “inspired by” the game. Jeffrey’s theme has got to be the most lame tune in the entire series, and Wolf’s desert stage sounds more like something from an RPG. Jacky and Akira’s stage BGM is still excellent, but others less so. The music of Virtua Fighter 3 is basically more of the same as the previous games, although it has lost a lot of the earlier games’ energy. One sequence of notes uncannily resembles the theme of Neon Genesis Evangelion – whose first episode aired exactly two days after the Virtua Fighter anime started. Around that time frame also falls the soundtrack for the animated series, which strikes a similar chord. A few of the tracks are quite good as far as early 1990s J-Pop goes, especially Akira’s song, but the majority is really corny and boring. This doesn’t have anything to do with the music from the game, but rather consists of entirely new pop songs “inspired” by each of the characters. This time the original soundtrack was followed by an album called Dancing Shadows. The music is very similar to the first game in nature, only bigger, more powerful and more interesting. The Saturn version soundtrack is subtitled Maximum Mania, which is close to the arcade original, but the instrumentalization sounds a bit more natural thanks to the redbook audio.įor the second game, Nakamura got support by Takenobu Mitsuyoshi (the only composer to stay with the series until Virtua Fighter 3, Youichi Ueda and Akiko Hashimoto. Some of this is actually really good, even though the songs are hardly recognizable as the game music, anymore. These include some trippy jazz versions and a strangely ethereal hymn, but mostly typical band rock. They also made the album Neo Rising, whose arranged songs depart much further from the original soundtrack. ![]() ![]() Those were made by Sega’s short-lived in-house band B-Univ, who were also responsible for several other arrange soundtracks in 1993-1994. Saikyou no Senshi (“The Strongest Warriors”) includes the original arcade soundtrack bundled with a bunch of remixes that sway more towards techno, although some contain really weird vocal and rap parts. Composed by Takayuki Nakamura (who last caught attention with his musical contributions to Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Lumines series), the music to Virtua Fighter starts somewhere in between the typical Sega arcade flair and Street Figher II style hymns, but soon branches out to incorporate hard rock, jazzy tunes and world music influences into one of the most versatile fighting game soundtracks of its time. In Japan, the first two games amounted to no less than six CD releases. Unfortunately the 32X is a bit noisy which is why there's some audible background noise during the quiet parts of the soundtrack.One more element Virtua Fighter owed a small part of its success to was its excellent soundtrack. Track titles and order are based on the sound test. All tracks were recorded from the game's sound test menu. All tracks were recorded at 96KHz 24bit using a Sound BlasterX G5 sound card and the and the phono jacks located at the back of the SEGA Mega-CD (Model 1) connected to the Mega Drive. This soundtrack was recorded from a real SEGA Mega Drive CD 32X (PAL, Model 1, VA4) using a Mega Everdrive X3 cartridge. Sound Designers: Masaru Setsumaru, Tatsuya Kōzaki, Atsumu Miyazawa, Tadashi Joukagi Title: Virtua Fighter Platform: SEGA Mega Drive 32X
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