During and After Falcom: Masaru Nakajima

Masaru Nakajima is one of the four powerhouse composers who joined around 1992, just before Brandish 2. He would contribute compositions and arrangements all the way until his departure shortly after The Legend of Heroes V: A Cagesong of the Ocean in the early 2000's. It will be up to you to listen to these sample in an attempt to dissect his musical style. This is from his debut in Brandish 2:

Next, this is a track originally composed by him in Ys IV: Dawn of Ys. The track is arranged by Ryo Yonemitsu.

Afterwards, Mr. Nakajima would take a much darker tone in some of the few tracks he composed in The Legend of Xanadu:

In The Legend of Heroes III: White Witch, Nakajima's style changed once again to something more lighthearted with the occasional aggressive battle song:

We won't see much after this point for a while. The next significant amount of songs comes from The Legend of Xanadu II. In songs such as "Crystal Valley" Nakajima reaches that calm, soothing yet melancholy change in musical direction that he begins to incorporate more from here on out and further into his music after Falcom. Similar to his role in the first Legend of Xanadu, his style in the darker tracks now sound more technical and sharper than before:

Moving on, Nakajima contributed to The Legend of Heroes IV: A Tear of Vermilion:

At the end of Nakajima's Falcom career, he would compose his final songs in The Legend of Heroes V: A Cagesong of the Ocean. The only breakdown I received as from Atsushi Shirakawa (Tenmon), and these are only his guesses as to what Nakajima may have composed. I'm sure there's more to it then just the songs he submitted to me. Still, it's better to have his guesses than nothing.

*The melody in this battle track would be reused in "Silver Will." And to this day, this melody still appears in Legend of Heroes games such as the current latest one: The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III.

After leaving Falcom, Nakajima decided to focus more on his website and composing for his own. The website is now down, and had featured new music he had composed. A project named "White Swan" was also released which is almost impossible to find (I have not been able to find it).

"White Swan" Project

Further into his composing career, he contributed arrange and original composition tracks to the FMPSG Doujin group over the next few years:

O. P. M. D.

 This would go on for a few years and he would also compose a few concept tracks meant for RPGs.

At the end of his career, his music continued to evolve as he took a surprising dive into vocaloid, which represents the last of his work.

The Never Ending Story (arrange):

The last known song he composed was a Vocaloid track from 2010, which was featured on his Piapro account. After that, he disappeared without a trace.

To find out more about this composer, I reached to many many people he worked with on Twitter, including members from FMPSG, as well as older contacts such as Naoki Kaneda and Atsushi Shirakawa. Unfortunately, no one seems to know what happened to him. Fortunately, one member of FMPSG told me that the last time he got in contact with Nakajima was in 2016, which means he is most likely still alive at least. This individual did recall Mr. Nakajima saying something that amounted to him not making music anymore.

The last known track composed by Masaru Nakajima is a Vocaloid work titled: Lost Virgin:

His Piapro Account

Youtube

His old website (some downloads still work)