Reflections: All you have to do is ask

Video Game Music is something criminally underrated. In particular, I began with the music of my childhood. Growing up, me and my brothers had a Super Nintendo and a Nintendo 64. The soundtracks to Mega Man X 1-3, Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong Contry 2, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, Super Castlevania IV, F-Zero X, Super Smash Bros, and other titles had a huge influence on me. I thought, why can't this be music I regularly listen to just like what's on the radio? It wasn't until much later that I found out that video game music, especially in Japan, actually was printed on CDs and often celebrated. Thanks to the internet, I was able to explore a much bigger world of video game Soundtracks as I dove into other consoles.

In this world there was a lot of creative music. From the bizarre Alien Soldier, unique Vib-Ribbon, mystical Rudra Ni Hihou, I found music I could relate to and enjoy that reminded me of my childhood games. Soon I began my own video game music collection.

Falcom I completely found by accident. At Snesmusic.org, I was listening to as many SPC sets as I could, and I came across the Super Famicom versions of Brandish 2, Popful Mail, Ys IV: Mask of the Sun, and Ys III: Wanderers of Ys. I had never heard anything like this, and after looking into it more, I came across the original titles on the PC-88, PC-98, and NEC PC-Engine and that these were all developed by the same company: Falcom. Soon enough I found my favorite composers who were in Falcom Sound Team JDK: Mieko Ishikawa, Atsushi Shirakawa, Naoki Kaneda, Masaru Nakajima, Takahiro Tsunashima, Hirofumi Matsuoka, and Satoshi Arai.

In the video game music community, one of the parts we focus on are composition credits. Thanks to asking composers directly, game data, and credits from soundtracks, we have been able to discover a lot, but a lot of mysteries remain. In particular, the soundtracks Falcom released from the late 80s to early 2000s. This was my interest at least. On VGMdb, I discovered other Falcom fans who had went ahead and actually found credits to some games, and the two that I saw were Ys IV: Dawn of Ys, and Vantage Master JP. It was a tease for me because I had been wondering who composed what and we finally had something. Of course, it was not enough and soon after seeing this I decided to try and research to find out more.

These posts on VGMdb also revealed that some of the composers from that time in Falcom were active on Twitter. This provided a huge opportunity to find out more. Hirofumi Matsuoka was the first I was going to focus on, but due to other elements taking much too long he passed away from stomach cancer before I could find out anything. Luckily, Atsushi Shirakawa (TENMON), and Naoki Kaneda (KIM's Soundroom) were still there. I spent the following months collaborating with them and trying to figure out as many credits as I could from their memories. Many mysteries were solved, and somehow this resulted in me getting blocked from Falcom on Twitter.

After a few months, we had quite a bit of new information, and other people were asking as well. but there was still a lot more to ask. Thanks to the determination of other members in the Falcom community such as Preta, we acquired an even bigger set of credits that cleared up a lot we were wondering about. It even got as far as getting Masaru Nakajima involved in trying to remember who did what. Despite the occasional contradiction in a few credits due to memory, we almost completely solved the mystery of Falcom's composer credits. There is still more to do now, but at least now we're almost done (with this era of composers at least).