Considered as one of the greatest video game soundtracks of all-time, we study Chrono Cross and analyze Yasunori Mitsuda’s gripping score!
the only podcast solely dedicated to the academic study of videogame music!
Considered as one of the greatest video game soundtracks of all-time, we study Chrono Cross and analyze Yasunori Mitsuda’s gripping score!
as always: great analysis, and nice of you to give a few favourite pieces for a listen at the end (lucky guy to be able to name some- I always recommend everything
There is one part early in the episode, the “big mistery” of, quoting the shownotes “this ‘lack of Chrono Cross on mastergamer.com’s 1999 video game awards’… “. Well: what _is_ the answer to that puzzle? Or were you just wondering? Maybe it’s that, according to wikipedia, the game was only realeased in NA in the late summer of 2000?
Another thing I noted is that you stress how an ascending fifth was a central means to allude to the game’s theme. But then, it’s only a fifth, one of the older dissonances in european music theory and pretty commonplace. Would you actually think that the listener will be- subconsciously- reminded of the theme? I actually agree you could, but not having played the game, I am not sure how aware the listener is of the melody.
A small aside on the theme of the episode: you talk about the arrangement as rearranging a song. While I know that this is very common, I do not like it that much: by etymology, it just means “put in line [that is i.e.: order]“, and wikipedia itself admits that “fleshing-out of a compositional sketch” is also arrangement, even though in the next paragraph it at length rephrases a definition that excludes the >Original Version
Oh, and one thing I forgot: next time you pummel somebody with time signatures, drop the 3/4 suppossedly present in the final battle’s ostinato: I would quite definitely put it as 6/8 from the start, because of the speed, because it repeats after six tones and since they fill up the time that was before between each pair of notes. Or does some piano score say otherwise? For me it looks like a bar with one notes, then some three-based signature but this turning out to be triplets in a 4/4 signature, followed by quavers later and otehr stuff. So there is still enough going on anyway
Hey onto-maelkashisi,
Sorry for the long wait on the reply, I just wanted to get my ducks in a row before commenting back. Lots to comment on…
Mastergamer - there is no solution, they just didn’t include anything in it… which I think is crazy, considering the unbelievable reviews it got from EGM, IGN and all those sites. Maybe just preference? I don’t know…
The fifth - I know that Mitsuda usually favours leaps, so I suppose that it could be a stretch to find the fifth in many themes. However, the fact that it’s there still proves the point, especially because one of the important intervallic relationships in the CT theme is the 7^1^5 (all ascending) in the B section. I think Mitsuda really does try and mirror that in many other pieces to keep a continuity through the game’s score. Is it a stretch? Yes, but it’s still there.
Time signatures - After checking the piano scores, it is in 4/4 with everything in triplets (I didn’t have the score at the time of the episode).
In the first time we hear the ostinato, I thought it was 3/4 because I hear a pattern of STRONG-weak-STRONG-weak-STRONG-weak, which suggests to me, 3/4, as opposed to STRONG-weak-weak-STRONG-weak-weak. However, the scores can’t be wrong, so alas, good effort team.
Thanks for your comments!
put that way, yeah, you could actually hear StrongWeakSWSW, I just never did! Interesting.
By the way, I just noticed my comment is truncated after “>Original Version”
sry, you may delete this but it seems whenever I write >Original Version the comments stops after that.
What I was saying is that I noted the absence of shownotes for Episode 3 in a comment you overlooked, so should I check the other episodes for you?