Music Monday: September 9, 2024

Estimated reading time: 4-5 minutes

Remember when I used to do Music Mondays? As I’m easing back in to writing regularly, I don’t know if I can commit to doing them every single Monday, but I’m going to experiment with what intervals of posting these are sustainable for me. You’ll see why as you read on: strap in and prepare yourself for a mini manifesto! (Click here for the TL;DR if you don’t wanna read all that!)

Today’s Music Monday features music from the video game known in the U.S. as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. For those unfamiliar with the game, the player/protagonist is a defense attorney named Phoenix Wright, tasked with clearing his clients’ good names through crime scene investigation, witness interviews, and courtroom antics. It’s a romp of a time, especially if you (like me) enjoy truly terrible puns.

This game was first released in Japan on Gameboy Advance in October 2001 and made its English-language debut in 2005 on Nintendo DS. I did own both systems, but somehow I had never heard of this original game and subsequent franchise releases until 2020, when my partner and I played the initial game trilogy together during the pandemic lockdown. Recently, we spent an evening re-listening to the entire original soundtrack for the game trilogy, and I was blown away by how many layers and details there are in this soundtrack that I had never fully noticed during gameplay.

In general, I feel that video game music is not given as much respect as film music has grown to receive, even though both serve similar purposes as just one component of a larger work of art. Much is made among professional musicians about the brilliance of John Williams’ music in many popular films (including Star Wars, Superman, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Jurassic Park, the first three Harry Potter films, and countless others), and there are even radio stations that regularly dedicate chunks of time to playing film music exclusively as part of their weekly programming. The same cannot be said of video game music (yet).

In a lot of ways, I believe video game composers actually have a much more difficult task than film composers. Ever since the early days of “talkies”, film composers have had the advantage of using live instruments and even entire orchestras to produce their sound; they have always been able to write fairly straightforward orchestral works to accompany the larger work of art. In contrast, video game composers have always had to contend with the limitations of the technology that brings their artistry to the masses.

With only a few channels available to them for sound—and with at least one always taken by the sound effects of the game itself—early video game composers were challenged to create music worlds with limited instrumentation possibilities. Imagine having to write a novel using only 10 different words throughout the entire work; that’s analogous to the Sisyphean task laid out before these intrepid musicians.

I do not mean to suggest that film composers don’t have their own challenges. However, I would say they are the Fred Astaire to video game composers’ Ginger Rogers. Backward and in heels, video game composers have wrestled with numerous other demands on their art form. They have not only had to contend with the limitations of the available sound channels on a given gaming system, but have also been hampered by the tinny, compressed sounds of whatever sound file is imitating the musical instruments whose true timbre can only be heard when a human plays it.

Not only that, but the nature of most video games demands background music that loops indefinitely for the majority of the gameplay, where one user might spend 20 minutes or 20 hours in the same stage of the game. Given the long hours a player might spend listening to the same music, it must also be interesting enough to keep their attention, but not so active as to be obtrusive to the gameplay.

On top of all that, video game composers follow the same conventions as film composers, creating leitmotifs representing the characters, locations, feelings, and narrative themes of the game. Like film composers, they also create music that changes in time with what is happening in the larger art form. And finally, they write on deadline—some franchises notoriously churn out games in rapid succession, and video game release dates are rarely pushed back. In short, video game composers fulfill a million demands on their work to create a product unified with all the other elements of the game!

I could go on about the complexities of video game composition, but I have digressed quite enough for today. Rather than continue blathering on, I’ll illustrate the point with this track from Phoenix Wright, composed by Masakazu Sugimori. Translated as “Pursuit – Corner the Culprit (Variation)”, this particular music plays in the final part of the trial, when Phoenix successfully reveals a witness as the true culprit beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Listen to all the layers in this one track: you have the main melody on the top, the drum beat underneath, a persistent rhythm providing the forward driving motion, a countermelody in the middle voice, a bass holding down the harmonic foundation, and the orch hits punctuating everything over the top. It is an absolute marvel that such a thrilling and supremely satisfying track resulted from the use of only 6 channels.

The whole trilogy’s soundtrack is fascinating to listen to in its entirety, especially if you have played through the games. Various musical themes are brought over as elements of multiple tracks, connecting people and places to each other and yet differentiating them through different articulations and rhythms. Character development is foreshadowed through subtle appearances of musical ideas heard for protagonists or antagonists. The music from the two later games even includes various elements referencing what was written for the earlier game(s), despite having completely different arrangements, melodies, chord progressions, and even composers.

TL;DR: video game music and composers are underappreciated, and the Phoenix Wright soundtrack is an example of why.

Now enjoy it, and try to appreciate all the thought and care lovingly bestowed upon every note!