“I recently went on a trip with my closest friends to see my cousin and travel around Eagleland. Before we left the house, he handed me a pretty stone and said to collect some nice sounds with it on our roadtrip.
We were having a nice time seeing the sights one day when a vulgar looking man approached us and started swearing angrily. I sighed, picked up my bat, and gently rubbed the sound stone until it began to play.”
Yakuza 7 feels like a spiritual sequel to Earthbound / Mother games in all of the ways that matter. After beating up a bunch of hippies, cultists, and criminals I thought “Wouldn’t it be funny to remake the Yakuza 7 Yokohama battle theme using only samples from Earthbound?” So here we are.
The classic videogame 2x loop + fadeout
The only other things I used were a bit of EQ and the built-in effects available in the sampler plugins “sforzando” and “chipsynth SFC”.
released October 6, 2021
Big thanks of course to the Yakuza 7 composers for their great work on the game: Hidenori Shoji, Yuri Fukuda, Chihiro Aoki, Saori Yoshida
Huge respect to the original Mother and Mother 2 / Earthbound composers Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu “Hip” Tanaka for writing such eclectic music that set the template for how a goofy modern JRPG could sound like. It’s a testament to the variety of samples in the original Earthbound that I could come up with an idea so silly and pull it off without much trouble.
Other thank yous in order:
Ian Cowell, for being supportive and encouraging throughout the entire process. Without it I don't think I would have even started the project. Check out his Bandcamp page at:
iancowell.com
William Kage for hosting a massive library of SNES soundfonts & sample packs including the ones I used from Earthbound at
williamkage.com. Also check out his bandcamp:
williamkage.bandcamp.com
David Viens, owner of the synth company at
Plogue.com which created the two plugins I used for this “sforzando” and “chipsynth SFC”, as well as making many other wonderful near perfect retro synth emulations.
The ‘Cave of the Past’ horn sample. After demoing it for the opening synth line, I had a good laugh and knew that everything else would fall into place in making this silly idea a reality.
Other credits for the cover art:
Starmen.net - for the battle screenshot of Frank I got from their Earthbound walkthrough and modified
TragicManner, null & AppleKid - for the character name and main text fonts respectively