In the balance between the rallying cries of romance and the inner life of characters they develop grand orchestrations with quiet and long lyrical ballads of an impressionist sort. Where (generally speaking) Western composers of fantasy epics emphasize the late-Romantic bombast of sweeping melodies and grand orchestration to build a sense of Wagnerian heroism and myth, Japanese composers like those mentioned above tend to strike a middle-note. While it’s hard to pinpoint a singular origin for this tradition, the imprint of Joe Hisaishi’s early cinematic work is hard to avoid, reflected in all sorts of epic fantasy soundtracks, from Nobuo Uematsu’s numerous Final Fantasy OSTs (1987-) or Yasunori Mitsuda’s Chrono Trigger (1995), all the way up to Yasunori Nishiki’s Octopath Traveler (2018). It would be easy to make dark, trying music to fit the theme, but Dale North takes, instead, the route that many a great Japanese composer has taken when it comes to melancholy in games: a mix of Romantic and Impressionist music. The Long Return is about a lost cub that is retracing the last journey with his mother, which is to say that it’s a game about memory and longing.
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