Subarashiki Kono Sekai Original Soundtrack :: Liner Notes Translated by PQTN

	Album Title:	Subarashiki Kono Sekai Original Soundtrack
	Record Label:	Square Enix
	Catalog No.:	SQEX-10100
	Release Date:	August 22, 2007
	Purchase:	Buy at CDJapan

Commentary

Tatsuya Shindo - Director

Creative producer Tetsuya Nomura gave us the mission to "make a game that fully utilizes all the functions of the DS" for our next project. We thought we should take the opportunity to create a novel game that would have never been developed otherwise. After making trials and errors for over two and a half years — a very long time frame for handheld games — it was Subarashiki Kono Sekai that was eventually released.

The development of such a game was full of challenges. There were battles simultaneously going on in the two screens, story developments inspired by horror movies, and the location the characters were to run around in was today's Shibuya. What kind of music could fit such a daring game?

The order we gave to Takeharu Ishimoto quite vague: "Please create various genres of music to reach our ears while we walk in Shibuya!" Although I wondered whether an order like this was acceptable, I was soon speechless by the samples he delivered. "This features vocals?", I thought. "Can the DS handle with vocal tracks? What about the ROM capacity? Still, this is incredibly cool!!" ... "Hmm, how would an battle become uplifting with this track?"

As a result of some hard management decisions, we gave up all of the planned compressed movies and passed the memory capacity to the music instead. This allowed us to finally accompany super high tension battles with vocal tracks. What do you think about this? Isn't it novel? It's damned good, eh?

Thanks to Ishimoto's music, Neku's Shibuya has a great presence about it. Subarashiki Kono Sekai's Shibuya is slightly different from our own thanks to him. Please get lost in this Shibuya by listening to this album. Oh, but please beat the game or you'll be diminished by reapers.

Publicity Team

This game has a close connection to music as seen by the many music-related words used in the game. For instance, samba, punk and R&B are used for the names of game's characters called "composers", "noise" is used to describe the game's enemies, and the protagonist Neku also wears headphones. When I play it, I find it impressive how music is naturally melded with the game despite the fact it is shifted according to the random transitions from field to battle and there are various styles of music present. Also, there is no other game to my knowledge that features as many vocal tracks as this one. Exactly what one would expect from a composer 'who would like to see if there is anyone who loves music more than him'. Ishimoto was a key part of Subarashiki Kono Sekai in many respects.