"Challengers" is Yamamoto at his finest, applying light organ to a guitar to build the mood for battle and then going into complete overdrive mode for the main melody.
In fact, I applaud Team Entertainment for getting a few of the best tracks on there. The content on the disc itself isn't bad. Has Team Entertainment never heard of "Disc 2", or possibly even "Disc 3"? Or how about giving each game its own release apart from each other? My genius would be killing me if I didn't consider it common sense! It incorporates half of the scores for each game (and in any case, very few of the pieces that grabbed my attention originally). This includes four "arranged" tracks and almost everything else not looping. The official Dragon Ball Z -Budokai 1 & 2 Original Soundtrack clocks in at a miserable 68 minutes. The in-game soundtrack for Dragon Ball Z: Budokai clocks in at about an hour and a half, while the in-game soundtrack for Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 clocks in at about two hours. There's no need for gory details I have the statistics for how badly this soundtrack is put together right here in front of me. They decided to squeeze the soundtracks for two different games onto a single disc, give the majority of tracks only a single playthrough and still be stupid enough to omit seemingly every good piece of music from both scores. Then Team Entertainment released the official soundtrack for the games and managed to completely and utterly ruin everything. I hadn't heard from him since, but here he was just like he never left and at least three times as good as he was before.
#Dragon ball and dragon ball z ost series#
The most interesting part was that composer Kenji Yamamoto had played an active role in composing the music for Dragon Ball Z games on the Super Famicom, back when the series was all the rage in Japan, and had spawned some excellent arranged albums from the original scores. To be perfectly honest, these were two of the greatest scores I had heard in my life. And just for good measure, some tracks made the funk meter go through the roof with crazy techno rhythms and awesome psychadelic melodies. At other times, it would be an all-out hellfest that gave even the best Guilty Gear piece a run for its money. At times it would just be chugging along, only to be picked up by a series of electronic samples and frantic drumbeats before going into a wonderful climactic interlude. Rather, this was crisp, light rock mixed with techno elements to create some of the most powerfully epic melodies I had heard in a long time. This wasn't heavy metal like the Guilty Gear series. and succeeding! My fetal position quickly adjusted to that of a rabid Dragon Ball Z fanboy about to witness the Cell Games for the first time as I gave the computer my full, undivided attention for the next four hours. Instead of music fit for a bad Genesis game, I was greeted with the sound of an electric guitar attempting to shake the heavens with the power of melody. with brave release, I allowed the sound to enter my ears. From my balled-up position I could hear the echoes of sound waves as the rip for the first Budokai started playing. Upon firing up the game, I braced myself for Faulconer's screechy, whiny synthesized score by balling myself up in a fetal position with my hands firmly covering my ears. Afterall, Dimps was primarily a developer for the Japanese audience (they made the Rumblefish games) and I wasn't sure how Nihonjins would take to Bruce Faulconer's US score for the Dragonball Z series, which was the material I was expecting to be used for the soundtrack. Still, as a game music fan, I was curious how the music was going to be handled. I followed the Dragon Ball series during its mega-popular run in the US and I largely enjoyed it, but by the time the Budokai games were released my interest in the series had gone the way of the Ginyu Force.