I defecated bricks

AWJ · Post by **AWJ** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 2:58 pm

Listen to track 9 of the NSF rip of "Akagawa Jirou no Yuurei Ressha"

(I've never played this game, but I gather it's a text adventure based on a Japanese mystery novel. Track 9 is the ending music)

Next, listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTiRLELxTLQ

("Setsunakute", an image song of the character Umi Ryuuzaki from the 1990s fantasy anime Magic Knight Rayearth)

tokumaru · Post by **tokumaru** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 3:04 pm

And how did you find that out?!

The songs are nice, BTW. I have watched a lot of MKR, but not listened to many songs.

clueless · Post by **clueless** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 7:03 pm

I don't get it. For those of us who don't understand Japanese, what is significant about the youtube video and the NSF (which I don't have access to), and what does it have to do with shitting bricks? Inquiring minds want to know.

RushJet1 · Post by **RushJet1** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 8:08 pm

clueless wrote:the NSF (which I don't have access to)

what an appropriate username!

tokumaru · Post by **tokumaru** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 8:42 pm

clueless wrote:the NSF (which I don't have access to)

Come on, you can't go to Google and paste the name of the game + "NSF"? It took me 10 seconds to find it.

Anyway, the thing is that they're basically the same song. It's the exact same melody. I have no idea who copied who, or if the composer is the same, but they are just too similar for this to be a coincidence.

AWJ · Post by **AWJ** » Sat Nov 13, 2010 10:24 pm

tokumaru wrote:And how did you find that out?!

A random Nicovideo comment, by way of a 4chan /a/ thread... it's a long story

So I did a bit of research. The "Yuurei Ressha" music was composed by Koichi Sugiyama, as should be obvious just by listening to the NSF... the resemblance to Dragon Quest music is palpable. The music in the Rayearth anime was composed by Hayato Matsuo, whom you could pretty much have called Sugiyama's protégé at the time: Matsuo broke into anime and game soundtracks respectively by arranging Sugiyama's Dragon Quest music for the Dai no Daibouken anime, and by working with Sugiyama and Hitoshi Sakimoto on the Megadrive version of Master of Monsters.

Rayearth was Matsuo's second anime project after Dai no Daibouken (and his first actually composing rather than arranging), and Sugiyama was credited as "music supervisor" for the series.

So I guess what happened is Matsuo got Sugiyama's permission to "recycle" one of his mentor's old and obscure compositions ("Yuurei Ressha" came out in 1991 and doesn't even have a J-Wikipedia page) as a Rayearth image song...