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Weekly Update - Week off; Beast Signer OST
4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago196 words
MusicMusic Album Time OffWeekly Updates
I already wrote ∞ a personal post about how I took this week off due to depression (did you know antidepressants are probably placebos?) ∞, but I've at least kept up the weekly music album thing, so here's this week's!



This is the soundtrack for that game called Beast Signer that I worked on back in 2007-2008 and - shockingly - never finished! Since I composed this soundtrack around the same time as some early MARDEK and Raider ones, it's similar to those in general style and competence.

Link: [LINK]

Looking back on this game, it was such a shameless Pokemon clone - combined with aspects of Digimon, even! - and it's not well-made at all, but some people seem to have fond memories of it at least. Maybe this music might be interesting to them.

This is the last album that I have where I need to convert my midi files to wavs/mp3s. So that's a bit of a milestone. I still have a bunch more left to upload though!

I'll get back to work on Atonal Dreams next week.

8 COMMENTS

Maniafig222~4Y
Beast Signer! I did like playing that back in the day, so the OST is pretty nostalgic. My favourite track is the one for the Arena battles. I actually have a copy of that track on my PC, downloaded years ago. The OST is definitely stylistically similar to MARDEK and Raider as you say. Would you say the same about the OSTs for Atonal Dreams and Memody?

I can understand why you didn't stick with it, though, since it was so derivative, and the whole idea of having to meld together beasts to raise their level cap and accumulate skills sounded like a big pain to actually balance.

It's interesting how you somewhat predicted the idea of 'wild non-Legendary Pokémon boss battles' with the boss of the first mission being a Stoat.

I wonder what your thoughts will be on Miasmon when you get there, since it shares the same main inspiration.

I also did read the other blog, might as well reply to that one in this comment too.

I never knew antidepressants were placebos w.r.t. depression. I do know someone who had them prescribed for reasons unrelated to depression, what exactly do antidepressants do if they don't mitigate the effects of depression?

Interesting that the excerpt also mentions unpublished data hidden by drug companies. There is at least a core truth to anti-Big Pharma nuttery, in the sense that corporate greed will drive companies to lie, cheat, hide the truth, pollute and falsely litigate when it's financially beneficial to them.

I've recently played Telepath RPG: Servants of God, a rather odl flash game by this point, which came out in 2009 I believe. It's not entirely polished, but I did at least find its antagonists interesting, since the main villains are a theocratic cult.

Usually in stories with those, they're either wrong about their god's existence, or the god does exist and is actually evil, or there's some other big twist like that. But in SoG it's entirely kept ambiguous. You can even beat the final boss through a long dialogue tree, skipping the fight entirely. I found that interesting. [LINK]

I've also been playing and really enjoying a Pokémon fangame called Xenoverse: Per Aspera Ad Astra! [LINK]

I've been consistently impressed by the quality of the soundtrack, polish and overall design of the game. It's really scratched an itch for me that I've not had scratched since back when generation 5 came out. I had a lot of fun just planning out my team, since there's so many new Pokémon I wanted to try out: [LINK]

It seems like something you'd enjoy!
2
Tobias 1115~4Y
Memody's soundtrack feels completely different to anything else I've written due to the call-response nature of the songs! Even the non-song pieces were deliberately minimalist in a way that's different to what I usually do.

Nobody even knows what antidepressants do, from what I can tell! Or it seems that each different type has a completely different effect - some increase serotonin, some lower it, some have no effect on it - but they're all used for the same purpose. The whole thing feels like something we might look back on as a culture with bemusement in the future... Like phrenology etc.

There are a lot of surprising similarities between that Servants of God thing and stuff I've been recently making! Strange that I never played it; if it's that old, it must have been around at the same time as MARDEK, and I know I had some brief correspondence with its creator around that time... Maybe I should play that! I'll keep it open in a tab.

I had a look at that other thing, and went to their website, but it's not in English and the layout is unclear to me! I've never played a Pokemon romhack or fan game - I suppose they're different things - since I've always been the sort of player who prefers the vanilla, unmodded version of everything (it probably has something to do with appreciating the developers' intentions as one myself). I do look up 'fakemon' designs fairly often though, and it might be interesting to see what fans distilled from the series to get a better understanding of what other players like. How's the in-game dialogue though, if the team aren't navite English speakers?
1
Maniafig222~4Y
Servants of God isn't a free game, so I suspect that kept it from getting big like its peers (MARDEK, Sonny, Epic Battle Fantasy) around the same time did.

Sadly this is the only time the dialogue trees get this extensive, most other boss battles can't be avoided by talking it out, at most you can choose to talk or to just get right down to battling.

It's weird to me that they didn't have an English version of the site, I just had google autotranslate the site's text to Dutch for me. There's a big, green download button on the main page that downloads the launcher .exe file.

I think the last time I played a vanilla Pokémon game was Pokémon Y. I'm not sure if I could even go back to playing them that way after getting used to playing romhacks and all the conveniences that come with playing on PC!

This game is easily my favourite set of fakemon I've seen! They even all have full Sugimori-style artwork alongside gen 5-style animated 2D sprites and backsprites in battle. Apparently the project took 5 years to make, I'm impressed how much effort they put into something entirely free! [LINK]

The human character designs are also quite neat overall, I like how many characters have outfits inspired by Pokémon, which is something I think the main series should do more considering how central Pokémon are the human culture.

The translation's probably the weakest element of the game, there's a lot of instances of clumsy wording and sometimes sentences that just don't really make sense. One particularly amusing example is there being a character with the name "Wallace Daddy", who usually gets referred to by just his surname. This predictably leads to some bizarre dialogue! [LINK]

The translation also has a bit of anime subbing syndrome where the translation is more coarse than the original Italian version, it's never worse than characters saying words like "damn" or "bastard", but it doesn't really fit the tone of the series.
1
Marwan6~4Y
Yes, BEAST SINGER!!! I played the game some months ago. Although I couldn't understand how to play the game until the place I got lost. I still liked it very much. I only made the quiz and talked to some NPC in a house and that's when I didn't know what to do next. Since it's not finished I would still see how long and fun the game really is. I wanna get some more adventure in Beast Singer. I will definitely play the game again someday.

Have a great day and week. We will see how the progress goes on Atonal Dreams and I hope you can deal with your depression better than this week.

Ps: I would like to buy the Orginal SoundTrack as quickly as possible. I still haven't bought the ARDRUNGS album yet.
3
Aberrsary4~4Y
It's actually pretty wild to me that you're going through and converting your old midis because I actually did the exact same thing! I had all the old midis saved from when they were available on Fighunter, and some time last year I was organizing music on my phone, so I converted the midis to MP3s so I can move them over; even did up the metadata and made album art :p

Might just buy the album anyway though, for the sake of having it!
1
Tobias 1115~4Y
Interesting! I'm glad my music was valuable enough for you to bother doing something like that with it! I'm curious though about your methods, since to accurately 'convert' the midis to mp3s/wavs, I had to play them and record the output, which has been quite time-consuming. Did you do something different? I also wonder what you did with the album art!
0
Aberrsary4~4Y
Nope, that's exactly how I did it! I think I used some software to queue all the midis and batch convert them; but it still had to process through the full runtime of the songs, which took some time

For the album art I just took the game logo, set it over a light blue gradient, and gave it a dark blue trim. Nothing special, but I *hate* having absent album art in my collection >:T
1
RandomNom3~4Y
I miss this so much! I know you probably took it down for a good reason, but I would love to be able to play that alpha again. I played it several times over the course of my childhood, and it always fascinated me. I always thought the story was cool—being in a dystopian world and using a VR world as escapism, it had the potential to be neat! All the characters had charming dialogue, and the battles were honestly really fun! I liked experimenting with different evolutions, being able to raise up all the different kinds of beasts. It was really fun. I miss the music most of all though, I'm def gonna buy it, it's so memorable to me and I'm glad you're re-releasing it! But yeah, I just wanted to write my memories a little since it's been a good while since I've played it. I hope everything is going ok for you!
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