Ogre Battle Image Album ~The Entrance~

The Entrance is something else. For the most part, it's a disappointing image album for a game that had such incredible music. I'll get to the saving graces later in this review. The first complaint would be that only two tracks (one, really) contain melodies from the game. These two tracks are "Constellatus" and "Megalo Syntaxis tes Astronomias." All the other tracks are "inspired by". The music in these "inspired" tracks is non-melodic, dissonant, and inferior in all respects to the music heard in the game.

The tracks that have vocals ("Constellatus" and "SHADE OVER" in particular) contain some of the most poorly written lyrics I've heard in a while, and the male vocalist has an incredibly bad English accent. Just to give you an idea, here's an excerpt from "Constellatus": "Yes, it's the battle, human being confront with ogres a picturesque decay. They mess around, playing with sword." *Cringe* The narrator, who I swear is Michael Caine early in his career, does a decent job - but not good enough to compensate for the overall presentation of the one track in which he speaks ("Constellatus").

Now that I've ripped the disc to shreds, allow me to point out the silver lining. "Megalo Syntaxis tes Astronomias" is a well-arranged medley of seven of the best tunes from the game - most of which were composed by either Masaharu Iwata or Hitoshi Sakimoto. These two have done music for Tactics Ogre and Square's Treasure Hunter G. They also composed the song for the Final Fantasy Tactics movie on Square's demo disc and are working on the game's score as we speak. "Megalo Syntaxis" is 21'44", close to half the disc - so some may consider the single track alone reason enough to place an order. But wait, there's more! "Spectrum", the only "inspired by" track that I actually like, is a rocking song that is, indeed, "inspirational" at times. We now come to the final surprise. Risa Ohki, the goddess of game music, makes an appearance on "INNOCENCE". As always, she belts out a phenomenal performance - and luckily the lyrics are good in this one. Risa gets yet another chance to show off her multi-linguality, singing almost the entire song in perfect English. (There's one line of perfect Japanese.)

I did my best to bring out the strengths and weaknesses of The Entrance. People who are unfamiliar with Ogre Battle should obviously save their hard-earned yen for something else, but veteran players of the game may want to check it out.

The Entrance: Ogre Battle Image Album does have two saving graces, two great tracks. "INNOCENCE" is a beautiful song; though it has nothing to do with Ogre Battle and contains awkwardly written English lyrics, it is redeemed by the excellent vocal performance of Risa Ohki. Another track worth listening to is "Megalo Syntaxis tes Astronomias". This 21:44 minute track contains eight of the game's best melodies upgraded with a cool, funky, rocking style, while remaining true to the original composition.

So what is wrong with The Entrance? For starters, it is, well, a complete mess. The album just basically consists of dissonant cacophonies, along with two intolerable songs of poor English writing and a male vocalist (Moto Hara) with a weak English accent. Although it begins with a promising interlude, a spectacular upgraded version of the Overture over Paul Fitzgerald's fluid narration, it immediately dissolves into more noisy, intolerable cacophonies.

These cacophonies continue throughout the whole album, and they never seem to come to an ending result. For example, on the last track, the music doesn't "end", it just stops and we suddenly hear a loud explosion. Boom! That's the end of the album. A treatment such as this is enough to leave a bad taste in one's mouth, especially since the game itself had such incredible music.

The result of all this is an uneven image album that is only average. The two highlights of the album are the jewels, but whether they're worth the treasure hunt is up to you.