Deep in the annals of the early internet one can find a YouTube oldie
by Rob Paravonian called Pachelbel Rant, a snippet from a musical
standup comedy routine. The set is a prototypical version of the “all
songs use the same chords” format, later covered to greater fame by
Australian comedy rock band Axis of Awesome.
Rob starts off with the Canon in D bassline.
It’s eight quarter notes that we repeated over and over again. They
are as follows:
and that’s all we got to play.
As a child I had the privilege of inheriting my older cousin’s SNES
console when he went off to college. In the box that his family
shipped over was a number of games, including a cult classic known as
The 7th Saga.
The 7th Saga was released in 1993 and by no means was a newcomer to
the JRPG genre. However in the US it was more famous as a notoriously
difficult title to complete.
I certainly felt the same, barely making it alive through the first
boss fight with Romus, even then with a great deal of grinding. It
wasn’t until much later that I found out the English localization of
the game had power scaling differences making it way more challenging
to complete than the original Japanese title.
Maybe it’s because of the unforgiving balance or the spooky ghoulish
opponents that I have such a chilling memory of it from childhood. Or
perhaps it’s the haunting soundtrack, composed by Norihiko Yamanuki
a.k.a. Bosatsu Beat.
I no longer remember where in the gameplay I heard it, but one track
that sticks out in memory is Valsu Saizer, named after the playable
priest-like healer character.
The bassline is surprisingly similar, but with a surprise major
supertonic in the second half to slip in a cheeky ii-V-I variant into
the following phrase.
The melody repeats itself on the way back, only this time it’s
accompanied by a descending bassline instead.
It should be no surprise that old soundtracks sound faintly Baroque.
For starters the game is actively seeking the medieval-fantasy
feeling. Something like Gregorian chant would be less anachronistic as
ecclesiastic background music, but Baroque elements are Close Enough™.
More importantly, techniques popular to Baroque like counterpoint and
basso continuo happen to work well with the technical limitations of
both the instruments of the Baroque period and hardware of the 8-bit
era. David Bennett has an excellent video essay that goes into this
topic in greater detail. It’s no wonder that something like the S.S.
Anne theme sounds almost like Bach 3-part invention.
