Note: The DVD that comes with the soundtrack includes an animated promotional video for Emil Chronicle.

Hey look, another underdog MMO with a cute premise and catchy artistic/musical merits! The big question...are we tired of it yet? Has the market been saturated? I'm not sure. Yeah, Ragnarok Online and TalesWeaver both hold significant status, but even the smaller games (like Emil Chronicle) show some serious potential. To see a game truly succeed, it needs to do well in all aspects. So, what of the music? This album is the first of a multi-volume release covering the music from this new, Japanese MMORPG.

For the most part, I was impressed with the composers and synth manipulators who worked on this soundtrack. It's clear that, if these composers seek to emulate their more well-known musical peers, they hold Yasunori Mitsuda in high esteem. Traditional folk and Celtic instruments are found all over this soundtrack. Other songs take on a blatantly Western style (with that epic happy-ending twist, using a large strings section); this too could be pulled from Mitsuda, particularly his album "Hako no Niwa." I was also reminded of Kouhei Tanaka's work in Sakura Taisen V.

But enough of comparisons. Though there are plenty of other lines I could draw connecting this or that composer's work to Emil Chronicle, I think it's important to also recognize the originality of the album. This soundtrack is, on the whole, a relaxing album. The smooth-jazz-meets-World style has been done before, but not quite like this. I enjoyed so many of these songs, even the ones that use the often-irritating "house" loops for percussion.

The ending vocal, "Hold on to love" (sung by Aiko Kayo), reflects a lot of the power-acoustic J-Pop of the last two years. I am reminded of the work miz did for Grandia III, or the recent "Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology" opening piece "Kami Hikouki." The background vocals kill a lot of the pleasure I could have potentially gleaned from the album: they're simply too cheesy, too "Tokimemo" for my liking. But Kayo's performance, along with the instruments, make for a heartfelt and inspiring mid-tempo piece.

I was surprised by how good the music was for this album. There have been a lot of crappy MMOs released since their inception into the world of "popular" gaming, and with them, a lot of terrible soundtracks. This one rises above the crowd: check it out for yourself.

Reviewed by: Patrick Gann