Well, the Tokyo Metropolitan Brass Quintet, who put out one of the best DQ arranged albums of all time, decided to do a follow-up. This time, they included a guest percussionist for certain songs, and even re-recorded some tracks that they wanted to improve upon from last time (such as "Comrades" from DQIV).

If you weren't/aren't attuned to the Brass Quintet sound, the additional percussion will probably help you enjoy this album quite a bit. I know I found it beneficial to have that additional instrumentalist to either set rhythm or add flourish to these different pieces.

On this album, they decided to arrange the track order by game release. I was surprised to find some back-to-back tracks that I truly enjoyed from a soundtrack I generally don't enjoy: Dragon Quest VII. The arrangements/performances found on tracks 10 and 11 are simply phenomenal.

I was disappointed that they didn't include any arrangements from Dragon Quest VI on this album. What happened? They just totally skipped it!

As I said about the previous Brass Quintet album, this one is a keeper. The Tokyo Metropolitan clearly has some amazing musicians on-hand, and I'm glad they were selected to record music from this fine set of games.

Reviewed by: Patrick Gann