December 31, 2000

Collections

Mahou Daisakusen

Platforms

Arcade

Companies

8ing Capcom Raizing

Genres

Shooter

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In an 2000 interview with the game's composer Atsuhiro Motoyama published in the Great Mahō Daisakusen OST liner notes, he stated he had a great deal of personal affection for the first game in the Mahō Daisakusen series since he wrote the music for it. Before he started to compose Dimahoo, he chose to go back and listen to the old songs from Sorcer Striker for reference.

In Sorcer Striker, he stated that the approach he took to the songs was "melodious and colorful", but for Dimahoo he decided to try something else, not over-emphasizing the melodies and instead attempting to evoke a sense of atmosphere. In his mind, by contrasting these two approaches he was trying to explore the theme of what background music is supposed to be:

"When a video game composer writes melodic, busy pieces with tons of notes, and lots of progressive, complex chord structures, those songs make a good impression on the listener as songs, and they can also be quite effective in making the stages seem more exciting… but if you make a single misstep in this approach, it's very easy for the BGM to stand out too much (of course, if you can pull it off, the results can be spectacular). For Dimahoo I tried to do "both" (melody and atmosphere)… but how do you think it turned out?"

He also stated that he was not only plagued with technical difficulties with his sound equipment, but his air conditioner also broke. This made his working experience worse for a few days as Motoyama was "extremely sensitive to the heat":

"The sun would gradually heat the room up by midday, and on top of that, there was heat from the three computers and a rack full of music modules… I wasn't going to get through this with some dinky little table fan! The repair guy couldn't come for three days, and during that time I filled a bucket with ice water and put my feet inside while I worked (yes, I really did this). Damn! Now I can't use the damper pedal on my keyboard!"

He also thanked composer Manabu Namiki for assisting him with assembling the game's music data, saying he was "very indebted" to him. The way Namiki handled the music data for Dimahoo was different compared to the way he normally did it. Although he endeavored to keep his original data clean and simple to understand, it ended up being "idiosyncratic and confusing", and Namiki ended up spending many extra overtime hours dealing with it. So, he expressed his gratitude towards him by thanking him for cleaning all that up.

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