Just about everything regarding Dragon Ball FighterZ has me all excited, but there is one detail in particular that has me at the edge of my seat. (Yes, we’re still talking about this game. You were warned.)
I won’t say I condone piracy, but when my high school friends experimented with it, I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit that I was happy to accept the fringe benefits. I distinctly recall one of them wanting to show me a Dreamcast fighter he had tried to rip called Guilty Gear X. I had heard good things and was excited to try it. We loaded the pirated disc into the Dreamcast – and got only the game’s soundtrack, set against a blank screen. My friend, disappointed, was about to throw the disc out, but I was hooked. I took it home with me that night, and Daisuke Ishiwatari’s incredible soundtrack came with me wherever I went from then on out. I eventually did buy the game when it came to PS2, but it never equaled the play time that it soundtrack got.
I had never heard anything like it before. The music was engaging, but not too obtrusive, as most good game soundtracks tend to be. The hard rock anthems, both exciting and encouraging of focused, intense battle, crystallized everything I felt watching anime and playing games. I eventually wore out that first CD before purchasing an official release, several times over. And this love endured, even when Guilty Gear went on a long hiatus. The special edition copy of Arc’s follow-up fighting game, BlazBlue, only earned a purchase because of its inclusion of a soundtrack, which was just as magnificent as its predecessors. In a way, it’s the most expensive rock album I’ve ever purchased. And when Guilty Gear Xrd finally came out, its soundtrack once more found its way into my permanent playlist.
Which brings me, finally, to Dragon Ball FighterZ. Beyond the fact that the game looks amazing and appears to play like a wet dream, the Guilty Gear-esque music is the thing that most excited me when I saw the trailer. And sure enough, the soundtrack was composed by Arc’s people. There has been no official word on the composer of the game’s soundtrack, but I am of course praying it is Daisuke Ishiwatari, Yoshihiro Kusano, or one of the other talented composers that made Guilty Gear and BlazBlue so special. I have Googled this every day since the game’s release, yielding very scarce details on the soundtrack (which implies that it’s not finalized yet). However, I am drooling over the fact that a producer noted that the soundtrack would take notes from memorable songs of the previous series. The possibility of a Guilty Gear style remix of Spirit vs. Spirit has me unreasonably excited for a song that I hardly understand the lyrics to.
The thing is, DBZ has NEVER had this kind of music, in any of its iterations. But it’s how it always felt to me. The sounds of Guilty Gear were always the ones that best captured the world of DBZ to me. And until now, that’s just been my own feeling. I’ve talking in the past about my love of Chrono Trigger’s soundtrack without having played the game, and maybe Guilty Gear started for me the same way; removed from the context of the game, these hardcore anthems spoke to my soul. To righteous fury in pursuit of victory, clashing with emotion beyond the literal lyrics of the piece. And to be teased that it’s coming to Dragon Ball Z…
I’ve already started making space on my iPhone for all the tracks.