I’ll post them here and on Twitter every Tuesday and Thursday using the hashtag #KongsTdayTunes.

#12

Third game in a row from 1991. Peak nostalgia, I guess. I really liked this tune because of the odd tone/sound/instrumentation. This carries through the whole game, but I picked this song as an example because of the chill melody. It’s great to hear this semi-drone synth in up-tempo battle scenes.

Track: “Theme of Wei and Wu” (YouTube Link)
Game: Romance of the Three Kingdoms III: Dragon of Destiny (SNES, 1991)
Composer: Minoru Mukaiya

I’ll post them here and on Twitter every Tuesday and Thursday using the hashtag #KongsTdayTunes.

#38

The NES version of the first Romance of the Three Kingdoms game was my first exposure to China’s great epic novel and the historical period on which it’s based, but the SNES sequel absorbed far more of my time and entrenched itself as the standard to which I hold all strategy games.

Once you spend enough time on a strategy game that’s delimited in a way that many other “grand scale” staples of the genre aren’t (there are only so many specific generals, and the map is always the same shape and size), you begin to follow patterns. Each area has its own map and battle themes, and I made my home in one particular corner enough times to make this song feel like my own “toil and struggle” theme.

I like how the map themes are more ambient while the wartime themes pick up their melodies in faster, more desperate tempos. The battle version here is a short loop, so I’ve included it as a bonus.

Track: “Theme of the Frontiers” (YouTube Link)
Bonus: “War in the Frontiers” (YouTube Link)
Game: Romance of the Three Kingdoms II (SNES, 1991)
Composer: Minoru Mukaiya