The Mahjong Touhaiden/ Ｔｈｅ麻雀・闘牌伝 OST

 

The seminal VGM podcast, The Legacy Music Hour, has just ended. It's a great show, and has turned us on to a lot of tremendous, obscure video game music in the past year or so. Episode 122: Mahjong Games is a personal favorite, and we owe Rob and Brent big time for leading us to the haunting, experimental soundtrack for Super Famicom game Ｔｈｅ麻雀・闘牌伝/ The Mahjong Touhaiden. The first track the show played from Mahjong Touhaiden, "Mister Diviner" (or "Mr. Oracle") is an odd, transfixing blend of buried spoken-word vocals, Reichian minimalist composition--Music for 18 Musicians is referenced explicitly--Noh percussion and orchestra hits. Other standouts are "Female Pope", "Dancing Princess", "Dark Side King", "Match 2" and the sublime "To the Waves". To our ears this music recalls at times Saeko Suzuki's score for Jun Ichikawa's No Life King.

Developed by Micronics and released on April 16 in 1993 by Video System/Khaos, The Mahjong Touhaiden is one of many anonymous mahjong games which never stood a chance to be localized for any market outside of Japan. LMH lists as composers Soushi Hosoi and Pirowo. SNESmusic.org doesn't list any other credits for either composer. The SPC file, from which I've ripped these tracks, can be found here.



TRACKLISTING
01. Opening (1:30)
02. Gambling Place (1:12)
03. Item Shop (0:34)
04. Great Rocker (0:57)
05. Force of the Tiger (3:52)
06. Mr. Oracle (4:56)
07. Female Pope (3:55)
08. Dancing Princess (4:43)
09. Good Luck Queen (4:33)
10. Dark Side King (3:17)
11. The Star (4:17)
12. Naniwa no Mahjong Shokunin (2:55)
13. To the Waves (5:10)
14. Path of Royalty (7:57)
15. Match 1 (2:22)
16. Match 2 (3:27)
17. Match 3 (0:47)
18. Match 4 (0:38)
19. Match 5 (1:13)
20. Match 6 (0:37)
21. Match 7 (1:57)
22. Match 8 (1:10)
23. Match 9 (0:38)
24. Fanfare 1 (0:05)
25. Fanfare 2 (0:04)
26. Fanfare 3 (0:09)
27. Ending (0:49)

PLEASE ENJOY!
(more posts soon, promise)