The Bride of Space-Time - by Wolf

Finding suitable game music to arrange and orchestrate isn't always that easy. The main body of MSX games dates back to a time when music was relatively short. As an arranger, a short loop is tough to expand upon, and even Konami's body of quality work mostly consist out of short loops. These sound well in their games, but on their own they are merely what they are: short. Kogado's Jikuu no Hanayome has been on Wolf's wish list for years. It's not a game known for its overall quality. The graphics aren't bad, the music uses only three channels on FM-PAC and the game itself (an RPG) has nothing of the quality which Konami, Falcom and Micro Cabin offered. Not by a mile.

Still, for Wolf the music of this game always had something attractive. It was however not quite possible to obtain all the music directly from the game, so the idea ended up on the shelves. The outcome of this forum thread finally put new life into the concept again. It's not the first time a practically unknown Japanese game moved Wolf into arranging it; the even more obscure Galaxy Hero Legend 2 by Bothtec has an intro which he stretched to over twenty minutes in length.

The music of Jikuu no Hamayone (also known as Time Lady and Heroic Fantasy of Citadel with the current title suggested by Sama), while not a high end production, is thematically rich. This creates opportunities to orchestrate the game into a large scale work, which is exactly what it is. With over eleven minutes it contains almost all the music from the game, the 'rejected' tunes were just too obscure or short to make them fit. If anything, Jikuu no Hamayone proves that three-channel music has all the potential to be orchestrated into a score for over 30 instruments. As with his other projects, there's a bit from Wolf himself inside the project. Partly to glue the individual bits together, partly because it's simply great fun. According to Wolf, orchestrating this particular game was very entertaining. For people who never heard of this game before, Vampier recorded the intro a while ago.

Relevant link: The Bride of Space-Time