GameOn - JVG Music Composers - Daisuke Ishiwatari

Daisuke Ishiwatari (石渡 太輔) is the man known for the concept, design, characters, art style, and music of the Guilty Gear series as well as the most recent IP BlazBlue.  What he does is what I aspire to do when I finally get into the interactive entertainment industry: have a solid concept of an entire game and stick to it.  In the various projects I have worked in the past, they have always been a collaboration of multiple ideas put together.  Collaboration is a beautiful thing, but it can be scattered and unorganized.  It also takes away a lot of the originality and main concepts that the original designer might have wanted.  This isn't to say that Ishiwatari did everything on his own.  Being born in South Africa and strictly forbidden from playing videogames drew his curiosity towards the subject and had him thinking about all sorts of designs and concepts for a game.  Once he acquired the skills to run his own team and create his first game, he touched upon a lot of the process in the game such as voice acting, story writing, character design, concept design, and the compositions to the music.  So he knew what he wanted and stuck with it, but admitted that he had a lot of help from the team which was also great.  He had a strong team backing him up on the project and has then gotten him the attention from the industry and its community.

So aside from his amazing background in the game industry, what is it about his music that made me inclined to talk about him in this week's GameOn series?  He doesn't come out with a ton of music each game using MIDI-like programs like ZUN does in his Touhou series.  The music isn't nostalgia-inducing with 8-bit music like Daisuke Amaya for Cave Story.  The tunes don't have the influences of classical, electro, and rock music such as in Michiru Yamane's compositions for the Castlevania series.  No, his compositions is influenced from a music genre I haven't heard in a videogame until I played Guilty Gear, and that genre is heavy metal:



Source to all 3 videos: Youtube Channel shinryuu10901

Guilty Gear (and I think even BlazBlue) has a LOT of references to metal and music.  One of the most obvious ones I can point out is the character Axl Low from the Guilty Gear game looking a lot like (if not identical to) Axel Rose from the band Gun n' Roses:

Source: http://www.videogamelookalikes.com/a-m.html

 I actually didn't get into metal until high school when a friend introduced me to music from Metallica, Dream Theatre, and such.  Before then, I was always under the impression that it was just loud drums and guitar with lots of screaming (granted the idea came from stereotypes in pop culture and my parents not listening to metal).  Did anyone hear any screaming in the three songs above?  No?  Good, then you can hear the amazing guitar riffs and powerful beats from the drums.  Daisuke Ishiwatari putting metal into a videogame genre without the vocals created metal with the whole song being one incredible solo (or that's one way to think about it).  The riffs are still complex, but it isn't muddled.  In fact, a lot of his music have a clear melody and audible instruments playing.  I say this because I have heard a lot of metal sounding like a jumble of noise and bass (metal fans tell me that those are the bad ones...unless you're high, then it sounds great).  But not all his music in his games are so heavy and dark.  In fact, some of them sound very happy:

Source: Youtube Channel nobodyknows182


Source: Youtube Channel serenade123


Source: Youtube Channel serenade123

Ishiwatari has come a long way from when he started Guilty Gear up to BlazBlue Continuum Shift.  One of the most facinating aspects of a fighting game (for me at least) is the stories and how each character interacts with each other (I mean, it's a fighting game, they all fight each other).  Sure, both Guilty Gear and BlazBlue has a convoluted story going on, but it's very intriguing how it plays out when going through each character's story.  The characters he creates are all eccentric and very out of the ordinary.  It ranges from interesting to humorous to down right creepy.  The gameplay emphasizes a lot on fluidity, combo making, and flashy animations.  The graphics are vibrant and the background is rendered in 3D for BlazBlue (2D for Guilty Gear).  But many people, including me, agree that the music that Daisuke Ishiwatri composed and recorded is one of the biggest highlights of his games.




Source to all four videos: Youtube Channel serenade123

Sorry, I would have given as much effort and love to the past three composers if I had more time. I started very very early on this post today, so I was able to put this all together. Please take the time to listen to the other composers music as well as Ishiwatari's.

Anyways, I do believe that wraps it up. BlazBlue was created in an unfortunate turn of events when Arc System Works lost the rights of Guilty Gear to Sega. A lot of the aspects of BlazBlue mirrors that of Guilty Gear. Despite that, BlazBlue is an amazing game and I do not regret one bit on purchasing the game (even though I barely have the time to play it). It's available on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, so pick up a copy if you like fighting games or like Ishiwatari's music.

Daisuke Ishiwatari, YOU ARE THE MAN!!!