Soundtrack?

[Necrosaro]

So, as iI understand it the first official US release, the one available through Mangagamer had a different OST than the original game, leaving out many of the iconic songs, like Dear You. Will this be remedied for this release? Will we be getting the FULL and original soundtrack or wil this be the neutered version,? This will pretty seriously be a deciding factor on whether or not i spend money on this.

[Ohagi-Chan]

It will only have the soundtrack that MangaGamer has the liscense to use, that means it will undoubtedly have a similar soundtrack to the previous version they released. That version did include many instrumental versions of Dear You, but not a lyrical version. I don't know what product the lyrical version first appeared in. For all I know, lyrics didn't appear until the anime.

The best place to truly confirm your suspicions would be the ask.fm page for mangagamer, which is the main place they have been posting their updates.

[Ohagi-Chan]

Keep in mind that Dai, one of the original composers and also the person who wrote the majority of the Kai arc music (including Dear You) did cooperate with MangaGamer to produce some of the music that replaced the original soundtrack when MangaGamer released their localisation in 2009.

Edit: Oh, but don't be epecting Dear You to show up in this arc because it first plays during the "Opening Credits" to the fifth arc, to my memory.

[Yirba]

!!! NOTE: The following post is outdated. MangaGamer subsequently announced that the Steam release will indeed feature the original soundtrack as used in the Japanese PC release.


This release will utilise the same soundtrack as MangaGamer's previous release of Higurashi. To elaborate on that:

For the first four chapters of Higurashi (Onikakushi-hen to Himatsubushi-hen), in the original Japanese releases, none of the music was composed specifically for Higurashi. Instead, these chapters only featured pre-composed royalty-free music obtained from a couple of sources. Some of these tracks were originally in MIDI format, and were converted to MP3s. Infamously, these are extremely poor quality conversions.

Due to rights issues, it was not possible to use these tracks for MangaGamer's release, so they were replaced with different music. These are higher quality tracks that many consider to be better than the originals, and I'm inclined to agree.

Starting from the fifth chapter, Meakashi-hen, original music was composed for the series by a number of different composers. Unfortunately MangaGamer were not able to get all the composers on board, but all the best known tracks are present, including those from composer dai. In fact, it's worth noting that MangaGamer were able to get the rights to some incredible tracks that weren't even present on the official soundtrack CD.

As for this thing you call "Dear You"… In truth, there isn't actually a single track called "Dear You". Let me explain: These sound novels do have an instrumental track called "you", as well as a bunch of other instrumental tracks that use the same motif, such as "Thanks" and "Confession". However, there is no vocal version of "you" in these sound novels. An image album named Dear you does exist, which is where that title comes from. However, when most people say "Dear You", they are actually referring to the track "you - Visionen im Spiegel", which was first featured in the Kakera-Musubi image album, and later in the Higurashi Kaku anime.

As you can see, it's quite complicated, but the important thing is that the versions of that particular track that were in the sound novels in the first place, are still present in MangaGamer's version.

[Necrosaro]

AHHH! Thanks for the replies! From what i had read it made it sound like the original game had original music which was replaced with the inferior ones. I had also thought that the "you" songs were all just different lyrical arrangements of "xxx You" fit to each character that all stemmed from a instrumental on the original soundtrack. Still comparatively new to this whole VN thing, so it's hard to sort out some of this info. I thought an "image album" was just an OST but with an artbook or something to go along with it, meaning all the music in it was directly from the game. Never knew they were things produced entirely separately.

Thanks for the replies everyone, again!

[Crystalis]

we need a patch for the original japanese soundtrack. it's uncomparable to everything. simply amazing and way better than mangagamers.
At least the experience from the game is way better.

[Chaos_Alfa]

Originally posted by Gisol:

we need a patch for the original japanese soundtrack. it's uncomparable to everything. simply amazing and way better than mangagamers.
At least the experience from the game is way better.

This version has the original soundtrack.

http://blog.mangagamer.org/2015/04/03/anime-boston-announcements/

"The BGM that were replaced in the initial release will be restored to the original versions"

[Proxiehunter]

Originally posted by Chaos_Alfa:

Originally posted by Gisol:

we need a patch for the original japanese soundtrack. it's uncomparable to everything. simply amazing and way better than mangagamers.
At least the experience from the game is way better.

This version has the original soundtrack.

http://blog.mangagamer.org/2015/04/03/anime-boston-announcements/

"The BGM that were replaced in the initial release will be restored to the original versions"

The problem is this thread that was accurate when it was made got posted long before it was announced that Higurashi was being released with the real music. So it's still around providing inaccurate and misleading information.

[Ohagi-Chan]

I'm which case Necrosaro should update the thread description, though I doubt that he is still reading or they might post once in a while.