The Umamusume Musical Universe - PART 1: The Foundations
Pretty much everyone and their mothers knows that the Umamusume series has good music, it’s one of those universal constants that’s been long accepted when it came to Cygames projects, but whether you’re talking about the winning concert songs, the character’s solo songs, or the background music that plays in the game or the various anime, not a lot of people seem to be all too familiar with the actual people working hard behind the scenes to bring us this music - from composers, arrangers, producers, and lyricists, and also the many musicians bringing them to life with their performances.
This post is the first in a series meant to specifically highlight the many composers that have contributed a part to Umamusume’s vibrant and still growing musical universe. Where later blog entries will focus more specifically on the individual composers, their musical stylings, and their individual contributions, this post will serve more as an introduction to the Umamusume series’ musical footprint, and a ‘primer’ for future posts that will dive more into the specific people working on this series.
The Origins of Cygames' Sound Department
Today, Cygames has a large number of over 20 or so music composers working in-house at their offices, but did you know this wasn’t really the case for most of their previous projects? The company was founded with Akihiro Honda at the helm of its sound department. You might know him for the work he did at KONAMI for the Metal Gear Solid series, with some of his notable works being songs like Sins of the Father.
Yes, that guy.
When Honda first joined Cygames back in 2015, the sound department consisted of only a handful of people, with him not only working as a composer, but as sound producer too; doing broad-scale audio directing, handling budgets, doing outreach with outside companies, and doing overall quality control for all of the audio assets. During this time, Cygames took the approach of outsourcing a lot of their music to established composers working in the industry to ‘direct’ the initial musical direction of their games, with the idea being that in-house sound staff would mainly serve to work in between them and deliver music that can match their quality.
Princess Connect Re:Dive, for example, had its main themes composed by industry legend Kohei Tanaka, known for his work on One Piece, Sakura Wars, and Gravity Rush. From the instant that he heard Tanaka’s theme song, Lost Princess, Honda knew what direction he wanted the rest of the game’s music to take, and so in a sense, Tanaka’s music became the blueprint for the work that the other composers would take from. Of course, for the majority of the game’s development up to launch, Honda was the only composer internally at Cygames working on it, so a majority of its soundtrack consisted of tracks contributed by external composers, such as the aforementioned Kohei Tanaka, but also accompanied by Yasunori Nishiki (known for his work on Octopath Traveler), and many others. Many of these additional composers, including Tanaka himself, are composers affiliated with a music production company called IMAGINE, who are a core player in this industry we’ll learn more about in a future post.
This pipeline was largely the same with Umamusume, which as a project had been in development since 2016, but with a core difference: Cygames wanted to expand the scale of their in-house sound team, and ultimately rely less on outsourcing music. With external contractors, there’s a limit to the amount of material you can share due to NDA restrictions, the amount and the frequency of meetings you can hold with the composers, and there is an overall lower degree of flexibility in supervision. However, with an internal sound team, the entire scope of development is laid out transparently to the staff members, who are able to work closely with all of the available material to craft the perfect tracks for the assignment.
Umamusume’s '1st Vision'
In the beginning, it was decided that Umamusume’s musical direction would be a clear-cut collaboration between Honda, who would mainly be in charge of the in-game BGM, and Tetsuya Uchida (prev. sound producer for THE iDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls, left Namco Bandai to join Cygames in 2016), who would mainly be in charge of the vocal songs. One of the things you’ll hear most talked about when it comes to Umamusume’s development was just how rocky the path to get there was; the game was originally slated for a 2018 release, but was delayed to 2021 so that Cygames could essentially overhaul the entire game’s production. Umamusume Pretty Derby Season 1 would air in April of that year on its own, its existence essentially being an outlier in how it largely represents an older direction for the Umamusume project.
One of the aspects that came with this 3-year delay is that Honda now took it as an opportunity to redo the entire game’s musical direction, as he had felt the BGM created previously had ‘fallen behind’ with how steadily the rest of the game was progressing, especially in how expressive the 3D visuals had become. With the release of Season 1 of the anime, it gave them a better insight on scope, and in his own words, he sought to make the music feel more akin to what you’d hear in an anime, rather than what you’d typically associate with video game music. By his own admission, they had ended up remaking over 30 pieces of music - A not-insignificant number of tracks, especially when you consider that many full-fledged games release with much less.
Going back a bit, did you know that Umapyoi Densetsu was actually Honda’s first assignment for the project? This was the first song that fans’ were greeted to when Umamusume was first revealed in AnimeJapan 2016, and it was specifically created to give this initial PV an impact, and to give audiences a lasting first impression and show them that Cygames had big plans for the series.
You’ve probably heard the story already; “The composer didn’t know anything about writing denpa music, so he got drunk off two bottles of wine and finished it all on the spot!”, but this is mostly just an exaggeration taken from an interview. In reality, the only thing that he got out of that drunken state was a voice memo for what would become the main melody of the song. It is however true that this memo ended up also being the final version of the melody, as he stated that minimal changes were actually done to the original idea afterwards, aside from a few adjustments being done to the A section melody. At its core, it is still largely the same song that he drunkenly came up with that one night. In fact, the lyrics, which a lot of people tend to associate with the drinking, were written entirely sober, and were in fact ALSO just the initial scratch-demo takes he had sent in for checking, which the supervisors decided to roll with for the final song.
Umapyoi Densetsu as a song has the unique role of being the last remaining ‘pillar’ of Umamusume’s ‘1st Vision’; a song that was conceptualized in the very first stages of production, yet remained very much a part of the series’ soul, even as the direction, their goals, and ideals for the series changed over time. It is thus kind of heartwarming how much they love this song, how much importance Cygames places in it, and how willing they are to highlight it; they make sure to include it in every single non-OST WINNING LIVE album, they play it at the end credits of every one of the anime (not including Cinderella Gray… yet), and it is also the only song from the series thus far to have an actual English version!
More ‘Athlete’ Than ‘Idol’
Even though Umapyoi Densetsu is a beloved song with great deal of importance, at this point it no longer felt appropriate as a theme song for this new direction that Cygames had pivoted towards with Umamusume. Before, the Umamusume project seemed to largely focus more on the ‘novelty’ of the concept itself; a raising sim with cute horse girls who run in races, then sing and dance in a big concert afterwards - it was very much everything an idol series like THE iDOLM@STER was, save for the racing part. Hell, initially it didn’t really seem like Cygames was all too concerned about the more direct IRL horse racing parallels as much as they simply wanted to borrow the likenesses of famous Japanese race horses.
But with this new change in direction, they wanted to capture another side to the girls and lean into their struggles, their hardships, and the journey they each take to overcome those hurdles and become the best racers in their own way. Putting it that way, a hyper-energetic denpa song no longer feels too appropriate, doesn’t it?
GIRLS’ LEGEND U became that song; the new ‘main theme’ of Umamusume: Pretty Derby. By Honda’s admission, this to him was the ‘natural evolution’ of Umapyoi Densetsu; gone are the energetic dance beats, wotagei calls, and nonsense lyrics, GIRLS’ LEGEND U is here to tell a story about these girls and the hurdles they have to overcome to become the best racers they can be. The lyrics highlight their ambitions, their struggles, and they really capture those almost primal feelings of wanting to go out and run. It’s written to be an anthem, a sort of fight song that encapsulates all that it means to be an Umamusume. This is also sort of why the song appears throughout the game’s score; as part of the gacha menu, the pull BGM, and also arranged in various styles for the in-game story tracks.
Akihiro Honda once again served as the composer, but the arrangement of the song was done by Kenta Higashiohji, a composer at IMAGINE who previously contributed music to PriConne, and someone I’ll talk more about in following blog posts. In my opinion, it’s his work on the arrangement that helped define so much of the core “sound” of the Umamusume series moving forward; a strong combination of fanfaric brass parts, expressive string lines and woodwind flourishes, all over a highly energetic rock band instrumental. This base level combination of symphonic and rock elements would serve as the sort of ‘stylistic backdrop’ that a lot of the game’s musical identity would take from, and a lot of it is in part thanks to Higashiohji’s work on the arrangement.
Earlier, I briefly mentioned how Kohei Tanaka’s main theme for PriConne, Lost Princess, essentially served as the musical blueprint that the other composers would lift from for the rest of the soundtrack. GIRLS’ LEGEND U is this for Umamusume as a whole; even when not directly the work of Higashiohji himself, a good chunk of the musical contributions from both in-house Cygames and external composers would go on to be written in this same ‘rockestral’ style that was established with this one theme song. It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that future anniversary songs and anime theme songs like We are DREAMERS!!, Glorious Moment!, and U.M.A. NEW WORLD!! all essentially have GIRLS’ LEGEND U in their pedigree - kind of like its own Sunday Silence fostering the series’ musical identity, and serving as the foundation on top of which the rest of Umamusume's music would be built on.
Thank you for reading this first introductory post about a subject I am so incredibly passionate about and have been practically obsessed with for the past year or so. Next time, I’d like to dive into some of the individual composers by name and talk a bit about their contributions to the series specifically, and a little bit about their background and their musical styles.
A large majority of the research for this blog post was sourced from two interviews with Cygames’ Akihiro Honda about the musical pipeline at Cygames during the development of Princess Connect Re:Dive and Umamusume respectively, I implore you to read them on your own just because of how fascinating it is to get an insight on how a company like Cygames functions internally: