Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Kowloon Cut-scene Music: 65 Tracks | Shenmue II

To help fully appreciate the wealth of tunes contained in the Shenmue games, long-time contributor and administrator of the Shenmue Dojo Ziming has been working on a long-term project over a number of years (with input from other members of the community): to create several high-quality compilation videos for the in-game and cut-scene music.

Image credit: Riken Productions
This latest offering, which he has just released, represents the last entry in a project covering Shenmue II music and is a compilation of all the cut-scene music from the Kowloon area. In this single area alone, there are a staggering 65 cut-scene tunes representing almost three hours of music.

Character-Themed Compilations


Ziming was inspired to start putting together Shenmue II music compilations in 2012 after noticing that different sections of each game were strongly associated with a particular main character, acting as a theme and providing a natural way to divide them up.

Hence in this new compilation for Kowloon, the theme character is Ren; the other compilations each have their own associated character such as Joy for the Aberdeen in-game music compilation, and Shenhua for the Guilin compilation.

Still-Image Sequences


Enhancing the experience further, each piece of music has been given a descriptive title, and is accompanied by a series of still-image screenshots from the relevant scene in the game, which I found really adds to the atmosphere.

Although it would have been easier to show a single unchanging image, for example, Ziming wanted to spend the extra effort to integrate a sequence of images in this way because it better reflects how the music is experienced when playing. His aim was "to mimic that feeling for the player as they listen to the music."

Kowloon Cut-scene Music: 65 Tracks


The full music video "Shenmue II Music: Kowloon Cut-scenes (Compilation)" is embedded below.

Beneath the video are image links to each of the individual tracks, opening in a new tab.


01. Kowloon Introduction

02. Ren's Hideout

03. Joy's Bike

04. Great View Herbs

05. Yang

06. Splitting Up

07. Dou Niu's Trap

08. Breaking Out

09. Ryo & Ren's Escape

10. Hiding from the Yellow Head

11. Forcing Through

12. Place for the Night

13. Rooftop Camping

14. Morning Escape

15. Elevator Ambush

16. Set Free

17. Joy in Kowloon

18. Payback

19. Searching Tapes

20. Playing Tapes

21. Kai's Musical Cut-scene

22. Kai's Performance

23. Following Yuan

24. Head or Tails

25. Hiding from Dou Niu

26. Finding Zhu's Location

27. Crossing Planks

28. Zhu's Hidden Room

29. Yuanda Zhu

30. Followed by Yuan & Dou Niu

31. Hong Kong Battle

32. Thousand White Convent

33. Outside Convent

34. Yuanda Zhu's Whereabouts

35. Predictive Explosion

36. Iwao's Old Friend

37. The Scout

38. Rod Stunt

39. Greg More

40. Chunyan Xu

41. What Awaits

42. Waiting for the Scout

43. Wong's Help

44. Black Suit Encounters

45. Yellow Head Battle

46. Waiting to Run

47. Sneaking

48. Caught

49. Running from the Yellow Head

50. QTE Fight

51. Yuan's Chainsaw

52. Yuan Fight

53. Yuan Prefight & Aftermath

54. Six Minutes

55. Master Baihu

56. Baihu Fight

57. Baihu's Defeat | Elevator Scene

58. Black Suits - 40th Floor

59. Black Suits Defeated

60. Up The Roof

61. Rooftop Confrontation

62. Dou Niu Rooftop Fight

63. Lan Di's Departure

64. Yuanda Zhu's Insight

65. Departing Kowloon


Links


The news and discussion thread for this video can be found here on the Shenmue Dojo forums (together with a link for direct audio download). Stop by and leave a "like" or note of appreciation for this latest superbly-presented compilation!

Which of the Kowloon cut-scene tracks is your favorite?
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1 comment:

  1. I have never heard of this game before. I do wish more people like you highlight the tracks played in games, because like some game songs I wasn't able to find the name of.Do you work at https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/to-pay-or-not-to-pay-someone-to-write-my-essay-for-me_b_14793970 as a senior lecturer? I got to see some articles there with your name. By the way, thanks for your post.

    ReplyDelete