Mystic Ark OST Shinji Imada and Akihiko Mori Liner Notes Translation I want to create a strange, clear world, I thought - and the first idea that came into my head was a lone little imaginary island with nary a soul around. And within the alabaster shrine there lie a clock coldly ticking away and a music box, through which you can enter a variety of unique worlds...wouldn't that be interesting? And so the provisional title initially given to the game was "Mystic World." It didn't become the actual official title, but in the winter of '94, I asked Mr. Mori to compose the music for a game with this unique worldview. Eventually, he delivered a demo tape, and when I listened to it, it was clearly quite different from what I had envisioned for "Mystic World." We therefore began to have weekly meetings, where I forced Mr. Mori to entertain my wild ideas. And so, right before the creation of the masters in the spring of '95, I was supervising the production of the ending, and I felt unsatisfied with its brevity and lack of content - but the music, I found, more than made up for it. It was then that I realized that all the tracks perfectly depicted "Mystic World" and became part of the greater whole. These CDs contain the compositions that put the finishing touches on "Mystic Ark" - and they represent two discs of memories that I want to own myself. Shinji Imada, Producer --- "I sure composed a lot of tracks for this game..." Now that the composing for the game is almost finished and I'm practically done with the arrangements for the CDs, it's only natural for me to utter those words. For this project, Mystic Ark, a whole 51 tracks were actually used in the game, but when you count all the compositions that didn't fit the desired image and were scrapped or where the first half was good but the second half wasn't...where they had to be remade, I think the total number of compositions I created stands at over 100. Composing all those tracks, getting the data ready, and even creating sound effects while I was at it...no one's going to say that Akihiko Mori is a superman, but knocking out that volume of content in less than half a year is becoming a matter of course for me. (Actually, I was doing work on other games in between, too.) On the contrary: recently, it's like I've been afraid of having downtime in my schedule between jobs. Akihiko Mori, composer --- Translation by R. Capowski, RACapowski@sceneryrecalled.com, 6/8/17. This translation is unofficial and has not been sanctioned by the creators or licenseholders. Tip of the Alkaloid Bucket to game-ost.com for the liner note scans.