I think Parish and I were talking about this on the season finale of Retronauts: how I've put in way more hours actually listening to the Rockman Dash soundtrack than playing the game itself, which is called Mega Man Legends in the US.
The stars of the show are the opening and ending vocal themes, "Another Sun" and "Your Wind Is Blowing," performed by Reika Morishita.?I think these were actually cut out of the US release, though.
There's a lot of unique instrumentation, like how the melody of the theme song for the Bonne siblings sounds like it's being plinked out on a rubber band. To be sure, it sets the right mood for the quirky action scenes and colorful characters.
But a lot of the tracks have really short, simple melodies -- it's tough to really even call some of them "melodies," really, more like riffs -- that just repeat over and over. I think they were working under some tough restrictions here -- they obviously wanted to use high-quality samples, or maybe even CD audio, for these pieces. But that meant that each individual piece had to be really short so they could get a whole game's worth of audio. Hence, most of the tracks are under two minutes.
Anyway, for the real standout tracks (especially "Another Sun", I say again) this is worth a listen even if you never touched the game.
