Fighter's Ragnarök (MSX2) Original Soundtrack

 A soundtrack rip before I head off to a convention? Now where have I seen that before?

Yup, we're doing this again, and this time we're taking a deep dive into the depths of the library of the MSX2, a legendary Japanese home computer of the 80's. Having never officially released in the United States, my knowledge on the system itself was always quite limited, only being able to experience the platform through emulation and yearly trips to the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo (if they have one set up that is). Turns out, it had something of a doujin soft scene in the 80's and even up into the 90's.

For those not in the know, very early readers of this blog may be familiar with the term from my repeated mentioning and fascination of the doujin soft title Rosenkreuzstilette. Indeed, that game was a then-modern example of doujin soft. Kuru Ball, which I mentioned back in 2020, also counts as an earlier example of a Windows-based doujin soft title. In a way, they are self-published independent games released at trade shows and conventions for people to buy, but usually had limited demos available for download online. Understandably, this resulted in pretty much every doujin soft title being exclusive to Japan, and some never being archived in full and/or re-released officially. Today's subject, on the other hand, was lucky to escape being lost media thanks to being archived in full:

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Fighter's Ragnarök, a doujin soft fighting game released for the MSX2 by the circle Delta-Z in 1997 (with further bugfixes and an English version in the following year). The game features a lot of the charm of a late 90's doujin title, with the novelty of being such a late release for the MSX2, a system that, by 1998, was being effectively replaced by the modern-day Microsoft Windows computer. Players pick one of seven characters and attempt to run a ladder of multiple opponents, including a secret gag fighter, the final boss, and a hidden final boss. It has full two-player support and each of the game's playable roster comes packed with special moves to fight with. The only caveat with the game is it requires quite the beefy machine to run, being such a late release for a computer model that originally debuted in 1985 and needing all the power it can get to load into battles without struggling with loading screens.

Contributing to the game's obscurity, search results for this game are muddied by other games and media with the name "Ragnarök". The game has a decent number of results on Youtube, including a rip of the game's battle themes from back in 2012, and some coverage on MSX database websites but very little else. Heck, I can count the number of times the manga and anime series Record of Ragnarök appeared in search results whenever I tried to search for Fighter's Ragnarök data, even using the game's original Japanese title (ファイターズ・ラグナロク). Surprisingly, the game's official web site is still intact, with a dedicated site for Fighter's Ragnarök and an archive of the original Fighters Ragnarök site from the 90's. Unfortunately, Delta-Z's run was short-lived, and plans for a sequel to Fighters Ragnarök as well as a shoot-em-up project, HaZard, went belly-up when Delta-Z's doors closed around 2003. While the Fighters Ragnarök section thankfully still works and contains all the original images posted almost 25 years ago, the HaZard page turns up nothing and the Fighters Ragnarök 2 site only gives this mysterious "Keep Out" image. Perhaps they would have been new fighters in the sequel? The world may never know...

Now where were we? R-Right, the music. The soundtrack for Fighter's Ragnarök was surprisingly easy to rip, if only thanks to the "Music Mode" accessible from the title screen. It was however very time-consuming, taking me pretty much all of Friday afternoon to get the entire song list recorded and converted to mp3 format between both errands and a friend dropping by for a few hours. Plus, some of the songs had loop points that were difficult to determine through ears alone. All of the songs were recording through OpenMSX running default settings, so I'm not entirely sure if there's any way to make the songs come out at a higher quality at this time. That said I think this is a confident enough rip that I can share it online and not have to worry about revisiting this game's soundtrack for a re-rip in the near future. In total, there are 25 songs composed by HAKASE covering the various menus, all the fighters, and their associated endings. The assigned year is the release of the English version ('98) and not the year the game originally came out ('97) so make of that what you will.

Before this blog post gets too long with another big paragraph, I'm going to cut it here and leave you with the download for the full Fighter's Ragnarök soundtrack. As for what's next, I got a few things I need to get back to writing, if only to diversify this blog with more than just summaries of events/conventions I attend while getting back into the swing of getting more productive with art and spriting.