Friday, April 5, 2024

Mangchi The HammerBoy (PC) Audio Rip

Since times have still been a bit slow and light in productivity for my liking lately and I've just begun to warm back up into doing bigger projects, how about another soundtrack rip to pass the time? This one came by rather sudden, as it's a very obscure little gem that even I, someone who knows way too much about obscure games, completely passed on back then until a streamer I started following since last year did a surprise longplay of it live on their Twitch channel back in March.

That's right, we're traveling to Korea to experience the one and only Mangchi the HammerBoy.


Released in the year 2004 as a loose adaptation/licensed title for the similarly-titled "Hammerboy" anime film based on the manhwa of the same name, Mangchi the HammerBoy is a simple 3D platformer exclusive to Windows PC. Owing to its obscurity, it has very little documentation online, and what documentation exists in English is extremely brief. What's most notable from this research is Mangchi's complete redesign into something closer to Kingdome Hearts' Sora, including changing the weapon from a real-life hammer with a rope on it to a giant cartoon mallet. All the characters from the original story that do appear were able to keep their names at the least, including the game's central villain and final boss Moonk. The game is also pretty short, having only 5 stages total, but I will admit that the first level, an abandoned and flooded city, is not a common trope for the setting of a 3D platformer.

The game's audio comes entirely in the form of wav files, which made assembling the soundtrack as easy as "convert to mp3 and tag the files appropriately". I also included the theme used in the opening FMV sequence but, for understandable reasons, didn't do the same with the rest of the in-game cutscenes that are full of sound effects and voice lines. If there is interest in listening to those as well, I will gladly convert those and bundle them with the full rip as extras since I would also like to update the track of Stage 4's boss with the boss' actual name if I ever come across it in the future.

With that all covered, here's the audio rip for your listening pleasure.