Late-90s synth pads and wistful melodies, the sound of a PS1 visual novel trying to make you cry. Hateshinaku Aoi, Kono Sora no Shita de is a romance/drama from 2000 on PlayStation and Windows, and the soundtrack covers everything from school days to genuine horror.
Read more
"学校" (School) sets up that familiar safe feeling before the story starts pulling it apart. "猫屋敷" (Cat Mansion) goes somewhere strange and unsettling. Then "レクイエム" (Requiem) just wrecks you, slow and final. The tracklist reads like a plot outline: confessions, summer, yakuza, a fire, a cave, a ritual, madness.
You can feel the story escalating just from the song titles. Thirty-four tracks that go from sweet to sinister and don't look back. For anyone curious what late-era PS1 visual novels sounded like at their most emotionally ambitious.