Haruka Shimotsuki's first game soundtrack and it already sounds like someone who understands how wind instruments can carry loneliness. Relict: Toki no Wasuremono leans heavily on strings and woodwinds to paint this pastoral fantasy world that keeps threatening to turn melancholic.
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Song of a Distant Legend opens with the kind of melody that makes you stare out a window. Nature Calls Out and Basking in the Sun do the warm pastoral thing before tracks like Tense Thread and Wailing pull everything into darker territory.
Beast Person has this restless, uneasy quality that the title absolutely earns. Your Warmth closes things out with genuine tenderness. If you want early-2000s Japanese visual novel music that actually makes you feel something, Shimotsuki was already there from day one.