Genso Suikoden Original Game Soundtrack

The Gensosuikoden Original Game Soundtrack (幻想水滸伝 オリジナル・ゲーム・サントラ, Gensōsuikoden Orijinaru Gēmu Santora) is the official soundtrack release for Suikoden.

Development
The music for Suikoden was led and directed by Higashino Miki, with TAPPY, Taniguchi Hirofumi, Kageshita Mayuko, and Tamawari Hiroshi all also composing for the soundtrack.

Early into the project, Higashino Miki realized that the game could not be depicted using a single genre of music. A deliberate attempt was made to compose something completely different from the music in other RPG titles like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, due to the increased scale and diverse setting of Suikoden as compared to those titles.

The development team had originally hope for theme music for every character, but the sheer size of the game's cast quickly rendered this impossible. In the end, only a handful of character-specific themes would be composed.

On a technical level, music for the first Suikoden allowed streaming and direct playback of the waveform data that was recorded on the CD-ROM. Although much of the game’s music was streamed, some music, such as the world map theme, had to be played back through the internal sound fonts, as they required having the map data read from the CD-ROM’s contents.

However, as most of the composer team had been working on Sega Genesis titles up until the development of Suikoden, there were very few who could work with the PlayStation’s internal sound fonts. Suikoden ended up being one the first games to use the PlayStation’s internal sound fonts for music creation (partly due to its development taking place early in the console's lifetime).

Releases
This soundtrack is the first soundtrack release and first album release of any kind for the series. It was released on April 5, 1996.

A complete digital re-release was made available to download in individual MP4 track format from Konami's Chakushin Uta online store for 1389 points (approximately 1222 JPY through Chakushin Uta's point-buy service).