Review by lordhades

I'm not ONE PIECE manga or anime fan (in fact, I dislike it) but after watching some episodes with a friend (who is a ONE PIECE fan), I said "I don't like this anime but the soundtrack BGMs are great!". Served by Kohei Tanaka and Shiro Hamaguchi, veteran composers in pure 90's anime soundtrack style, BGMs are musically attractive. This typical neo classical progressive anime compositions serve well the listener pleasure with classic ones like action, sadness, comic relief, dramatic and baroque scenes, etc. A "must have" is this near complete 3 CD box.

Xenogears (on PlayStation) is one the best JRPG from all time. Its long remarkable story and highly developed characters made this game a JRPG reference. Yasunori Mitsuda's great progressive music was part of this success. Like several JRPG music in the past, symphonic version of this album was long awaited by JRPG and video game music fans like me. A great album with fabulous Eastern European Classical Music flavor make this listening enchanting and powerful. The only minus point is these two soap piano solo tunes that are considered as cheap and boring by Western listeners who'd prefer have two other powerful orchestral pieces instead of these.

I discovered this band with this album in 1996. A pure progressive/symphonic metal with remarkable technique and composition. Most of tracks are near perfect and all band members execute their job with an extreme precision in this pure fantasy music to serve the listener happiness. "The Accolade" and "The Divine Wings Of Tragedy" tracks are this album's nirvana.

After the more-than-excellent "V - The New Mythology Suite", it'll be very difficult doing better and it is the case. With greats "typical" progressive symphonic metal tunes like "Accolade II" and the 24 minute-track "The Odyssey", the rest of the album is near basic speed metal and that's regrettable.

"V" concluded Symphony X some kind of "nirvana trilogy", each of these 3 albums gives the best of their creativity. These were followed by the average-good "The Odyssey", but "Paradise Lost", seems to be the great fall down and two points are the cause of this. First, Michael Romero (Guitarist and Band Leader) takes full control of the band, near all of compositions are made by him with Russel Allen (Vocalist) collaboration for writing lyrics. Second, Russel's vocal incident stayed a lot of definitive damages on his voice. His opera style chorus capability totally disappeared. The result is Russel's broken voice and Romero's full control came this album to basic speed/black metal way and Pinnella's enchanting fantasy keyboards are near absent. Symphony X lost its soul in this album.

"Paradise Lost" was a great deception for Symphony X traditional fans. Romero (guitarist) still have the full control of the band and made alone all the compositions (sometime assisted by Russel Allen [vocalist] for writing lyrics). If some efforts were made to be a little more progressive (in a few tracks like "Iconoclast") with more Pinnella's keyboards, the most part of this album flavor is still speed/black metal and Russell Allen's voice is still part-broken. So, "Iconoclast" is slightly better than "Paradise Lost" but there is a long way to go to regain Symphony X past quality great albums like "The Divine Wings of Tragedy" or "V - The New Mythology Suite".

Another great soundtrack from Toshihiko Sahashi. This second volume from "Simoun" completes this anime soundtrack with everything else that not included in the first one. This score includes epic and classical orchestral themes mixed with modern keyboards as well as many other great anime soundtrack. A must have for those who like "Simoun" anime and this kind of anime soundtrack (like me).