Скачать или смотреть OutRun 2 — LAST WAVE [H.] Vocal Version — Takenobu Mitsuyoshi (OST Soundtrack Music)

Full title is LAST WAVE [H.] Vocal Version - For "OutRun2 Sound Tracks -SIDE B-".
The artwork is essentially a video mockup of the OutRun 20th Anniversary Box cover ( look at that beauty: https://segaretro.org/OutRun_20th_Ann... ) which quite elegantly portrays the GAME OVER / NAME ENTRY screen with a very simple gradient for the background creating a quite simple but effective contrast. Instead of going full tryhard and painting the whole tree scene in an EPIC PAINTING they opted to keep the raw pixel foreground, and I find it very impressive they resisted the autistic urge to clean up a few loose pixels that are kind of "ugly" and unnatural, but I feel it's very important to portray it as is, and I doubt I would have the foresight to not clean it up, I feel like a veteran graphic designer worked on the thing or someone who is very passionate about OutRun. Even though it's a very simple cover it's quite evocative and respectful of the source material, I find it very hard to put it in words since it's weird describing a visual medium, but it always struck me as a well accomplished cover and I've always been aiming to create this video. It's kind of hard to understand who was responsible for the case design, I see two companies pop up, DTJAPAN and RAREDROP, but I'm not quite clear which did what.
And this particular scene in the game, the song that plays is the aforementioned LAST WAVE which is one of the most relaxing and effective vidya tracks. It's quite interesting to do the sort of genealogical construction of how this track evolved until it arrived at this ultimate form. It started in with the first OutRun in 1986 and HIRO did all the original tracks, he is essentially the musical face of SEGA AM2 in the 80s. Then I'm not sure when the track got added a SEASHORE special effects by Shigeharu Isoda I believe. And I want to say that was initially added in Saturn port of the game but somehow that seems way to late down the line, I think I heard the SEA effect in a way earlier title. And so adding on and speaking of the Saturn version this particular tracks seems to be a remix of the saturn remix of this song which as far as I can gander it was a collaboration between Takenobu Mitsuyoshi and HIRO. They already worked on Outrunners together but I don't think Mitsuyoshi wasn't pulling his strengths yet. If you don't know who Mitsuyoshi is, he's that guy that sings and composed the quite iconic Daytona USA tracks. So here we have the face of SEGA AM2 of the 80s (Hiro) and the face of SEGA AM2 in the 90s (Mitsuyoshi) collaborating together on music for a SEGA racing game. It all boils down to this OutRun 2 song, Mitsuyoshi lending his voice to play on top of Hiro's track. It's quite special that such a thing even happened this way, since Mitsuyoshi does need to sing to put his definitive stamp on a track, the Outrunners collaboration wasn't enough. I don't think they even collaborated together in SEGA's SST Band, I think Mitsuyoshi joined after HIRO left.
Regarding the actual video production, the background was captured in Cannonball, a OutRun open source implementation, which feature-wize is probably the de facto definitive version of the game, but I have a special place in my heart for the 3DS port. However Cannonball has so many crazy features that it allowed me to do a lot of finagling so I could capture proper footage for the video. Then I just had to color key out the sky and clouds and luckily it didn't interfere much with the rest of the foreground colors, though if I wasn't too lazy I would have manually edited the street signs since ideally they aren't supposed to be keyed out like that.
I would also love to have added lyrics to this but other than unvetted youtube comments that are just taking their chances though google translate, I don't think anyone managed to get some lyrics going. What a shame. If anyone wants to take a shot at the translation it's listed in Japanese in the album: https://media.vgm.io/albums/47/5474/5...
I'm gonna go ahead and credit this in the title as Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's for simplicity sake since he's forefront on the vocals, but it's a collaboration from a lot of people, and technically you know, this will always be Hiro's song and OutRun will always carry his DNA.

Composer Hiro
Lyrics Dai Takemura
Arranger Hiro
Vocal Takenobu Mitsuyoshi
Trumpets Mitsuharu Fukuyama
Copyright SEGA

-- Addendum 2022 --
I have OCR'd the lyrics and added them to the Japanese subtitles, also translated them with DeepL into English.
-- Addendum 2026 --
I have tasked ChatGPT to translate the lyrics, but I would appreciate if human eyes could review them and suggest corrections.