I am of an age where most of my school memories are a jumbled haze, except for the occasional trauma nugget that likes to surface at inopportune times. (Everyone has those, right? Right?) Anyway, one of the few concrete recollections I have is that of a music lesson on tone (or symphonic, for the big word fanciers) poems. The concept fascinated me, the idea of using music to not just set tone and mood, but to tell a story, to conjure specific images in the mind of the listener.
Playing A Musical Story made me think of tone poems. One glance at any of the screenshots accompanying this review will make it obvious to all but the most unobservant that the game does have actual images alongside the music, but they’re intimately entwined. There’s no dialogue and the animated scenes lean on the side of being vignettes, so the music isn’t just background noise, it’s doing the heavy lifting.
