Let's Go Away: The Video Game Daytona USA Anniversary Box

To be a true core gamer, I think you have to have some deep level of appreciation for arcade games, and few companies had an arcade library as on point as Sega did. Daytona USA, a 3D arcade racing game that they produced in 1993, is an absolute classic of early 90s gaming, due in no small part to the plain badass soundtrack that Takenobu Mitsuyoshi performed for it.

This four-disc set touts itself as the definitive soundtrack to the entire franchise. The first disc starts with a newly recorded piano version of "Let's Go Away" (the "DAAAYTOOONAAAAAAAAA" song we all know and love), and devotes the rest of its space to the original game's arcade version as well as the soundtrack to its unported sequel Daytona USA 2, composed by Fumio Itoh. The second disc goes to the soundtrack of the original game's Sega Saturn port, and gives part of the soundtrack to the Dreamcast remake, released in Japan as Daytona USA 2001.

Disc 3 includes more of the Dreamcast remake's score, and also houses the soundtracks to the Championship Circuit Edition and Daytona USA Evolution, and the last disc is just more for the Dreamcast version. All of the different versions sound vastly different from one another, and this set gives you enough room to pick favorites-- personally, my money's on the Saturn port, especially for its vastly superior versions of "The King Of Speed" and "Sky High".

Unfortunately, this set isn't as definitive as it should be. The set is sorely missing the rearrangements from the original soundtrack release back in the 90s under Mitsuyoshi's "B-Univ" project-- which also contained new arrangements not present on this set at all, like "The Queen Of Speed", a slower reworking of "The King Of Speed", and "Tornado", a wholly new track. Perhaps the costs of this set were already reaching a critical mass before they could add the B-Univ disc to the collection, but I would recommend getting both sets for a truly definitive experience.

The Championship Circuit Edition is also missing the American rock songs that game had, but unlike the aforementioned B-Univ material, the liner notes for Disc 3 leave a disclaimer that those songs were left off due to legal reasons. A little sore about that, but I'll live.

The tracklisting is just too massive to transcribe here, so take these screenshots of the discs and their contents as a tracklist to live on. Unfortunately, while there is a credits section sitting behind Disc 4, it doesn't discern who composed or performed what, so I labelled everything but the Daytona USA 2 soundtrack as Mitsuyoshi's doing when writing tags for the music files. If anyone could produce a more clarified list for who composed what, I'd definitely like to see it.