Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters (UE) / Lethal Enforcers II: The Western (J)

[Generator]
 MAME 0.152 (modded by Valley Bell)

My 25th submitted pack, this collects the music
of the sequel to the first game I submitted a
pack for on VGMRips, two years ago. While
Lethal Enforcers is a light gun game that pits
you against bank robbers and other thugs in
20th-century Chicago, Lethal Enforcers II,
subtitled either "Gun Fighters" or the more
fitting and interesting "The Western" depending
on the region, is a light gun game putting you
in the Wild West with the goal of stopping
bandits and other ne'er-do-wells, culminating
in a battle against a magical Native American
chief who casts fireballs and raises
axe-throwing warriors from the dead. (I'm not
joking about any of that.)

The differences in style between both games
are reflected in the soundtracks. Lethal
Enforcers has hard-hitting percussion, synth
and guitars that rev you up to take on drug
dealers, hijackers and other scum infesting
the depths of the Windy City. Lethal Enforcers
II's soundtrack follows suit by using the kind
of music you might find in Western movies,
with era-appropriate instrumentation, which
suits the game perfectly and differs it
substantially from its predecessor.

But it also differs in other ways. For one
thing, unlike the previous game, this game had
no official soundtrack release. Thus, the
tracks were named here based on where they
play, with a change of background constituting
a sub-stage. (e.g. Stage 1-2 is the first
screen when you move into the bank.) For
another thing, the situation with authorship
is rather different. Here are the credits for
Lethal Enforcers II prior to the cast credits
and the special thanks:

        LETHAL ENFORCERS II
        GUN FIGHTERS

        DEVELOPMENT STAFF
         Y. HATANO
         J. NARITA
         S. JOHNSON
         T. WADA
         T. SEKITO
         Y. SAKAKURA
         M. UENO
         N. TAKEMOTO
         A. NONAMI
         H. MATSUURA
         T. MURAYAMA
         T. MAKI
         T. KAKUTA

Notice something missing? On top of the "first
letter of first name plus surname" policy for
names inherited from the previous game, nobody
is credited for what they did! Fortunately, it
wasn't hard for the makers of the Genesis
version's VGM pack to figure out who the sound
guys could be based on their work in other
Konami games, so we can determine that Yuichi
Sakakura and Tsuyoshi Sekito are the most
likely candidates for the game's composers. If
anyone else worked on the game's music, we
don't know for sure.

You might also wonder about the Japanese
titles for the stage music. In the Japanese
release (but only in the arcades for some
reason), a Japanese subtitle appears under all
of the English stage titles. These are
generally translations of the titles--except
for "The Hide-Out," which gets the more
dramatic title of "The Coal Mine Stronghold."
(NOTE: In Japanese, the word for "hideout"
would be either "ajito," from the Russian
"agitpunkt;" or "himitsu kichi," which
literally means "secret base.")

What's also different between this game and
the previous is that unlike the previous game,
the sound test has no track selector. At all.
All you can get is the Stage Select music and
a speaker test (which I didn't log for this
pack, because come on, really?). This
precluded me doing it for a long time, up
until GTheGuardian supplied me with a MAME
cheat code to allow the music to be played
whenever one wishes. Were it not for him,
this pack may never have existed. Thank you,
man!

In any case, enjoy!

— The Golden Horse

Source: VGMRips