Magician Lord

[Source (track titles)]
NEO-GEO SOUND POWER -G.S.M. SNK 2-
Pony Canyon / Scitron  PCCB-00031  Jun 21, 1990
[Source (track order)]
ADK Ontama
Clarice Disc           CDGM-10017  Dec 28, 2013
[Generator]
MAME 0.248 (modded by Valley Bell)

One of the launch titles for the Neo Geo
and the only one not developed by SNK,
the platformer "Magician Lord" sets the young
wizard Elta on a quest to recover eight magic
books to seal the ancient gods of destruction,
Gal Agiese and Az Atorse, before they can end
the world. His quest will be a strenuous one,
as this game is notorious for its punishing
difficulty, guaranteeing that a new player
will have to fill the cabinet with coins to
fulfill Elta's mission, on account of the
developers halving Elta's life bar and cutting
down chunks of the levels weeks before release
to ensure that players wouldn't last too long.
The fact that ADK (then known as Alpha Denshi)
was developing the Neo Geo hardware itself
alongside the game also means that features
were constantly changing and the final game
doesn't take as much advantage of the Neo Geo
as other games.

Still, the game's soundtrack is a strong
demonstration of the Neo Geo's sound hardware
and its ability to feature high-quality
samples alongside FM instruments, even if
it's not as emphasized in this game. From
up-tempo action tracks to foreboding
cutscene music, everything is a great listen.

Enjoy!

Some extra notes on this pack:
* The game's opening sequence only plays
  when starting the console (AES) version
  of the game. As such, the "Opening" track
  is unused in the arcade (MVS) version
  of the game.
* The name of the Greek god Zephyrus is
  misspelled as "Zephros" in the official
  track list; this is retained in the Japanese
  tags but fixed in the English tags.
  For that matter, the title of track 12
  is presented in both English and Japanese
  on the official albums. This is kept in the
  Japanese tags, but the English tags only keep
  the English title to prevent redundancy.
* The FM instruments on tracks 7 and 19 have
  absurdly long release times, such that
  allowing them to fully decay would add
  30 seconds to each track. The VGM files
  instead cut them off after 10 and 5 seconds,
  respectively. Track 7 ("Gal Agiese") also
  lasts far longer than the cutscenes where
  it is used, and so it is not normally
  possible to hear it in full.
* The original release of this pack was among
  the oldest packs on the VGMRips site,
  released in the first year of its existence,
  and so old that its text file referenced
  SMS Power instead! It also predated MAME
  being modded to record VGM files, and thus
  it was recorded with the less accurate M1
  instead. It didn't even have Japanese tags
  for the track titles; these were added in
  the 1.10 update.

— The Golden Horse

Source: VGMRips