Not so far away – Ragnarok Online

This is “Not so far away” from the MMO RPG “Ragnarok Online” created by Gravity.
This is composed by soundTeMP.
Other than this game, soundTeMP composed a lot of music for Korean online games.

This music is played when you reach Kunlun, a village in the sky.
It seems to be based on a real mountain in western China called the Kunlun Mountains(崑崙山).

As you can hear, it has an oriental feel.
This is because the major pentatonic scale(c, d, e, g, a) is used.
It feels stable and powerful, because it doesn’t contain f and b, which want to go to another note a semitone lower/higher.

The first half is simple progression, but Part B is more emotional using secondary chords(around 1:11~1:16).

Originally there is Pipa(琵琶) part like tremolo, but I omitted it for simple arrangement(I can’t play tremolo…).
The following is my favorite example of a performance with a Pipa.
It’s very cool, isn’t it?