Arpeggios aren't just sound chip abuse -- they actually serve to form chords on sound chips that have few channels and need more oomph like the SID and SMS PSG. They also lend a lot more personality to a note, something Japanese musicians often fail to do because they stick slavishly to melody, flat note on, flat note off.
Yup. Though they never come anywhere near close enough to sounding like a real chord (in whatever instrument or waveform you chose). It does add personality to an otherwise extremely flat chip like the SMS PSG and related (no duty cycles, fixed waveforms, no triangle or sine, etc). But it's just soo over used on those chips that it's a personal turn off for me, most of time, as an otherwise saturating and distracting effect when too pronounced.
SID composers might have used it for a chord effect originally since the chip is pretty limited in the number of channels, but SID has plenty of other methods to provide personality to a channels sound than resorting to something like Arps. An EU thing I guess.
Anyway, our favourite game Magical Chase has several arpeggio moments in its stellar soundtrack. You can tell Hitoshi Sakimoto (or the other guy) was a bit enamoured with European game music.
Yeah, I was surprised to learn that a number of years back too. A Japanese music developer using Arps
Though in his defense, only about 3 songs used it out of all the tracks and only 1 song of those uses it for most of the song (other two only in opening bits and such). And it's not overly pronounced. I rather like it.
