japanese game dev in the 90s: hey dude can you make some music for our game about anime girls getting fucked sloppy style
guy who's about to push the PC-98 sound card to its absolute limit and create the most heartachingly beautiful music you've ever heard: Yeah okay
Look, I know it's funny to say the PC-98 eroge had a stellar soundtrack for 'just an eroge'. But that is extremely dismissive of what YU-NO is and how it shaped the landscape of future releases in the era. Like we're talking about a game with time travel that lets you set down checkpoints in time, so you can collect items across multiple timelines and solve a series of mysteries. It's a story so long and complicated, it had been in Kanno's mind and developing for over a decade. It's a story that doesn't even properly work as a show or movie, it has to be a game. This title was extremely influential to how the sci-fi genre evolved in the adventure game medium of this era in japan. Titles like Steins;Gate wouldn't exist in nearly the same fashion, KEY works would be entirely different, other adventure game producing companies started trying to push themselves to match YU-NO's high production values. I'm sorry but you can be funny without being dismissive of something that had a huge cultural impact on a medium of storytelling.
the composer Ryu Umemoto left his well-paying job scoring licensed games at FamilySoft to work in the pc-98 eroge scene because of the creative freedom it allowed him. he and the writer Hiroyuki Kanno worked together on several ambitious games for various small erotic games companies. there's a great obituary that talks about his life, here: click.
