Did Steins;Gate composer Takeshi Abo plagiarize Umineko no Naku Koro Ni's composer ZTS?

Akerakai said:
What is sure is that umineko's music shit on steins gate's music

Grey-Zone said:
I recently noticed that a lot of Japanese content creators, be it video games, anime, or anime-related stuff like light novels which got anime adaptations, have had some troubles with accusations of plagiarism. Notable examples would be Metal Gear Solid's main theme which apperently plagiarized a Russian song, or the illustrator of the No Game No Life light novel, who supposedly "traced" someone else's work.

Now I might have possibly noticed a similar situation, in this case dealing with OSTs. The first time I listened to the OST of Steins;Gate, specifically one of the main themes, "Gate of Steiner", a part of it sounded oddly familiar, but I didn't know at the time where exactly I heard it. But now I found out!

It's a theme from Umineko no Naku Koro Ni's OST, called "far".

Note that Umineko's track was without a doubt released before Steins;Gate. The track "far" was appearently created by ZTS and first used in 2008, while Steins;Gate had been released in 2009. Seems like it would be just the right time for the track to be an "inspiration", doesn't it?


Now speculation is nice and all, but let's get the evidence rolling. It's actually just a mere 20 second segment, so it might really just be a "coincidence" in the end, or perhaps a subconcious action, but you can't deny that it's oddly similar:

First listen to this 1:00 - 1:20 segment of "far" from the Umineko soundtrack:



Now a section of that track is re-used in a different style in another track from ZTS in the sequel VN "Umineko no Naku Koro Ni Chiru" which was released in August 2009, called "Resurrected Replayer". Note that this is still before the release date of Steins;Gate which was in October 2009.

Listen to the track "Resurrected Replayer" from the Umineko Chiru soundtrack 2:03 - 2:23:




And now compare these two 20 second segments above with the 0:50 - 1:10 segment of the Steins;Gate track called "Gate of Steiner":





So what do you think? Is it plagiarism? Is it a subconcious "inspiration"? Is it coincidence? Is the truth perhaps that both composers plagiarized someone completely different I am not aware of?

DISCUSS!


(note to mods: This thread is in the general anime section because it involves two different VNs, both which have anime adaptations which also re-use the same tracks or remixed version of the same tracks, so I considered this the correct place instead of the video games section.)