Alterna Citizen Program M-00: Init (System Noise)

→ Soundtrack announcement post
→ Credits revealed

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: Soundtrack (coming April 26), YouTube, extracted audio

Credits

Sound: Toshiyuki Sudo, Shu Tamura, Toru Minegishi, Ryo Nagamatsu, Tomohiro Imura, Shiho Fujii, Takuro Yasuda, Kota Okumura, Yumi Takahashi, Sayako Doi, Takahisa Yamamoto

Intro

So probably at least one of you out there has been wondering when exactly the Splatoon 3 post would come, since it’s not exactly a secret that I’m big on the series. The reason I haven’t posted anything yet is that we still don’t know who specifically among the sound team are the composers and we don’t even have track titles for the vast majority of the soundtrack, and I fully expect an album release some time in the next few months, so I was strongly considering waiting so I can talk in definites.

However, I’ve just decided it’d be fun if I show my Whole Ass and post some composer guesses now, and then when the soundtrack comes out we can all come back and have a laugh about how literally everything I said in this post was incorrect.

Info

So first off, we should run down the sound team. Shu Tamura, Tomohiro Imura, Takuro Yasuda, and Takahisa Yamamoto all only have sound design credits in other games, so are unlikely to be composers. Kota Okumura is a very new person whose only other known credit is just a nondescript “development staff for updates” in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, so it remains to be seen what his general responsibilities are at Nintendo. This leaves six folks, all of whom are primarily or exclusively composers:

• Toshiyuki Sudo: new to the series, worked on a lot of random non-major Nintendo games like the NES Remix series and Miitopia (3DS & Switch)
• Toru Minegishi: sound director & lead composer of previous Splatoon games
• Ryo Nagamatsu: contributed miscellaneous tracks to Splatoon 2 (chiefly multiplayer bands and Salmon Run), major co-composer of Octo Expansion
• Shiho Fujii: chiefly responsible for Squid Sisters and Chirpy Chips songs from the first two games
• Yumi Takahashi: new to the series, previously worked on Miitopia (3DS) and Animal Crossing: New Horizons
• Sayako Doi: new to the series, previously worked on Metroid Dread and Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain

I’ll have more to say about these folks as we get into the guesses, so let’s get into the guesses!

Multiplayer

Deep Cut music: Toshiyuki Sudo(?)

In an interview, Toru Minegishi said that the sound director, who is not him by implication, wrote the music for Deep Cut. Minegishi was the first person listed for sound in the previous games, but now Sudo is in that spot, suggesting he could be the director this time. If it weren’t for that, I’m not sure that I’d guess their main songs like “Anarchy Rainbow” were his, but he’s done some cultural mishmashy stuff before, so I think it’s plausible. The news theme, though, that sounds a lot like him to me with its frequent interjections by random instruments/sounds that play for one second.

In the same interview, Minegishi described the musical style as chaotic, and I’ve never thought about it in those terms before, but I’d say Sudo’s music does have a bit of chaotic energy to it. A good-natured, goofy kind of chaotic.

C-Side songs, Front Roe songs: Toru Minegishi

These are all reasonably similar to the rock songs Minegishi has previously written for the series, moreso the Squid Squad songs from the first game, and I don’t have any particular reason to doubt he did these too.

Damp Socks songs: Ryo Nagamatsu

The jazz writing in these is reminiscent of the Ink Theory songs Nagamatsu wrote for Splatoon 2.

Salmon Run: Ryo Nagamatsu

Nagamatsu was 100% responsible for all the unhinged Salmon Run music from Splatoon 2, and the new songs are in the same mold and also unhinged.

Lobby: Toru Minegishi, Ryo Nagamatsu

The two main lobby themes are electronic rock/bluesy themes with some similarity to the lobby themes from the first two games by Minegishi, so I think they could be him again. However, there are also a whole bunch of special lobby songs that under some condition (certain times of day? random?) will play for an hour, and these are stylistically all over the place, so much so that I think it’s conceivable they were written by a lot of different people. There are some that I’d peg to Nagamatsu and Minegishi specifically, but then there’s stuff like this I have no idea what to do with.

I’ve just realized there’s some broad similarity in the breadth of the special lobby music as a whole and some of the styles chosen to the stage music that Minegishi and Nagamatsu wrote for Octo Expansion.

Town

Plaza ambience: Toru Minegishi

Minegishi has been solo credited for the town suites in the first two games which collect the random ambient themes (along with some SFX folks), and some of it is the same kind of stuff, so this seems fine. The plaza is much bigger this time around so there’s quite a bit more material than there’s been previously, though, and it does feel potentially like there could be a few different composers who contributed.

Shops: Toshiyuki Sudo

These songs, particularly the Man-o’-Wardrobe and Hotlantis variations, have a Nintendo eShop vibe and do the Sudo thing of having random instruments/SFX play for one second.

The Shoal: Toru Minegishi

The new song is very similar to the one Minegishi wrote for Splatoon 2, so I definitely think it’s him again, but wowwww is this new one good. The mix of chiptune, rhythmic weirdness, and whole tone bits reminds me a lot of the Super Paper Mario soundtrack.

Tableturf Battle: Toru Minegishi

Several of these tracks are musically similar to/arrange Squid Squad or C-Side songs, which are either confirmed or suspected Minegishi, so I think these are also him. They do have the “Nintendo cute” ratcheted up a little, though, to an extent it makes me wonder if they’re actually by a different person (Sudo in particular).

Singleplayer

Octo Canyon: Yumi Takahashi/Sayako Doi(?)

The songs in the intro area are in the style of the music from the singleplayer modes of the first two games, which was largely by Toru Minegishi, so the obvious guess is that he did these too. However, there are some small instrumentation differences that strike me as not quite “correct,” like the slap bass in the mission theme and arped synth in the boss theme, and they give me the crackpot feeling that these aren’t actually Minegishi, but rather the main singleplayer composer(s) mimicking the style. Watch as they of course just end up being Minegishi doing some new things because it’s a new game.

Alterna – Maps: Sayako Doi

Doi is the newest composer of the six and has the least amount of pieces specifically attributable to her—three K.K. songs from Animal Crossing: New Horizons to be precise: “K.K. Break,” “K.K. Khoomei,” and “K.K. Robot Synth.” However, she’s one of the two credited^[1] composers in Metroid Dread, which was my favorite soundtrack of 2021, so Chimeratio and I spent a lot of time talking about her, trying to find connections between songs in the game and other games she worked on to possibly pin down what her style could be.

Our best guess, which seems somewhat backed up by the fact that Big Brain Academy: Brain vs. Brain has a number of similar tracks in the “Super Practice” mode, is that she was largely responsible for area themes in Metroid Dread like “Ghavoran,” “Cataris,” and “Elun”: the keywords here are electronic production with synthetic sound design and heavy whole tone-icity.

So when I reached the first two areas of Alterna, and heard sinister, ambient tunes with sound design that wouldn’t be out of place in Metroid Dread, which develop into fuller pieces with interesting rhythmic complexity, harmonic color, and dissonances that also wouldn’t be out of place in Metroid Dread, my instant gut reaction was that these were by Doi. Some of the other map themes are quite a bit different from each other, so I’m not convinced that they’re all by Doi; some might be by Yumi Takahashi too (see next section).

This is my favorite set of music in the game, by the way, even more than the new Salmon Run tracks.

Alterna – Stages: Yumi Takahashi(?)

Yumi Takahashi is the composer I’m least familiar with, so I’m mostly putting her here by default: this is a big unclaimed block of music that I don’t really strongly feel is by anyone else, and she’s the only composer I haven’t put anywhere else. That said, the one track by her I’m very familiar with is her arrangement from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, an almost SuperSweepy, harmonically cool bit of EDM, and a bunch of the mission tracks are harmonically cool (and super ’80s for some reason) dance music, so it’s super reasonable to me that she did at least some of these.

There are a bunch of different stage themes, so I think it’s possible that Takahashi wasn’t the sole composer and Doi did some too, but I don’t have any candidates for ones I think are obviously Doi (maybe this one???).

Alterna – Bosses (Deep Cut): Yumi Takahashi(??)

The boss theme incorporates the musical identity of Deep Cut used in their multiplayer songs, but is also very much in the style of the singleplayer music (the vocal manipulation in particular stands out to me), so I think this is by one of the singleplayer composers and not Toshuyki Sudo. Maybe worth noting is that the phase 3 variation has a little transposing synth chord part (section starts at 2:19 in the linked vid above) that reminds me of the Splatoon 1 boss second phase theme by Toru Minegishi.

Alterna Space Center – Deep Cut songs (stages 2-5): Yumi Takahashi(?)

Both “Hide and Sleek” and the currently unknown-title song that plays in The Spirit Lifter stages sound pretty different from all the other Deep Cut songs, and there’s precedent for the idol songs that appear in the singleplayer campaign being by a different person than the main composer (Ryo Nagamatsu did the Squid Sisters arrangements in Splatoon 2 instead of Shiho Fujii and the new Off the Hook songs in Octo Expansion instead of Minegishi), so I think these could both be by a different person. In particular, the song for The Spirit Lifter is actually the song in the soundtrack I would in a vacuum most readily guess is by Takahashi; its chords and EDM production remind me a lot of her arrangement of “Gravity Man” for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Alterna Space Center – Grizzco remixes (map, final boss phases 1-3): Ryo Nagamatsu

As I mentioned earlier in the Salmon Run section, unhinged Salmon Run music seems to be Nagamatsu’s domain, and the remixes used in the singleplayer campaign are all also variously unhinged, so I’m of the mind that he did all this stuff too. I want to specially shout out the first phase theme of the final boss fight for the absolutely baffling 32:31 polyrhythm between the melody/synths and the percussion. I have literally no idea how Ryo Nagamatsu continues to convince Nintendo to pay him money to write music like this for one of their flagship series, but it’s legitimately inspiring to me that he does.

“Calamari Inkantation 3MIX” (final boss, last phase): Toshiyuki Sudo(?)

This song could conceivably have three in-game artists (DJ Octavio feat. Deep Cut & Squid Sisters???), so I think there’s some flex in who wrote this, but that said the arrangement is pretty similar to that of “Anarchy Rainbow” (the use of a brass section in particular is very distinct), so I think it’s the same person.

“Wave Goodbye” (credits): Shiho Fujii

Fujii’s only direct contribution^[1] to Splatoon 2 (prior to a free content update) was the credits song, and I think the same thing happened again here because this is definitely in the vein of stuff like “Fresh Start.” The bridge at 1:36 in particular really feels like her to me, due to some combination of the chord progression and synths used.