Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (with music info), extracted audio
Info
For reasons that one would assume are related to the fact that the sequel just came out yesterday, I gave the ol’ Breath of the Wild soundtrack a relisten. One of my favorite soundtracks from the series, for one of my favorite games in the series! Zelda music has long had a vein of ambience going through it, and BotW rather famously went all-in on very empty music with almost no melodic priority for its main environmental themes. But I think calling it an “ambient soundtrack” would be doing it a grave disservice, because it’s a beefy soundtrack with a whole host of nonambient tunes for areas, battles, and cutscenes.
The main score, covering the first four discs and first 33 tracks of the last disc, was composed by Hajime Wakai, Manaka Kataoka, and Yasuaki Iwata, who respectively had 2, 1, and 0 previous Zelda games under their belt. The main instrument is by far piano, with a healthy amount of strings, hand & metallic percussion, and electronic sounds (among other, more traditionally orchestrated pieces and some other instruments here and there to accentuate the different cultures of Hyrule). The incorporation of computery sounds into a lot of the songs associated with ancient Shiekah technology is actually one of the more distinctive parts of the soundtrack to me, even moreso than the ambientness honestly; I quite enjoy the sound design and it ties in thematically with the setting of the game very well.
Compositionally I love the use of extended chords, allowed to ring out without resolution in the ambient themes and sometimes presented in a more straightforwardly jazz context, and I’m not going to pretend that I don’t appreciate the randomly proggy bits and bobs, because you know I do and I know that you know I do (although to be fair, the Zelda series has been full of rhythmic shenanigans for a long time now).
The rest of the last disc, minus the two trailer themes at the very end, were new songs written for the DLC. The music was handled by the same staff, with the addition of new composer Soshi Abe. Almost all of the new music is from The Champions’ Ballad, which is focused on the four champions, so the majority of the new songs are simply new arrangements of songs associated with those characters, with a few other arrangements and a couple of completely new compositions (including the titular “Champions’ Ballad”). It’s all very much in the same vein as the main game music, they didn’t decide to go in a shocking new direction with anything.
Recommended tracks:
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“Main Theme” (Kataoka) features an incredibly powerful caesura right before the chorus, an intentionally-composed part of the piece stated by Kataoka to represent the gap between the past and present, as well as some very emotional chord changes in the chorus to follow
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“Battle (Field): Original Soundtrack ver.” (Kataoka) is a suited version of the game’s almost Copland-esque or John Adams-esque dynamic battle music, arranged for standalone flow; the rhythmic irregularity of the individual passages and their irregular arrangement to match the flow of battle are longstanding traditions of Zelda music
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“Hateno Ancient Tech Lab” (Wakai) is very cute and staccato
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“Divine Beast Vah Rudania Battle” (Iwata) is a tense, sneaky theme for a stealth section with some very subtle mixed meter
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“Kara Kara Bazaar” (Iwata) might be my favorite ambient area theme, with some big ol’ piano chords that make me feel good
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“Divine Beast Vah Naboris (Dungeon)” (Iwata) is my favorite of the game’s excellent dungeon music, starting off with cool sounds and dissonant piano clusters before building into something very lush, simultaneously warm and threatening
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“Lost Woods” (Kataoka) is a disorienting piece of music with a constant pulse yet a dizzying meter constantly in flux, running around you in circles as you run around in circles
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“Champion Shrine” (Abe) is a slow version of the main theme for the Champions’ Ballad DLC with some of those nice field theme chords
(track titles are unofficial translations from VGMdb)
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