The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch, 2023)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: extracted audio, YouTube

Credits

Sound Director: Hajime Wakai
Music: Manaka Kataoka, Maasa Miyoshi, Masato Ohashi, Tsukasa Usui
Sound Design: Mitsutoshi Kodama, Yohei Miyagawa, Isami Yoshida, Takahiro Nosho, Yuki Tsuji, Riyu Tamura, Takuro Yasuda, Tomoyasu Taka, Eiji Nakamura, Chiharu Minekawa, Hiroki Taniguchi, Shotaro Arakawa, Yasushi Inomata
Sound Programming: Junya Osada, Masafumi Kawamura, Kota Wada, Takumi Sekino, Shun Hayami, Ryosuke Kawakatsu, Koichi Sato

Info

New video game that sold one hundred quadrillion copies in forty-five minutes! I’m sure it’s good, I’ll play it eventually.

Nintendo’s never one to shy away from letting their newest sound staff work on their biggest properties, so returning BotW anchors Hajime Wakai (sound director) and Manaka Kataoka (main theme composer) are joined by three folks writing Zelda music for the first time: Maasa Miyoshi (been there a few years but without any super prominent works besides a Smash Ultimate remix), Masato Ohashi (only other known work is radio jingles for Animal Crossing: New Horizons), and Tsukasa Usui (completely new with no other credits, though videos exist of some of his university compositions and they’re interesting). A lot of the soundtrack sounds pretty similar to stuff that Wakai and Kataoka wrote for BotW, so I suspect that they were the leads on the project, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the new kids wrote the bulk of the soundtrack because Nintendo has a knack for hiring extremely cool composers.

Since this is a direct sequel that takes place in the same world as Breath of the Wild, the music direction is similar and a lot of music is reprised as either an arrangement or direct reuse; if you were at home in the BotW soundtrack, I’d have to imagine that you’d feel the same way about Tears. Lots of the same instrumentation as the previous game, with the addition of some prominent sax in a couple of tracks (which you might remember from a trailer) and a bit more presence of electronic sounds. The environmental tracks are still ambient, the new tracks for reappearing areas reuse the instruments associated with those areas, and so on.

The main difference with BotW, and the main reason this is now my favorite Zelda soundtrack of all time(!!), is how much more unhinged this soundtrack gets than its predecessor. And I’m not just talking about how most of the battle themes are weird and prog now (though that’s of course a factor), but there are also weird, random distortion and reversal effects, and weird chord/tonal stuff in new town or town-related music, and even the new minigame themes are all significantly weirder than any of the ones from the first game. It’s definitely not nonstop baffling tunes, there’s plenty of new normal music too, but they took one of my favorite soundtracks in the series and just added a bunch of compositional nonsense that’s highly appealing to me.

It’s wild to me that in the span of one and a half years, we’ve gotten both my favorite Zelda soundtrack and my favorite Metroid soundtrack (Dread), both series which began in 1986. It’s a great time to be a fan of Nintendo music.

Recommended tracks:

Note that a couple of the tracks I’ve selected here are fairly dynamic, consisting of a bunch of shorter segments that are swapped to based on the flow of battle. The uploads I’ve linked below for those tracks do not reflect that dynamicism, and instead just play a number of those segments in some order. I’ve tagged each of those tracks with a ❖.

(track titles are unofficial)

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