Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube
Credits
Sound Programming Lead: Hirotaka Miyazako
Sound Programming: Kouhei Iwai
Sound Director: Mitsuhiro Kida
Music Lead: Kenta Nagata
Music: Asuka Hayazaki, Soshi Abe
Sound Design Lead: Taiyo Furukawa
Sound Design: Rintaro Sato, Yuto Sasaki, Shogo Yasuda, Shoichi Hiyama, Eka Chin, Tomoya Nakajima, Masahiro Izumi, Hiroshi Lee
Info
Haven’t played Pikmin 4 yet, but I’ve played the first three so I probably will at some point. This is the first numbered game in the series without music by Hajime Wakai, who’s nonsecretly a top 2 Nintendo composer, and the music lead this time is Kenta Nagata, who’s one of my less favorite Nintendo composers, so I wasn’t super excited when I saw the game’s sound credits for the first time. There’s a lot of good stuff in the soundtrack though, I for sure enjoyed it.
There’s a pretty big emphasis in the soundtrack this time around, especially in cutscenes, on quirky light cartoon music with plenty of pizzicato strings, staccato piano and winds, and mallet and other funny percussion, which is tonally a little different from and less distinct than what the series has historically gone for. I would guess these were mainly by Kenta Nagata, because there’s some similarity to his pieces from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and it’d make sense that the new guy who’s listed as the lead would be responsible for the new style. I enjoyed this stuff, probably some of my favorite material by Nagata now if it was indeed him.
The base versions of the area themes are sparser than they are in previous games, because the game does some dynamic stuff where when you’re engaging enemies, different elements are added to the music based on what you’re fighting. Four of the areas also have much more active postgame versions for the Shipwreck mode, even more active than they are in previous games with a healthy dollop of Nintendo Cute. Generally these are what I think Asuka Hayazaki was responsible for (she’s also presumed to have done all the area themes from Pikmin 3, based on character codes in the music filenames), along with the Dandori mode music and some of the more electronic themes.
I want to give special shoutout to the short 20-30 second intro themes for each of the main maps, which are all quite lovely. They remind me a bit of the area stingers from ONINAKI, which were my favorite songs from that game.
A lot of the battle themes sound like Metroid Dread music, and I don’t mean like similar compositionally with different instruments and more cartoony but literally like they could have just been used directly as a Dread boss theme. I was inclined to believe Dread’s boss themes were mostly by Soshi Abe even before listening to Pikmin 4, so given he’s the only common music staff between both games, I expect he did both. His music in this style seems pretty deliberately evocative of Minako Hamano, not just on a level of “electronic/orchestral hybrid with angular prog elements” but down to like idiosyncrasies in the way they sequence piano, which is great for me personally because she’s one of my favorite Nintendo composers.
Recommended tracks:
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“Pikmin at Play” (Nagata?) is one of the lusher cutscene tracks (in that it has a section where the strings aren’t playing pizzicato)
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“Cave” (Hayazaki?) has some really great synth design
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“Foolix” (Abe?) is a very Dread boss theme
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“Welcome to the Serene Shores” (Hayazaki?) shows off some of the pretty solo piano that made it into a few tracks, like the title theme which a lot of people love
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“Hero’s Hideaway (Shipwrecked Mix)” (Hayazaki/Nagata?) is big comedy
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“Dandori Story” (Hayazaki?) is a pretty rich electronic track, reminds me a little of the Hajime Sugie stuff I was going through earlier (with less reverb)
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“Primordial Thicket” (Hayazaki?) was the base area theme that reminded me most of the ones from Pikmin 3
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“Ancient Sirehound” (Abe?) drops all artifice of being prog-influenced angular orchestral music and just goes straight to being some Haken-ass prog metal
(track titles are unofficial)
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