Hey y’all, you’ve arrived just in time for me to post this post that I totally didn’t just realize at 9:47 PM on December 31 that I need to prepare. Nope, had all these tracks picked out weeks ago! You know me, never done anything at the last minute before in my life.
I don’t have any secret surprise tracks to pull out of my pocket for this half of the list: everything here is something I’ve posted about already. Though I’ll go into a little more detail about what I like so much about these selections this time… maybe.
I’m picking two pieces from Nintendo’s in-house sound team in this update, to go along with one more in my first half update. I do like Nintendo’s composers a lot, always have, but even so it feels a bit excessive to me to devote so much of my intentionally limited space here to them when I could be featuring other composers too.
But at the same time, it doesn’t feel excessive, because like, I think Nintendo has had an incredibly strong last two years and change, even for them. In this span we’ve had my favorite Metroid soundtrack (Dread), my favorite Splatoon soundtrack (3), my favorite Zelda soundtrack (Tears of the Kingdom), possibly my favorite Pikmin soundtrack (4), and my favorite 2D Mario soundtrack (Wonder). And it’s not just that my favorite old hands were writing music for me specifically; each of these games features at least one new composer who hasn’t been there for much more than five years at most. They have a super rich talent pool, seemingly much richer than it has to be, given they employ so many composers that a lot of them only write music for like one game a year, if that.
So one of my biggest takeaways of the year in VGM 2023 was: Nintendo, what the fuck?
Crypt Underworld: The End of History – “heaven”
Composed by ESPer99
The huge glitchy sound stacks of this at 0:37 and 2:46 were some of the most striking, arresting moments of anything I’ve heard this year. Any one of the sounds would be cool on their own but there are like four happening at once, filled with a yearning emotion that pairs well with the chord progression
Fire Emblem Engage – “Trial of Dawn”
Originally composed by Yoshito Sekigawa
Lead Composer: Yasuhisa Baba
Composer: Kazuki Komai, Hiroki Morishita (suspected arranger), Takeru Kanazaki, Fumihiro Isobe, Takafumi Wada
Arranger: Ryosuke Kawasaki, Sumika Horiguchi
This is a medley arrangement of three melodic fragments from straight orchestral tracks from Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, all originally composed by Yoshito Sekigawa: “Bearer of Hope” to start, “Echoes of Daybreak” at 0:50, and “Ascent” at 1:27. I love the syncopated string stab and transposing wind synth figures dueling in the “Echoes of Daybreak” section; there’s a lot of fun energy there, especially with the spicy change at 1:12
Master Detective Archives: RAIN CODE – “Tremolo Horizon”
Composed by Masafumi Takada
Trippy, ambient noises with a chord randomly moving back and forth across multiple axes; the abstract notion of a place, unmoored from space and time
Pikmin 4 – “Ancient Sirehound” (unofficial title)
Music Lead: Kenta Nagata
Music: Asuka Hayazaki, Soshi Abe (suspected composer)
I was really close to posting one of the cool electronic pieces composed presumably by Asuka Hayazaki, since I do probably like them more than this, but I’ve gone pretty electronic with the other choices here, so to take a breather from all that, here’s some prog metal. Some of the most Haken-like material I’ve ever heard in a video game
Super Mario Bros. Wonder – “Lava” (unofficial title)
Sound Director: Koji Kondo
Music: Shiho Fujii (suspected composer), Sayako Doi, Chisaki Shimazu
This track is packed full of the chord changes and tonal movement I love in Shiho Fujii’s best compositions, and it keeps mixing up the rhythm slightly to keep things nice and bouncy
For the first time since I started adding a cheat section at the end of the year, I don’t actually have anything from a past year I super strongly feel like cheating and including here, but I suppose there is one thing that would be fairly appropriate for me to post:
Zombie Daisuki – “Noisy Zombie”
Composed by Keisuke Ito
This soundtrack was kind of a minor Holy Grail to a very, very small group of people among whom I was included, due to the game never being properly ripped for a variety of reasons and the soundtrack never being acquired by anyone. Until I spontaneously decided “hey, what if I just bought this off of Amazon,” and then I just bought it off of Amazon. This track is some of the closest I’ve ever heard someone else write music in the style of Koichi Sugiyama’s Dragon Quest scores for the NES, not just compositionally but down to the instrumental programming, with a little bit of funny haunted house mixed in there too because this is a cartoony game about zombies.
Finally, a little bonus listening, including the only track in this post that I haven’t actually posted about here on cohost yet (because it was added in an update to the game after my post about it):
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Dungeons of Aether – “Eternal Familiar” // RESOFORCE & flashygoodness
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Nine-Tailed Okitsune Tale – “The cave of Inari” // AAAA
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Poisoned Daggers – “Ringing Steel” // Zan-zan-zawa-veia
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Splatoon 3 – “Clashing Colors” // unknown (Ryo Nagamatsu?)
See y’all in 2024! Although not, like, immediately in 2024, because I’m still busy with some of the stuff that’s kept me away from music recently. Hopefully wrapping up that stuff soonish, though! Just in time for AGDQ 2024 to suck up my free time!
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