Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube, 2022 soundtrack album (CD, incomplete), 2024 soundtrack album (digital, incomplete)
Info
I mentioned Toki Tori a couple of months ago in my post about The Sorcerer’s Detritus because my game was inspired by it, and now the composer coincidentally just released a new soundtrack for the game! It’s a stage-based puzzle platformer where you need to collect all the eggs in the level in one go without getting stuck or dying. The puzzle bit is that Toki Tori can’t actually do much platforming at all, so instead you need to use his magic abilities like teleporting and building bridges, which are limited to specific amounts per level, in order to actually reach everything.
The GBC was an interesting time in western video game music because a bunch of demoscene folks got in on the professional game-making action around this time, so you ended up with composers like Jeroen Tel, Jonne Valtonen, Aleksi Eeben, Manfred Linzner, Stello Doussis, and of course beek here doing the soundtracks. So there’s a lot of music on this platform that sounds an awful lot like Commodore 64 or Amiga/DOS tracker tunes, with arpeggiation out the butt and clever multipurpose channel usage and leads written in just that way.
But when I played Toki Tori back in the 2000s, I wasn’t aware of any of that history. All I knew was that this was the first time I was hearing Game Boy music that went ham on the chord arps, and I could barely comprehend what I was listening to. This doesn’t sound like Game Boy music at all??? Well of course it does, it just didn’t sound like any of the Game Boy music I was used to. It was horizon-expanding for me at the time.
The music for this game is largely peppy and cheerful, which you might expect given the colorful graphics and cartoony main character. Some relatively long songs for the Game Boy, each of the main themes is about two minutes long, which is probably a good thing considering the game doesn’t have a whole lot of unique tunes in it. I’m a lot less into the soundtrack than I used to be 15 years ago, which isn’t really a problem with this specific soundtrack but rather that I’m a lot less into this kind of music as a whole. As much as I’ll always appreciate the technical aspects, demoscene and demoscene-adjacent music just generally tends not to scratch my compositional or sound design itches as much as other stuff.
Both soundtrack releases for this game have been incomplete, only including the main menu theme and all four stage themes; the game also includes a few cutscene tracks and jingles and a staff roll theme which haven’t been officially released anywhere. The original 2022 release also included five “Dechipped” arrangements of those tracks with full production. beek’s new 2024 digital release has remastered versions of those arrangements as well as an obscure arrangement of “Creepy Castle” that was once posted on the game’s website, back when that existed.
Recommended tracks:
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“Slime Cave” is funky as hell
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“The Last Egg / Credits” has a bunch of triumphantly feel-good staff roll energy
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“Forest Falls (De-Chipped 2024 Remaster)” turns my favorite bit of the original into a nice texture-y bit at 1:01
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“Creepy Castle (OG Remix 2024 Remaster)” is that remix that was originally posted at tokitori.com and goes into full tracker dance music mode onto the original track; I’ve always liked the more ambient intro with the light synth riffs dueling each other over breakbeats
(“The Last Egg / Credits” is an unofficial title)
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