Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube, extracted audio
Credits
Music: Yoshito Sekigawa, Yuka Tsujiyoko
Sound Effects: Saki Kasuga, Kenichi Nishimaki, Masanobu Matsunaga
Mario Series Theme Music: Koji Kondo
On her old website, Saki Kasuga said that she composed for the game as well, explicitly pointing out this was despite only being credited for sound effects.
Info
As is tradition, since a big remake of this game just came out, I decided to relisten to the original soundtrack for comparison purposes.
I don’t need to tell y’all that this soundtrack rules, right? Like, this is easily a top 3 soundtrack by INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS, quite possibly a top 1 soundtrack, and I feel like this is the opinion of most people. Including my contrarian butt. Tons of quirky cartoon shenanigans, fun chords, and truly bizarre nonsense, all wrapped up in some of the most consistently fantastic and eccentric sound design produced across an entire game soundtrack. It’s really great. I’m not even sure what else to say about it besides that it’s really, really great.
I’ve never at all been confident in guessing composers beyond a very small handful of tracks (typically involving more intricate partwriting, which I give to Sekigawa because he’s demonstrably a better orchestrator in Fire Emblem games than Tsujiyoko). I used to think the soundtrack was likely almost all Sekigawa, since it’s very different in terms of compositional complexity and sound design from the original N64 Paper Mario, which was mostly Tsujiyoko… but then I heard the soundtrack of Pokémon Picross, which is entirely by Tsujiyoko and is very similar to TTYD, so now I think she definitely had to have had a decent role. As for Saki Kasuga, your guess is as good as mine, beyond the assumption that she probably didn’t write that much given she was only credited for SFX. She arranged the Rogueport theme for Super Smash Bros. 4, which may or may not suggest she wrote the original and chose to cover it herself.
Recommended tracks:
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“Cutting It Pretty Close!” is a good cartoon panic theme crossed with EDM sounds
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“Boggly Woods” is a really pretty ambient theme
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“We’re the Three Shadows!” is funny haunted house music, love the tempo/meter change halfway through
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“Battle – Macho Grubba” tries to play white noise as a pitched instrument at 0:40, which doesn’t really work because it’s white noise but it also does kind of work
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“X-Naut Fortress” honestly sounds like a Metroid II caves theme now that I’m thinking about it
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“Supportive Voices from Afar” has this really tender moment of delicate determination at 0:41 with nice string writing, and the combination of that with chiptune feels a little ahead of its time in VGM
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“Battle – Bowser, the Koopa King” is the track from the game you’d include in your one hour [VGM] JUNGLE/DNB/BREAKCORE MIX YouTube compilation
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“Battle – Shadow Queen (True Glory)” is one of the weirdest pieces of music in the game, which is saying a lot
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“Pit of 100 Trials” is dizzying with layers that aren’t quite the same tempo
(track titles are taken from the Switch remake)
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