Game info: Nintendo
Listening: extracted audio, YouTube (extended tracks, incomplete)
Credits
Music: Masaru Tajima
Sound Effects: Masami Yone
Info
Taking a brief break from Takashi Yoshida to fit in a 2024 release I forgot I never properly listened to until right now. Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition is kind of a spiritual successor to the NES Remix series where you play a bunch of short challenges from NES games like “collect all the coins in this room in Super Mario Bros.” and try to clear them as fast as possible. So all of the music that plays while you’re in the challenges is the music from the original games (my assumption is the game has an NES emulator in it), but there are a few original tracks for menus/results/etc.
Masaru Tajima has never been a prolific composer for Nintendo, doing maybe one or two games a year that don’t have a whole ton of music in them, but that’s slowed down even more in the last ten years or so; this is the first game he’s shown up in since 2021. There hasn’t even been any uncredited system application or eShop music or whatever he could’ve kept busy with, since the Switch doesn’t have any of that any more (disastrous move on Nintendo’s part IMO). Maybe he does some internal management? Maybe they just pay him a salary to do nothing because Nintendo has 5x as many composers on the payroll than they actually need. It’s hard to say. He’s back here though, so that’s sick.
In a somewhat Nintendo-ish fashion, most of the themes are just same-tempo instrumental variations of one another: there’s a synthwave-y/chiptune main theme that’s arranged like seven different times into a few other styles for various menus and results, along with a long credits remix that extends the piece a bit before changing into an actually rearranged chill jazz fusion version in the second half. Besides those, there’s also a standard results theme, a special results theme for Survival mode(?) that doesn’t seem to be uploaded anywhere, and a few different intro jingles. So there’s very little “distinct” music, but if you like the main theme it might be nice hearing it in ten slightly different versions, and I do like the main theme so it’s nice hearing it in ten slightly different versions.
Recommended tracks:
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“Player Icons / Pin Collection” is my favorite version of the main theme, which obviously means it’s the mystical version with bells in it
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“Speedrun Mode – Results” is a pretty standard DnB results theme, with a splash of cute because this is a Nintendo game
(track titles are unofficial)
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