Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: soundtrack album (w/music info), extracted audio
Credits
BGM: Yuuta Ogasawara, Hirokazu Ando, Jun Ishikawa, Yuki Shimooka
Theme song: Tadashi Ikegami, Taro Nagata, Yuuta Ogasawara
Info
This game came out during the mysterious four year period (i.e., COVID) when HAL Laboratory stopped releasing albums in any way whatsoever, so I was pessimistic they’d ever release this soundtrack, but then they did this month! Pretty cool of them, this is a nice soundtrack. I wasn’t planning on doing an official relisten of this, just a quick one as I update some songs from in-game compression to source quality, but I impulsively decided halfway through to actually do a post about this.
This soundtrack hits all of the fairly standard modern Kirby notes: tons of cuteness mixed with acoustic instruments/orchestra and electronic music, a bunch of different vibes for different settings, more complex chords than you’re expecting, and a dollop of weirdness. The music lead was Hirokazu Ando, which is great because he’s the king. He loves using big chords, unexpected chord jumps into classic cute turnarounds, syncopated staccato rhythms, and the most unhinged piano comping in VGM, and you’ll get all that and more from him here. He’s always consistently solid and always worth listening to.
He’s joined here by my other HAL favorite composer, my original HAL favorite composer, Jun Ishikawa. He’s the guy who invented Kirby music, and while these days I tend to find him much more inconsistently good than Ando, he also does like his chord extensions and he has one thing going for him that no one else there does: he’s Fucking Weird. He’ll get randomly prog out of nowhere, or detune things for no reason, or drop the most unsettling song imaginable, and I love him for that. Ishikawa left HAL at some point recently, possibly some time this year because he turned 60 and that’s the age you can start collecting pension in Japan.
While Ando was the music lead according to the credits, the person who wrote the most music was actually newcomer Yuki Shimooka in his first major role (though not his debut role) with the company. He’s explicitly inspired by Kirby music of the past; in a job recruitment interview (untranslated), he said he played the games in elementary school and they made him want to get into music and join HAL specifically. IMO this is fairly easy to tell from just his music alone, since he writes a lot like Ando, but with a bit more Ishikawa flair to his songwriting. I don’t like him as much because I don’t generally find him to get as compositionally or harmonically adventurous as Ando, but he does some good work.
The last composer is the other newest composer at HAL, Yuuta Ogasawara, who’s been there for a couple more years than Shimooka and debuted on Star Allies. Out of the four I think he’s the one who tends most to write music that’s less “Kirbyesque” in terms of instrumentation or melodies, though Kirby music is stylistically broad to begin with so it never sounds unfitting or anything. He seems to be the go-to guy when the game calls for some thrashin’ rock music.
Recommended tracks:
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“Plundering Beast Battle” (Ogasawara) is a jazzy jam with some nice background mallet lines
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“VS. Dangerous Beast” (Ando) switches back and forth between 6/8 and 3/4 in a way I find pretty fun
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“Fast-Flowing Waterworks” (Shimooka) builds up in a very emotionally-dramatic Kirby way and has some cool synth noises right before the loop at 2:00
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“The Wondaria Dream Parade” (Ando) has my favorite chord progression in the soundtrack at the end of the bridge at 0:51
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“The Battle of Blizzard Bridge” (Ando) is the song where Ando keyboard solos for over five minutes straight
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“Burning, Churning Power Plant” (Ishikawa) starts off with my favorite lead synth that Ishikawa has ever used, it’s so corroded and full of character I love it
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“Hunted by the Beast” (Ishikawa) marks off all three of those Jun Ishikawa checkboxes I listed earlier: randomly prog out of nowhere, detunes things for no reason, and the most unsettling song imaginable
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“Two Planets Approach the Roche Limit” (Ando) is the over-the-top final boss suite with an over-the-top title that’s kind of Ando’s thing now
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“Eternal Echo of the Thrilling Tour-our-our” (Shimooka) plays without the voice clips in the sound test but I feel they’re really critical to the atmosphere of the piece, luckily they realized this was a bonehead move and have the voices in the OST version (though obviously in Japanese)
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