The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (Switch, 2024)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube, extracted audio

Credits

Sound Programming: Kei Yokohama
Sound Director: Yoshitaka Fujita
Music Director: Hajime Wakai
Music: Masato Ohashi, Manaka Kataoka, Chisaki Hosaka, Reika Nakai, Yuri Goto, Ryotaro Yagi, Azusa Kato
Music Coordination: Kenji Nakajo
Sound Supervisor: Mahito Yokota
Sound Support: Takahiro Watanabe
Recording & Mixing Engineer: Nobuyuki Aoyagi
Assistant Engineer: So Shiiba
Performer Coordinator: Noriko Sekiya
Sound Editors: Eiji Nakamura, Chiharu Minekawa, Kenichi Saito

Info

It took 28 years but they finally released a third game in the Legend of Zelda series, following 1993’s Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon and 1996’s Zelda’s Adventure. Echoes of Wisdom is a slightly puzzlier entry in the series where you summon hordes of minions to beat up enemies for you and also solve all your problems with beds.

The game’s audiovisual presentation follows up directly from the Link’s Awakening remake from 2019, though that game’s composer, Ryo Nagamatsu, didn’t work on this. The music team features two composers from Tears of the Kingdom (Ohashi and Kataoka), two very new Nintendo composers whose only other known work is for the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe DLC tracks (Hosaka and Nakai, though Hosaka is likely the Chisaki Shimazu credited in Super Mario Bros. Wonder), and three outsourced composers for some reason (Goto, Yagi, and Kato). Of the last group, the only person I have any amount of familiarity with is Yagi, though my experience with him is kind of stilted; professionally he’s a serious composer/orchestrator/copyist and I haven’t heard anything he’s done in that regard, but he’s also done some very sick jazz/prog chiptune and eletronic stuff under the name Ryo Senba.

Like Link’s Awakening, they went with a chamber-y string + wind ensemble instrumentation for a lot of the soundtrack, mixed with a good amount of chiptune and other electronic sounds. I wasn’t a massive fan of a lot of this music in LA and likewise I think a lot of the more normal themes here are just okay, but the wind ensemble writing in particular is a lot more active this time around, with plenty of fun multipart writing across the soundtrack of a kind that’s rare to see this much of in video game music. The overworld and town themes are pretty peaceful and sometimes cutesy music like this that are primarily acoustic instruments, while the more threatening areas like dungeons get a bit darker & more chaotic with their composition and mix in more of the electronic sound design. The temple themes are pretty good!

While there’s still some chiptune in this soundtrack, there’s a lot less of it than in Link’s Awakening, probably because this isn’t a retro game remake. Instead the synth palette is a bit more varied with a mix of leads, pads, and percussive sounds, generally used as more background elements but there are a few tracks that are heavily or entirely synths. The most notable synth noises to me was the inclusion of sounds that sound like they’re reversed and stretched, very reminiscent of the boss themes in Tears of the Kingdom.

These all culminate in the Echoes of Wisdom’s boss themes, which are all incredible. They mix the most chaotic, proggy compositions in the soundtrack with more chiptune than the rest of the soundtrack uses on average, lots of the Tears of the Kingdom sound design, and some occasional glimpses of the more contrapuntal side of the orchestral writing. Overall, this might be my favorite collection of boss themes in any Zelda game; Tears is the closest competitor, and while I think that game has more boss themes that make me instantly explode in a shower of sparks, I think these may be more consistently great as a complete package.

Recommended tracks:

  • Hyrule Castle” is a pretty nice loose remix of the original theme from A Link to the Past

  • Still World” is one of the most electronic tracks in the game, playing in interdimensional areas

  • Suthorn Ruins” has some of my favorite wind ensemble writing in the soundtrack

  • Jabul Ruins Whirlpool Escape” is the weirdest of the handful of Minako Hamano Metroid-esque escape themes that apparently exist in the game

  • Hyrule Castle (Still World) Boss (2)” is one of the least hinged boss themes and probably the one that sounds the most like it comes from Tears of the Kingdom (is this Ohashi??), though the prominent chiptune instrument tells you it’s not

  • Faron Temple Boss” has a great intro with a sick angklung riff in 7

  • Lanayru Temple” mixes really pretty mystical ice ruins-type vibes with ominous pitch bending background noises that kind of remind me of Shiho Fujii (though she didn’t work on this game)

  • Mango Rush Minigame” is one of the comical themes I felt like including for some reason; it also has some of the nice multivoice writing you’ll find in the soundtrack because of course it does

  • Eastern Temple” might be my favorite track in the game, mixing modal jazz-ish chord movement with a nice mix of textural acoustic and electronic writing and whatever’s going on rhythmically at 1:11

(track titles are unofficial)

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