Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube (playlist, single video), extracted audio
Credits
SE/Sound Designers: Toshiko Tasaki, Eisei Kudo, Takuma Kanai, So Sato, Lo Wing On, Kenta Kawaguchi
Sound Producer, Composer & Arranger: Hideki Sakamoto
Sound Director: Yuta Fukuda
Recording & Mixing Engineer: Takuya Komiyama
Assistant Recording Engineers: Lu Pinghsun, Shion Nagano
Music Preparator: Takayasu Seo
Sound Supervisors: Koji Kondo, Ryoji Yoshitomi, Megumi Inoue
Info
So last year saw the first new game in the Mario & Luigi RPG series in almost a decade. The company that originally made these, AlphaDream, went bankrupt in 2019, so Brothership was developed by a different company, Acquire. With that change in developer, they intentionally decided to pick a new composer rather than default to Yoko Shimomura, who composed the first five games, so they went to Hideki Sakamoto of noisycroak instead. I don’t particularly like the music Shimomura did for the first four games (I haven’t played or listened to Paper Jam), and I do like Sakamoto a bit, so learning that made me put this soundtrack on the list.
Sakimoto’s direction for this soundtrack was a bit of a pops/jazz orchestra approach, with a bunch of tuned percussion, acoustic guitar, accordion, and pirate-y melodies to evoke islands and ocean exploration (the “ship” in Brothership is quite literal). The music does also take some excursions into more straightforward jazz, funk, and orchestral music as well, along with some more comedic-sounding tunes because this is a comedic Mario series after all.
I liked this one, easily my favorite Mario & Luigi soundtrack so far, though I think it does end up playing it a bit safe here and there (which isn’t unusual for Mario soundtracks as a whole). There’s definitely a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy here, in that I’m far more predisposed to like the new composer over the old one and—surprise surprise—I liked the new soundtrack more than the old ones, but there’s I think a pretty clear sudden increase in the harmonic and orchestrational complexity on Brothership that’s much more in line with my tastes.
There are a couple of different YouTube uploads of this soundtrack and I’m not entirely sure how complete either of them are, since the game seems to have quite a bit of duplicated music in its files.
Recommended tracks:
-
“Problems to Be Fixed” is one of the most Pokémon Mystery Dungeon-sounding tracks in the game (Hideki Sakamoto also wrote music for this series)
-
“Allsand Island” is one of the folkier tracks, I like the spicy chord that ends the phrases at 0:45 and 0:54
-
“Club Dyode” has the filename
Play_m50_discofeel, which should give you an idea of what to expect stylistically -
“Reclusa World” has some weird tonality and transposition that reminds me of the PMD Red/Blue Rescue Team soundtracks
-
“Castle Hallway” is a distorted remix of the Super Mario 64 castle theme that accompanies what’s apparently a weird creepypasta part of the game
-
“Final Boss Theme (Phase 2)” is one of several battle themes with a throwback anime soundtrack style to it
-
Play_m56_event02 is a nice comedy theme, no one seems to have come up with a title for it yet so that’s the filename
(track titles are unofficial)
Leave a Reply