So if you haven’t heard by now, the most recent Nintendo Direct from Thursday had a new trailer for Metroid Prime 4 that featured several pieces of music, including most prominently an ethereal area theme (which happened to be teased at the end of the last trailer). It only plays for about 40 seconds in the trailer, but the game’s Japanese website features a 3 minute extended version as BGM. The file is tagged with “Fury Green47-ver.3” as the title, though Metroid music (as most Nintendo music) tends to have pretty functional titles, so I’d expect this to just be called something like “Viewros Overworld” in the Nintendo Music app if it ever shows up there.
This song is really blatantly Kenji Yamamoto, in both the straightforward diatonic composition and synth choices from previous Metroid Prime games. I’d never discount the possibility of a newer composer intentionally writing in an established style, though if that’s the case here then we’d very firmly be in “direct pastiche of Kenji Yamamoto specifically” territory at the expense of the galactic theory-brained nonsense that every new Nintendo composer reflexively has to put in all their music, so I think the easiest explanation is that this is just Yamamoto.
But this piece is… weirdly rhythmically sloppy in a couple of ways that don’t feel intentional.
The main one is the whistle synth that comes in during the 1:10 section. It sounds like it was just played in live and then didn’t get any timing fixes, so it’s a little unquantized at the start when it’s just repeating the riff and then when it starts getting more melodic at 1:35 it’s just kinda aimlessly noodling and it feels like it loses the tempo of the song a couple of times.
Then in the final section starting at 2:09, there’s a strange desyncedness that becomes more apparent as it goes on where… it seems like all the instruments just can’t find the first beat of the measure? I initially though it might’ve just been that some of the samples have long attacks that weren’t compensated for, so some of the instruments are a little delayed, but some of the instruments are hitting before the beat too. I do actually kind of like the cacophonous, stumbling result here, but I’m not especially convinced that it’s intentional either.
Is the post-trailer part of this track just a hasty WIP render and it’s going to get more time in the oven later? It’s weird.
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