Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: YouTube
Credits
Sound Program Lead: Satoshi Miyama
Sound Program: Taiki Asamizu
Sound Director / Music Lead: Naoto Kubo
Sound Design Lead: Shigetoshi Gohara
Music: Daisuke Matsuoka, Reika Nakai, Yuri Goto, Tsukasa Usui
Boss & Enemy Sound Design: Hiroki Araya
Player Sound Design: Nobuyoshi Suzuki
NPC Sound Design: Juri Nakahara
UI & Object Sound Design: Yu Shimazaki
Field & Object Sound Design: Nozomu Sakurai
Cut Scene Sound Design: Nobuyuki Sakai
Sound Management: Mahito Yokota
Production Management: Atsushi Yamaguchi
Lyrics: Winda Benedetti, Owen Cooney, Aster Maragos
Song Vocals: Jenny Kidd
Music Arrangement & Synth Programming – End Credits: Jon-Michael Kubis
Info
Suppose I should probably listen to one of those big Nintendo Switch 2 first-party soundtracks at some point, since this is a website devoted to yelling about how all of Nintendo’s composers are cracked, after all. Donkey Kong Bananza is a 3D platformer made by the Super Mario Odyssey division, and they both share the same lead composer: Naoto Kubo. He’s joined by Daisuke Matsuoka, who previously contributed to the Donkey Kong Country games by Retro Studios, as well as three Zelda composers: Reika Nakai and Yuri Goto (Echoes of Wisdom), and Tsukasa Usui (Tears of the Kingdom).
I was pretty excited to get into the music for this game after finding out it’s in some ways a follow-up to Odyssey, since Odyssey has some of my favorite Mario music of all time: very specifically, the synthy challenge room themes by Naoto Kubo and Shiho Fujii like “Ice Caves” and “Challenges in Another World” all rule. And Bananza has a couple of tracks like that, so I’m satisfied. That’s all I wanted from the game, and I got it.
But there’s a lot more to the music, so I guess I should keep talking about it. It’s an exploration game with a bunch of environments like Odyssey, so there’s music in a bunch of different styles: western movie, EDM, synthwave, rainforestcore, lounge jazz, etc. Generally a bit synthy and lighthearted, with some good chords in every other track to keep things exciting. Even though this isn’t a Mario game, these tracks have a lot of the same DNA and they feel a lot like a Mario soundtrack out of context. On average I enjoyed these more than I typically do Mario music, though I think that’s just a byproduct of the fact that every composer Nintendo hires now is a completely insane freak, and if this same crew were to do the soundtrack for Odyssey 2 or whatever I bet I’d enjoy it just as much.
Though I intentionally left one style of music out of the previous paragraph, an unusual one that defines the soundtrack for me: ambient music. Which is definitely not unprecedented for Nintendo games, but not really this kind of ambient music. It’s mostly not sparse keyboard playing extended chords punctuated with silence and synths like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, though there’s a little of that (hi Tsukasa Usui). It’s mostly not spooky layered warping alien synth noises like Metroid, though there’s a little of that (hi Daisuke Matsuoka).
No, the main flavor of ambient on display here is more full of short melodic fragments, drones, metallic scraping and clanking, and random noises; it’s that Mystcore ambient stuff you hear in a lot of point-and-clicks from the ’90s and ’00s. Which is an interesting choice for a cartoony action adventure game! But a welcome one for sure, I’ll never complain about any video game that chooses to have music in that vein. It’s mostly not too too out there, especially in comparison to some of the less ambient themes, but a lot of it’s solid and some of it is really darn good. Nice soundtrack!
Recommended tracks:
-
“Sinkhole” (Matsuoka?) is one of the Metroid-sounding ambient tracks, very reminiscent in sound design to Samus Returns
-
“The Divide: Freezer Path” (Usui?) is one of the Tears of the Kingdom-sounding ambient tracks, very reminiscent in the chords
-
“Freezer Layer: Chocolava Lake” (Kubo?) was the most strongly “Odyssey challenge room” track to me, this was the track I found while skimming through a gameplay video that convinced me I had to listen to this
-
“Forest Layer: Beaky Thicket” is one of the forest percussion tracks that clock this game pretty quickly as being a Donkey Kong game
-
“Tempest Layer: Stormy Weather” is a bit mixed meter
-
“Feast Layer: Cat-Scratch Kitchen” is a corroded version of an earlier circus-y tune
-
“Poppy Kong Battle” (Nakai/Goto?) sounds a lot like Basiscape, or maybe more relevantly one of the Echoes of Wisdom temple boss themes
-
“Muckety-Muck Battle” (Kubo?) is one of the most Thousand-Year Door boss theme-ass pieces of music I’ve ever heard in a game not developed by INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS
Leave a Reply