Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: extracted audio, YouTube playlist 1 (incomplete), YouTube playlist 2 (somewhat more complete but worse titles)
Credits
Sound Director: Toru Minegishi
Music: Shinobu Nagata, Reika Nakai, Kairi Hamada
Sound Design Lead: Masato Mizuta
Sound Design: Taro Bando, Juri Nakahara
Toru Minegishi has said in an interview that he also composed.
Info
I wasn’t really planning on listening to this right away, but then I saw Kairi Hamada was in the composer list, the same Kairi Hamada who wrote some insane music for Splatoon 3 updates and DLC, so my hand was forced a bit here. This is the third Tomodachi Life game (though the first for the DS was never released overseas), which is a series of life sims that are kind of like Nintendo’s take on The Sims, though with more limited, Tamagotchi-like player-character interactions. The games are super quirky, with lots of bizarre dialogue and events, and the characters all have that simplistic, cutesy Mii style.
This is kind of slight throwback soundtrack for Nintendo, in how aggressively cheap-sounding it is; we’ve had a pretty good run of like 10-15 years of live instrument performances and nice electronic production across a bunch of different Nintendo games, but with this one we’re right back in the Wii/DS-era of sequenced music in terms of how fake all the instruments sound. A lot of the writing also feels very much of that era, in terms of an overall mix of quirkiness, sparseness, and cuteness. It’s Nintendo cute, in other words. Probably intentionally so, given this interview with sound director Toru Minegishi:
When I first joined the project, I shared a rough demo with Sakamoto-san and Takahashi-san, asking if they thought it would be suitable for the upcoming game. I recall the music being fairly simple, inspired by the relaxed, lighthearted aura that Mii characters give off. But they weren’t very impressed… The same was true of the reworked version. I can laugh about it now, but back then, I spent months trying to figure out what to do. (Laughs) As I wrestled with the question, “What kind of music truly captures the essence of Tomodachi Life?” I revisited the soundtracks from previous titles. Then, one day, I tried playing the main theme from the original Nintendo DS game on the piano, and realized how complex, jazzy, and full of character it was.
When you listen to it in the game, it sounds playful with a folk dance-esque rhythm, giving it a warm, laid-back feel. But when I played it on the piano and focused on its core structure, I discovered it was surprisingly deep. That’s when it hit me—it’s actually a rich, nuanced piece of music, but by layering those playful sounds and carefree rhythms on top, it creates a delicate balance. I realized that this balance is one of the things that gives Tomodachi Life its unique musical character.
I’m not entirely sure what piece he’s referring to as the “main theme,” but it’s probably one by Daisuke Shiiba, an ex-Nintendo composer with a fondness for both classical music and jazz chords who pretty often wrote music you could describe in the way Minegishi just did there. At that time Nintendo music was a bit less in-your-face in its bizarreness, tending to do stuff like mix sick chord progressions with poppy melodies and sunny instrumentation and be more “haha quirky” instead of overly avant garde, so as not to scare off the normies I guess. With Living the Dream’s soundtrack, it very much feels like they were all pretending it was still 2010 in Kyoto. Even though two of the composers were like ten years old when the original DS game came out. The passage of time is weird. Anyway.
I haven’t listened to the first two games’ soundtracks in quite a while, so I can’t really say how diverse or interesting the new one is in comparison to its predecessors, but I thought it was fine. A lot of random stuff can happen in this game so the range is pretty broad, with rock and orchestral and jazz fusion and various countries’ traditional music and solo guitar or piano and so on, but mostly it’s pretty chill and pop-jazzy with a mix of synths and acoustic instrumentation. I do prefer the present era of Nintendo music where they are avant garde directly into our faces over the era that this soundtrack represents, so it’s not terribly surprising that I didn’t think it was mindblowing, but it’s not like Nintendo music from then was bad, far from it! Minegishi identified the music as complex and jazzy, and there are plenty of randomly complex bits and jazzy harmonies to find spicing up the soundtrack.
Recommended tracks:
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“Where & Wear Clothing” is one of the more overtly fusiony tracks in the game, still pretty cute tho
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“Wishing Fountain” is real bendy in the background
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“Travel (Space)” hits a bunch of space music tropes in both the composition and synths
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“Local Communication” is peak cute pop-jazz, slight eShop vibes here
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“Mii Accident” was my favorite of the comedy quirk tracks
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“Mii Dream (Theme B)” sounded the most like Zelda music
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“Christmas” has some sleigh bells in it so you know it’s winter music
(track titles are unofficial)
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