Game info: WiKirby
Listening: YouTube (tracks 97-150)
Credits
BGM: Yuki Kato, Megumi Ohara, Hirokazu Ando, Yuuta Ogasawara, Yuki Shimooka, Jun Ishikawa, Shogo Sakai
Theme song: Tadashi Ikegami (composition), Taro Nagata & Yuki Shimooka (arrangement)
Info
From a not Kirby game to an actual Kirby game! The Switch 2 upgrade of Kirby and the Forgotten Land includes a new mode, Star-Crossed World, which features harder remixed versions of 12 stages and a new boss; it’s more or less a condensed hard mode for the game. You might not assume that would necessitate the addition of a whole lot of new music, but there are new themes for every stage, several cutscenes that all have new music, and new tunes for the new Colosseum difficulty (plus a handful of reused tunes from past games), so all in all there are almost fifty new tracks here. Most of the pieces are remixes of pieces from the original game, though there are a few original pieces, generally involving the new main theme from the theme song (which is quoted in a lot of the other remixes as well).
As noted by series director Shinya Kumazaki in an interview (Japanese), the entire HAL Laboratory sound team worked on this update, with all of them except newest member Momo Kodama (who did sound effects) contributing at least one piece of music. Particularly of note is that the second-newest member, Yuki Kato, did five tracks; they first showed up in Return to Dream Land Deluxe but didn’t have any music attributed to them in the sound test, so it wasn’t clear at the time if they were part of HAL and simply didn’t write any music, or if they were outsourced from Vanpool like Kiyoshi Hazemoto and so their songs were colored white like his. The answer is the former: they’re part of HAL! Two ex-HAL employees also contributed to the soundtrack, Jun Ishikawa and Shogo Sakai, though depending on how long this was actually in development, it’s possible they might’ve written their tracks very early on while they were still at HAL.
The base game was very much “house Kirby style written by multiple composers who sound different,” and Star-Crossed World’s soundtrack is more of that, but with even more composers who sound different. So it’s more disparate-sounding than its predecessor, but a whole lot of it does still sound like alternate Forgotten Land music. In particular, I think everything I said about Hirokazu Ando, Jun Ishikawa, and Yuki Shimooka in my post about the base game’s soundtrack applies to what they did for this soundtrack (and Yuuta Ogasawara too, though he only wrote a single track this time). A thing to add is that Shimooka seems more likely than everyone else to mix in some ambient sound design into his songs; this is something we already saw this in the two track I highlighted by him from the base game, but I didn’t explicitly comment on it as a tendency at the time.
The three added composers each had their own niches for the most part: Yuki Kato mostly did orchestral rock and jazzpop (including one instrumental for a song with lyrics but no vocal performance), Shogo Sakai used distorted electric guitar in three tracks (though also had straight orchestral and swing jazz), and Megumi Ohara was mostly different flavors of jazz (with some rock, EDM, and orchestral too). None of their songs really caught me all that much, though I haven’t ever really liked Sakai or Ohara as much as Ishikawa and Ando so I wasn’t expecting them to.
Recommended tracks:
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“Song of the Starfall Children” (Shimooka) had my favorite chords of a Shimooka track, with a little synthy goodness mixed in there for atmosphere
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“Meteoric Beast Battle” (Kato) tosses in a little unnecessary slap bass at 0:35 as bait
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“Washed Away at the Cement Summit” (Ogasawara, orig. Shimooka) has a nice staccato intro
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“Freezing Wind and Some Snowmen” (Ando, orig. Ando & Ogasawara) has acoustic guitar doing his usual nonsensical comping instead of piano
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“Wastes That Count Time” (Sakai, orig. Ogasawara) metals up a more Middle Eastern-sounding original track
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“Moonlight Canyon Labyrinth” (Ohara, orig. Shimooka) extremely jazzes up a Western movie-sounding original track
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“Beast Drum of Meteors” (Ishikawa) is the prog rockingest track I’ve ever heard by Ishikawa, forget what I said about that one mixed meter track in MR. ELEVATOR I should’ve saved that comment for this track
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