← The trailer music is weirdly sloppy
Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: extracted audio, YouTube (incomplete)
Credits
-Retro Studios-
Audio Manager: Scott Petersen
-Nintendo-
Music: Kenji Yamamoto, Minako Hamano
Environment Sound Support: Shinji Ushiroda
Full credits available at VGMdb.
Info
I was putting off listening to this until I could actually play it, which for budgetary reasons only happened a couple of months ago. And then after I finished the game, I put off listening to it because the only rip was an incomplete one on YouTube. But the audio files finally got dumped, so it’s go time.
Prime 4’s soundtrack doesn’t massively depart from its predecessors, so you’ll hear synth instrumentation from and compositional callbacks to past games, but it does have a bit of its own individual flavor, in part because so much time has elapsed since the last one and in part because all the games do to an extent. Most notably, as you might’ve heard in trailers, there are wordless soprano vocals everywhere, which are new compared to the previous male choir vocals that are also still in the soundtrack. Overall there’s also more of an emphasis on “horror” sound design in the music than before; Metroid has always been influenced by space horror so it’s not like previous Prime games haven’t had scary music, but in the ambient tracks they really went in on stuff like metallic scraping noises and drones harder than they have in the past. As a result, I feel like the sound palette of this game is a bit less distinctively Metroid-sounding, but there are still a lot of good noises in there.
About the writing… well. Real fans of the blog (i.e., no one) will remember that in my post about Metroid Dread last year I fully and openly came out as the Kenji Yamamoto hater I’ve been for ages. So I wasn’t excited when the trailer music was clearly him, and I wasn’t excited when I saw he was credited for music after the game came out. I’ve got two major problems with this soundtrack, the first of which requires a brief digression into some Prime musical history.
I’ve learned a bit of trivia about the original Metroid Prime since I wrote about its soundtrack in 2023. I knew then that Retro Studios had originally wanted Autechre to do the soundtrack, but what I didn’t know was that audio lead Clark Wen revealed in an interview that after Nintendo shot down Autechre and Kenji Yamamoto came on board, the first concept track he produced was very rock-focused; they pushed back on him like “aaaaaactually we were thinking more like Autechre,” and that’s why he ended up going in the electronic, ambient techno/IDM-y direction that he did. So Prime’s soundtrack was Yamamoto (and Koichi Kyuma, presumably) intentionally doing an Autechre impersonation, and that’s why I enjoy it. It’s generally not as interesting as Autechre music in either composition and sound design, but it’s not bad, and quite frankly if more game composers even just vaguely pretended to be Autechre I think the world would be a better place.
After the original game, though, Yamamoto started slipping rock into the soundtracks, starting with the guitar solo in the Dark Samus boss theme in Prime 2; there’s also the Brinstar remix in Pinball and the Rundas boss theme in Prime 3 with geetarz in them. And in Prime 4, it appears he had free reign to geetarz as much as he wanted, so while the majority of the soundtrack is still in more traditional Prime electronic styles, there’s way more guitar in boss themes and area themes alike than in all the previous games combined. And I just find Yamamoto’s rock to be so profoundly uninteresting compared to his Autechre impression. It’s the side of Yamamoto’s music that I’d rather listen to the least, and the embrace of it is my first problem with the soundtrack. Even if the guitar was removed altogether I’d still have complaints about a lot of the stylistic and melodic writing, but the guitar is just an upfront signal that this soundtrack wasn’t aimed at me specifically.
My second major problem is that prior to this game, Yamamoto hadn’t had an explicit music credit in more than ten years, and it feels like he forgot how to write music in the intervening time.
I wrote about some basic timing issues in the Fury Green theme that was used in a trailer, wondering if they’d be fixed when the game actually came out. And they weren’t, the song is in fact just like that. And that’s not the only example, there’s a small handful of other tracks with blatant technical deficiencies of a kind I’m hard-pressed to think of any modern examples of from a major developer: besides mistimed parts there’s also incoherently layered sounds, abysmal mixing, etc. Like, get a load of this:
This blows ass. This sounds like two people in the room next door trying and failing to play guitar and drums over a weirdly-edited version of the Prime main theme. I’m not making a personal complaint that this is in a style I’d prefer not to hear; this is just objectively garbage.
I don’t understand how a 40-year audio professional could be satisfied enough with this to send it out. And I don’t understand how the rest of the audio team could’ve just… accepted this and put it in the game. There are multiple tracks in this game where Yamamoto leapfrogged “worst music in the Metroid franchise” and went all the way to “worst music to ever appear in a Nintendo game,” and I don’t know how we got here. Were the development hell and crunch on this game really just that bad, that in a couple of cases this was the best they had to go with?
It’s rough, man. Part of me wants to crow about this, like see? You all wanted Kenji Yamamoto back, well you got your wish and here’s the trash you deserve. But I’m not actually happy to see Metroid music in this state, at all. Which is why I’m going to switch and talk about Minako Hamano now instead. That’s right! This game had two composers, not one.
Hamano was a bit less randomly prog here than she was in Prime 3, but there is still a little bit of her rhythmic shenanigans tucked in there. What I really want to talk about though are her area themes; there are a few of them, particularly in the Ice Belt area and Sol Valley shrines, that are a lot more tonally complex than the rest of the soundtrack in a way that Yamamoto really never gets, so I think they’re probably her. And if they’re her, then she’s definitely upped her sound production game since the last time she’s known to have written music for the Metroid series; in the past her sequencing and sound design have never been especially elaborate and are in fact often very fake-sounding (which I don’t hate!), but here those tracks that don’t sound to me like Yamamoto compositionally are also the ones with the coolest sound design in the game. Generally their sound palette is a bit wider and there’s a bit more care spent in manipulating the overall sound instead of just slapping down some lines and calling it a day.
So they’re, like… definitely some of the best music that’s ever been in the Metroid franchise. Coexisting with easily the worst music that’s ever been in the Metroid franchise. The Prime 4 soundtrack, much like the game itself, is truly a land of contrasts.
The game rip on YouTube is missing at least a few tracks: jingles, some cutscene music, possibly some area theme variations, etc. There are about 25 tracks in the game data that I couldn’t immediately identify as being part of the game or not; a bunch of them are very sparsely ambient and I think are likely dynamic layers that are stacked onto other pieces, but there are “full” tracks in the bunch too, some of which have instrumentation that isn’t used anywhere else in the soundtrack. The game also has several tracks from earlier Prime games that definitely weren’t used in the game that I’m sure were just placeholders during development, so there’s a possibility that some of the unidentified tracks are just older tracks that I don’t remember. One of those in particular is interesting because it appears to be an early prototype version of the Mogenar boss theme from Prime 3 which as far as I know was never used anywhere; compared to the original it’s slower, has less layers, and has a much more prominent synth bassline.
Recommended tracks:
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“Ice Belt (Snow Wolf Battle)” (Hamano?) was the first track that convinced me I should keep listening to the soundtrack, nice spooky chord movement
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“Keratos Boss Battle Music” (Yamamoto?) was one of the boss themes that most hearkened back to the boss themes from the earlier Prime games in its composition and sound design
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“Flare Pool (Energy Extraction)” (Hamano?) is some of that drone-and-metallic-noises ambience
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“100% Ending Song” (Yamamoto?) has a cool glitchy sound at 1:27 that definitely doesn’t feel like it’s actually part of the song, it totally is though it’s not a sound effect that’s synced to anything in the cutscene
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“Lamorn Shrine (Puzzle Room)” (Hamano?) is pretty easily my favorite track in the game, very warpy
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“Sand Griever Battle Music” (Hamano?) is some rare non-4/4 or -3/4
(track titles are unofficial)
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