Video game music (Twilight Princess)
So, I just finished playing through The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. This week has been my first real opportunity to play my Wii at home since moving into my apartment, since I didn’t previously own a TV.
What struck me on this play-though was the way it used music to set the mood, leaving me with a very immersive experience. Composing video game music is a different animal than other kinds of music. Scoring a film probably comes closest, but that doesn’t completely cut it except for the non-interactive sequences. This isn’t music you’d necessarily want to put on your iPod and listen to by itself, mostly because there’s no beginning, middle, and end. Given the nature of the medium, you can’t count on your music lasting a set amount of time. So, the challenge is to have the music fit the action without knowing exactly how long that’ll take. Hopefully, you can also create some memorable themes in there. Anyway, I’d like to share with you a few parts of the game that were memorable to me from a musical standpoint. I’ll be mentioning plot details, so if you haven’t played the game and plan to (and it’s from 2006, so what are you waiting for, exactly?) you may want to come back to this when you’ve finished it.
The first comes at a point about halfway through the game. Your companion for most of the game is dying on your back. You desperately need to get to somebody in the castle in the hopes that she can save your friend. Oh, and you’re stuck as a wolf so the humans are afraid of you. It’s night, raining, and this music (mostly piano) plays in the background. It really helps to convey a solemn desperation, and it’s no surprise to me that that song is the basis for the only 3 arrangements on OverClocked ReMix, including one of my favorites, Tattered Slippers. It makes good use of one of the main themes of Twilight Princess, already made recognizable to the player in a more upbeat form in Hyrule Field.
But they aren’t all solemn moments. This piece comes first when you’re on your horse, facing down a large green enemy riding a giant boar on the other side of the Bridge of Eldin, which has inexplicably been built with no guard rails over a giant chasm. He’s trying to charge you to knock you off, and you’re trying to make him miss you, but just enough so you can get in with your sword and cut free the kid that he’s kidnapped.
Boss battles, of course, have to sound epic, but not the same. This is in a giant frozen cathedral against a monster in a flying ice chariot-thing. Most boss battles have a point at which the monster is briefly incapacitated, giving you the opportunity to strike with your sword. At that point, the music track moves to an optimistic theme, without making it obvious that anything’s changed. You can see it at about 1:14 on the one I already linked, and here at about 1:05.
Nothing’s quite as epic as the final battle, though, which of course goes through many phases. The first phase has you fighting the body of princess Zelda, controlled by the main villain. The music is mostly notable because of how it uses and warps Zelda’s Lullaby, well-known to series fans since Ocarina of Time.
Anyway, I think that’s about all I wanted to share. There are people I know who would have played through most of that game with the sound off and their own music as a replacement, and I think they’re really missing something.
(I’d like to thank The Hylia for use of their Twilight Princess soundtrack)
