View Single Post
  #60  
Old Mar 27, 2015, 02:17 PM
Can of Nothing Can of Nothing is offline
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2014
Posts: 18
Default

Hope you don't mind the bump.

After some study on Kondo's musical style, I'd like to have a stab at which tracks he composed for Sunshine.

One key thing about the main level themes are that you can immediately tell which composer did which simply by checking the Yoshi bongos (not that it matters since who did what is obvious there). Kondo accentuates rhythms using the higher of the two bongos (I sadly have no idea how to explain this, just... listen to stuff like Delfino Plaza or Ricco Harbor), whereas Tanaka does it with the lower one. This means, although old news, things like Pinna Park are out of the question.

Again sticking on the question of level themes the only ones Kondo did were the ones using the Delfino Plaza melody, save for Secret Course. I don't know if he also did things like the Stage Intro theme, though; it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Cutscenes would have most likely been handled by Tanaka, though the one thing that challenges that is how the samples sound... better, for the lack of a better word, than her other work in the game - perhaps those were handled later in development, after she became more familiar with the tools she was working with.

Final Battle is most undoubtedly Tanaka as well. One thing you could see in Yoshi's Island and Super Mario 64 is that Kondo introduced a bit of a leitmotif for Bowser. This motif was heavily played around with each track directly involving him (Baby Bowser, Bowser's Message, Bowser's Theme and Ultimate Bowser) within those two games, and theoretically Kondo would've continued that in Sunshine... Except he didn't.
I have no doubt with the overall awkward style (If this were from Kondo, it'd be from the same man who gave a driving rock song for a battle against a pathetic slime that can't even directly hurt you, amongst other things) and questionable instrumentation that it's, if nothing else, not Kondo. It just doesn't fit in.

When in doubt, just look out for the ones that use anything like a synth. Kondo usually doesn't use stuff like those; I know of only 4 Mario songs by him (Metal Mario, Comet Observatory 1, Mushroomy Kingdom and Smash4WiiU's SMB Medley) that uses "synth" synths (Post-NES of course).

tl;dr here's the stuff I'm 100% sure Kondo wrote:
Delfino Plaza, Bianco Hills, Secret Course, Ricco Harbor, Gelato Beach, Staff Credits & Ending.
It's possible he did the Title Screen (in World, 64 and arguably YI where there was some per-game leitmotifing going on, he used a separate song for their title screens), Get Shine Sprite and Stage Intro themes as well, but I reserve my doubts.


On a less Sunshine topic, though, does anyone know of his influences? I've been listening to a lot of things he's been influenced by (ragtime, jazz, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Sadao Watanabe, Deep Purple and ELP in particular), but I can't find more. I know he's bound to have some Latin, Calypso and Reggae influence too, but I've never seen him drop any names.
And techno. That really surprised me when he said he's been listening to a lot of that lately.

Last edited by Can of Nothing; Mar 27, 2015 at 02:19 PM.
Reply With Quote