Hey! This is just a quick piece of trivia, but
I couldn’t resist sharing it. So, unless you’ve been asleep in a shrine
for a hundred years, you’re sure to have seen Nintendo’s incredible remake of Link’s
Awakening. The original game came out back in 1993 on
the Game Boy, and it’s my favourite entry in the Zelda series. Or at least, it was until this incredible
thing came along! Remember watching that Direct, when out of
the blue, this happened? It was an incredible moment! But listen closer to that music. I’ll turn down the sound effects. Because you see, there’s a really weird
story behind what you’re hearing right now, and there’s a - well - terrible version
of this song which almost ended up inside the game. Let’s take a look! Hi there! Welcome to Thomas Game Docs! So if we’re going to talk about Link’s
Awakening’s soundtrack, we first need to quickly jump back to the early 90s, when a
couple of Nintendo developers were secretly starting work on a remake of the recently
released A Link to the Past for the Game Boy. They used an old, and now mostly forgotten,
the Frog for whom the bell tolls, as the basis for their coding. Now, as time went on, they started fleshing
out this remake into an entirely new game, incorporating many ideas left over from a
Link to the past. In factm, the whole idea of the game revolving
around a large egg, that came from a Link to The past, an idea which was cut. Now, over the next year or so, a complete
and entirely unique zelda game began taking shape - Link’s Awakening. But what about the soundtrack? Well, a lot of this is mired in mystery. We can of course look to the end credits for
some pointers - for sound composer we have 3 names. First is Kazumi Totaka - you might well recognise
him, as he’s the guy that K.K. Slider from Animal Crossing was based on. Plus, he hides a little jingle inside every
game he’s worked on. It’s in the remake, too! What about the other names? Well, the first is someone called Minako Hamano,
and the other is named Kozue ishikawa. But who are these mysterious other composers? And who of the three was responsible for what? Well, luckily for us, Nintendo decided to
give us a bit of pointer. When they released Link’s Awakening DX for
the Gameboy Color a few years later in 1999, they released alongside it a guide, within
which can be found an interview of every single staff member who worked on the game. And if we look to the sound section, we can
get a little more information, as translated by the marvellous Glitterberri. Here’s Kazumi Totaka, who we know, and here’s
Minako Hamano and Kozue Ishikawa. Actually, this isn’t super related, but
during the interview, each of the developers was asked to describe a recent dream they
had, and these answers are pretty enlightening, actually! Totaka states, “It’s been awhile, but
I dreamt I was running and running and couldn’t gain any ground.” Sounds stressful. Kozue Ishikawa tells us, “Lately I’ve
been sleeping so soundly I don’t remember my dreams”. And Minako Hamano explains, “I think I’m
past the age for dreaming.” But it’s not just their dreams that this
interview tells us about. It actually reveals something much more enlightening. It turns out that their job titles as written
here, are different from the end credits sequence that we looked at earlier. Kozue Ishikawa is down for BGM Composition,
background music composition. That checks out. Minako Hamano, though, is listed as BGM Work. Now, I can’t find what the original Japanese
booklet said, so I’m at the translator's behest here, but going by “BGM Work” alone,
I’m wondering if maybe she helped touch up the tracks? Or perhaps she was also a composer, just like
Kozue ishikawa. It’s hard to say. But what’s really interesting is Kazumi
Totaka’s says “sound program and sound effects”. In other words, totaka didn’t actually do
any of the composing this time round, he was just in charge of typing up the data for the
music which the other two composers composed. That and sound effects, anyway. Of course, that still leaves a lot up in the
air. We get a little more information about one
or two of the tracks from various soundtrack CDs which list the composers’ names, but
most of this soundtrack is completely unknown and unknowable. Heck, the game’s best known song, ballad
of the wind fish, is left uncredited. Will we ever know who composed this landmark
piece of music? Sadly, that’s looking less and less likely. But, fast forward 2 decades, and Nintendo’s
new console, the Switch, is taking off like a kite in a hurricane. And at this time, an idea started brewing. What if a remake were developed of Link’s
Awakening, that weird Zelda game from the 90s? Grezzo, the development studio who had previously
remade Ocarina of Time and majora’s Mask for the 3ds, were enlisted as developer. However, this project would be on a completely
different scale. Those older remakes were based on the original
game’s code, and assets. Don’t get me wrong, these remakes involved
a huge amount of time, effort and skill. But at their heart, Grezzo were touching up
the older games to be suited for the newer system. This time round though, Grezzo were starting
from scratch. The original game was a 2d, 8 bit looking
thing - there was no way to just spruce it up a little, it needed to be rebuilt from
the ground up. Now, the producer was to be Nintendo’s Eiji
Aonuma, a man who has worked on more Zelda games than anyone else in the world. And before long, he and Grezzo starting brainstorming
this new game’s artstyle. After trying out a few styles, they quickly
settled on a sort of miniature diorama look for the game. As Aonuma put it himself, “When I played
the original Game Boy version, it was a small screen, and it felt like a small world, but
very vast. And so, it kind of had this tilt shift perspective;
so that's why I thought this diorama-like art style would be perfect for this.” And with that decided on, Grezzo’s remake
finally started taking shape. And this is where the sound kicks in! Finally, it is time! Enter composer Ryo Nagamatsu, here to save
the day! Now, you probably won’t have heard of him,
but if you have, it’s most likely from his work on A Link Between Worlds for 3DS. Not only that, he’s worked on mario kart
8, Nintendo land (which has a really underrated soundtrack!), and Splatoon 2. Yeah, this guy knows what he’s doing! And so, once development was well underway,
he was brought in to rearrange the classic soundtrack from Hamano, Ishikawa and a little
bit Totaka. To start, Nagamtsu took a look at the game’s
title music. Now, Here’s how it sounds in the original
game. Now this whole intro sequence is iconic i
I know for me, watching it sends literal chills down my spine, and that’s not an exaggeration. And so, Nagamatsu knew that this song was
incredibly incredibly important to get right - not only for the sake of my own nostalgia,
but also since it would dictate the vibe of the entire rest of the soundtrack. Alright, so how could he get started. Well, by the time Nagamatsu was brought in
to start composing, the game’s development was well underway. The graphical style, for instance, was locked
in, which meant that Nagamatsu had to carefully match his work on the soundtrack, to the sort
of miniature clay look. But, uh, how was he meant to do that? Because that’s a lot easier said than done. Well, he first stepped back. Because what even was this game? Well, it was obviously a Zelda game. And Zelda, he remarked, was powerful, pull
of energy. It had momentum. And so, he thought, why don’t I try to convey
that through the instruments I choose. And looking at the lineup of an orchestra,
there’s only really one group that truly screams “momentum”. Brass, right? Trumpets, tubas, these instruments are powerful
sounding, and full of energy. And so, he plugged them into the game’s
main theme. Voila! Hmm, it didn’t seem right, somehow? Sure brass, was energetic, he thought, but
this didn’t seem to fit. But why? Well, Link’s Awakening, is, yes, a Zelda
game, but it’s not like the others, somehow. Owing to its secretive, school-project type
roots, this game is quirky, it’s weird. The setting, story, characters, they’re
all completely different from what Zelda is typically like. And this brass theme, it just didn’t convey
any of that. Nagamatsu described it as having an “ordinary
Zelda feeling”. And so, he went back to the drawing board,
but this time, he was determined to convey the quickness, the weirdness of Link’s awakening. And luckily for him, Nagamatsu actually had
a lot of experience using weird, or unordinary instruments. Like maybe, he could use accordion and fiddle,
similar to the title screen from Triforce heroes, which he composed. Or maybe something lighter, with recorders
and xylophone, similar to Nintendo Land, another soundtrack which he worked on. But after much humming and harring, much tinkering
and tweaking, he eventually settled on something which he thought was just right, It was the
perfect mix of quirky but still Zelda, unique, but not crazy. Let’s take a listen, uh, shall we. Oh, um, uh, okay. Yes, this is certainly a song. Now, I don’t wanna be overly rude. Nagamatsu is clearly an incredibly talented
composer, but, uh, I’m not sure if this is really the song that shows that off. There’s this screechy violin, I think, fiddle,
at the beginning, which is never a great start, but then, of course, how could we forget,
the terrifying, creeping, haunting, children singing sound. And by the way, that is definitely meant to
be children singing - the name of the file from Nintendo of Japan’s website is title
version child dot mp3. So yes, this is definitely meant to sound
like a choir of children. HOWEVER, I suspect that what we’re actually
listening to is Ryo Nagamatsu himself, pitched up a couple of octaves. I know for a fact that he provided his own
“YUGA” voice for A Link Between Worlds, so it seems likely that he reprised his role
here. Anyway, point is, I’m not a big fan of this,
and I don’t think Nagamatsu was either, and so, after much distress I’m sure, he
returned to the drawing board one final time. He needed quirky, sure, but maybe children
singing wasn’t the best way to convey that. And so, for this final attempt he made use
of the orchestra’s most charming, I would say, group of instruments. The woodwinds! He figured, that these instruments fit the
teensy weecy aesthetic better than any other, and so, after a little more fiddling and fine-tuning,
he eventually ended up with the title theme that we’re now used to hearing. Take it away, Nagamatsu! And that’s the long and fraught story of
how we went from this, to this, and finally to this. Thank you for watching all the way to the
end, that's very kind of you! Follow me on Twitter, @thomasgdocs for updates
on future videos, and just me as a person - I also exist! Plus you can subscribe to this YouTube channel
and that would be very nice of you, if you want to see future videos. Ok, see you next week. Bye!
