Mr. Reader
I wasn’t comparing it to SMW soundtrack but to Super Mario Sunshine’s ‘Delfino Square’. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Delfino Square song sounds like restaurant music. And since most restaurants around me are Mexican, it was an association to me. I don’t think restaurant music is ‘magical’ or even appropriate for Mario games.
Above: “Waiter!? Where are my tamales?”
When Super Mario Brothers came out, each song seemed designed to carve out the level such as underwater music when underwater or castle music when you are in the castle. The rest of NES Mario games seemed to follow that tradition.
When Super Mario World came out, there seemed to be a shift. In the Iwata Asks interview on Mario Music, you hear Kondo say with Super Mario World that he intentionally played around and combined instruments that are rarely put together. This sounds more like indulgence than ‘genius’. Some tunes in Super Mario World are really great like the Vanilla Dome.
Above: Love the heavy bass and dangerous feel the tune has. This is not carnival music.
I’m not knocking Super Mario World’s music here so much but to note this appears to be the beginning of the definition that Mario music is ‘carnival kooky’. Decades later, Nintendo developers say it feels ‘natural’ to have Mario music sound like ‘wah wah’ as we saw in the NSMB series:
Above: “Wah!” “Wah!”
Is it necessary to have ‘wah’ ‘wah’ in every song?
When Mario Galaxy came out, it had a very different feel to the music. I rented the game, was so floored my the music, that I went out and bought it (I would later sell it). What is interesting is that while Nintendo thinks Mario Galaxy’s music is very different from ‘traditional Mario music’, I actually think they have it upside down. Galaxy’s music is the traditional Mario music. The kooky carnival music is the untraditional music.
Above: The very famous “Mars”. If you have never heard it before, you should listen. This is ‘real’ music.
Above: Thematically, this is a slowed down version of Mars especially with the percussion.
Above: Battlerock Galaxy is Mars again. When you add in the fact that there are airships in Mario Galaxy (which for some reason are going around in space), how can you not expect the customer to have a Super Mario Brothers 3 flashback?
The music we want in Mario games is music that gives the atmosphere of adventure and daring, not clown music. When underwater, we want underwater music. When in castle, we want dangerous castle music. Galaxy’s music wasn’t doing anything new. It was doing exactly what Mario music used to do.
During the NES Marios, I never thought Mario music as ‘clown music’. Mario’s world was dangerous where you could easily get killed.
Remember this theme? You picture Birdo shooting eggs and fire at you (which was a big WTF at the time hahaha).
One of the problems with Mario is that he became more like Mr. Magoo and became somewhat lame. I prefer the pixelated heroic Mario who is a stranger to Mushroom Land and isn’t a citizen, the plumber who fell through a pipe instead of the creepy old man who lives in a cottage.
In the Super Mario Collection, a music CD is packaged along with the game. What I find odd is that the music CD is a collection of songs across all Mario games where the games in the collection are NES Mario games. Shouldn’t the music CD be a collection of all NES Mario game music? If they are going to include Mario 64 music or Super Mario World music or Sunshine music, shouldn’t they also include those games in the collection as well? Why include music for games not present in the collection?
The people who buy Super Mario Collection are going to be fans of the NES Mario games. Why does Nintendo think they are going to give a damn about Mario 64 music or Sunshine music? But, silly, me. I keep making the mistake that the product was put together for the consumer experience.
Who is this music CD designed for? It seems designed for Kondo and other Mario composers to continue in their make-believe world that they are ‘geniuses’. No one is going to buy the Mario Collection for this CD. Although, these people are so haughty that they probably believe every purchase of Mario Collection is because ‘everyone wants the music CD and art book’. The reality is people just want the games and likely don’t even know the CD and art book even exist.
If a Mario music CD was made, why not put up an online poll asking consumers what music they wish to include? This would not only make a CD more compatible to consumers’ tastes, it would also give Nintendo a major clue what the masses prefer as Mario music. It would be education for the Nintendo developers (since they’ve been doing Mario wrong for over a decade). I bet this option never even entered Nintendo’s aristocratic head. The Mario music composers are to be ‘gods’ and their tastes are superior to the consumer’s tastes.
Music, ultimately, is very subjective. But we do know Mario became ‘lame’ for a decade or so ago. Certainly some of the blame goes to the music makers. If the software developers could have had the wrong definition of a Mario game for a decade, it follows that the music composers could be in the same boat.
