Musical Main Characters in ToTK

mediareview ? Am I still doing those? #publish

I guess this fits into Musings on everything else.

This article is about a YouTube video I watched on 2023-07-02: “Musical Main Characters” in Tears of the Kingdom

TODO: Write a review. In the meanwhile these are my texts evangelizing the key points I liked:

It’s 13 min so no need to watch the whole thing. But it’s basically a musician breaking down what he thinks are the main orchestral elements of the Zelda OST: grand piano, reversed choir sounds, and alto saxophone

The choir sounds are especially cool because they always play to evoke a sense of mystery, unknown. But depending on the context, it may be either evil mystery (signaling gloom or presence of the demon king) or comfortable mystery (signaling presence of the Zonai who are harmless)

Also fun fact: the piano in TotK is often accompanied by other instruments playing the harmony part. Contrast to BotW which featured grand piano playing solo for most of the game

Which totally makes sense thematically because in BotW, Link journeys alone through a ruined world; whereas in TotK he’s journeying through a healing world teeming with travelers and villages and settlements

Ahh you never think about these things. But it would have been totally terrible and off-theme for TotK to reuse the BotW OST without changing it like it did. Love the artistic flourish here