The Legend of Zelda
Released: February 21, 1986
Developer: Nintendo
Composer: Koji Kondo
There’s a game coming out later this year. You may have heard of it. It’s only part of one of the biggest game franchises ever! I am referring to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, but I am not talking about that today since it’s not May yet. In preparation I wanted to talk about some of the previous games in the series, and what better place to start than the beginning.
It’s epic as soon as the game opens…
And then that continues once you start in the overworld…
Koji Kondo had originally intended to use the classical work Bolero by Maurice Ravel because that tempo matched the scrolling of the opening screen, but it turned out that the copyright hadn’t expired.
He therefore had ONE day to compose new music with the same tempo! This is quite an accomplishment.
The score to start off with is nothing short of epic and heroic. Even with the limitations of sound in games at the time, the feel of the game is captured amazingly right here at the beginning. It was so iconic that a version of it was also used in Super Smash Bros years later.
If you play the game for longer than 5 minutes than you probably get to hear this because it’s really easy to die in this game!
This apparently is for more than just dying, since it’s the menu theme, but you mainly hear it after you’ve died. If you’re determined however, you don’t hear it for long because you are ready to get back out there and take on some more bad guys. I’m not entirely sure what this is supposed to sound like. It’s so high pitched and slow that it sounds like fairy music. Not exactly what you expect to hear when you die. I suppose that it’s meant to have a taste of sadness to it. That’s the way that it makes the most sense. You do know exactly what’s coming if you hear this, though.
You have now entered a dungeon. The bad guys have been ramped up to a level of X10, there’s at least one boss battle, and you’re here to find one of the 8 parts of the Triforce of Wisdom. This music sounds kind of spooky, which if you’re going into a dark dungeon then I guess it is kind of spooky. It did get a little bit repetitive, but the music made it more suspenseful here.
There are also other short motifs heard throughout the game for instances such as finding an item, dying, clearing a dungeon, and when you find a recorder that plays a few notes.
The recorder motif is interesting because it’s produced by the character and is diegetic (can be heard by the character). This is used for purposes such as weakening bad guys and clearing paths. These few notes are of greater significance because they’re actually plot based.
Also on a side note, when I copied the videos from YouTube I’d get this popup which is relevant. Get it? Link copied to clipboard? XD I know it’s corny but it’s still funny.
Anyways, now we get to the final dungeon, which his inhabited by none other than Ganon himself, who stole Zelda. This music is even more foreboding than the other dungeons, and you know that this is the final hurrah.
Once you take him out then you get the Ganon being taken out motif and finally get to rescue Zelda, who you’ve been looking for this whole time and who the game is named after.
It’s such a satisfying moment and a big accomplishment at this point. You’ve been fighting sea urchins, bats, triceratops, mummies, rabbit heads, stacks of pancakes, sneks, giant turds, waterdrops, (at least that’s what these looked like to me) all to get to this point! This is like a nice pat on the back, though brief. It kind of felt like “good job, you found Zelda! Alright we’re done”. But we’ve made it here nonetheless.
And now we get the ending credits music, which sounds a lot like the main menu music we hear when we die, only this time you aren’t dead thank goodness. The music suddenly changes into something more upbeat, like “we can celebrate now”. It’s a nice change from how it felt previously. We can now feel like we’ve accomplished something major.
There isn’t a whole lot to the soundtrack. I only found 12 tracks and many of them are just short motifs. It also gets a bit repetitive at times, but I can give the game some slack because of it’s age and that it was written so quickly. It really does feel heroic and dramatic, which is what this game is. I give the soundtrack four out of five stars.
★★★★
No guarantees that I’ll be able to get to very many Zelda games before Tears of the Kingdom, but I’d at least like to talk about Breath of the Wild before then, so everyone can keep me accountable on that. I’ll see you all next time!
Sources:
Video Game Harmony 
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