Anyone who has ever played a Nintendo game knows that Nintendo sucks so bad at making decent water gameplay. Playing through water in Nintendo games means terrible control of your character (a la Mario), an enormous array of far too many enemies and monsters (a la Pokemon), getting lost over and over again (a la Zelda), and moving incredibly slow (a la everything). Ever since the infamous first water level in Super Mario Bros’ 2-2, Nintendo has not gotten much better at improving their water gameplay. And the saving grace for this is one thing: the music. Water music has always been a staple of Nintendo soundtracks, featuring beautiful music that you would really enjoy if you weren’t stuck repeating water levels over and over for hours. I really love water music in Nintendo games, and it sucks that it has to be accompanied by terrible levels and game mechanics.
But even though I do love the music, I have to admit that Nintendo is incredibly unoriginal in its writing of water music, no matter how glorious the music may be. the TL;DR of this is that Nintendo writes water music in one of two ways: as a bouncy waltz, or as a deep fog of sound that is broken by ringing percussives.
Let’s start with the waltz. Now, I can say this every day and still not feel like I say it enough, but I love music that is in three. If you read the 69 Love Songs review (which is like all of the posts on this blog at the moment), you would see how easy it was for a song in three to catch my attention. I love how music in three always feels like it’s moving, like it had purpose, and makes you want to move with it. And waltzes are no exception to this. Just listen to Super Mario Bros’ Underwater Theme and feel how its waltz is constantly moving in beats of three. And the waltz is great, but that’s how all of the 2-D Mario games have their water themes. Listen to New Super Mario Bros’ Underwater Theme, and even Super Mario Bros. 3’s Underwater Theme, which isn’t even in three, still falls on triplets and sequences of three to fall onto the trope set up by the original Mario game. It’s not just Mario, listen to every surfing theme in Pokemon and you will see the same waltz-style music. It is ironic because a waltz is usually a pretty controlled dance, and yet the gameplay in these water areas is anything but controlled.
The other way that Nintendo writes water music, is by drowning the player in some echoing background noise, while there are ringing instruments offering a feeble sense of direction. This music is supposed to do the opposite that the waltz does. While you feel bouncy in a waltz, this music is supposed to make you feel weightless, and make you feel surrounded by sound as you are surrounded by water. This is usually done with a piano playing some long diminished chords, with an instrument playing some resonating echo, and a percussion instrument like the glockenspiel or vibraphone. The piano chords envelop you, the resonating echo reminds you of waves, and the pitched percussion acts like raindrops. The best example of this is the Ocarina of Time Water Temple Music from Legend of Zelda. It’s a beautiful sound for a temple that you spend way too long inside of and go crazy trying to beat without some tutorial. And again, it’s a good style of music, but so overdone. While the waltz is predominantly used in Nintendo’s 2-D games, this type of music is used in the 3-D games that you constantly get lost in. Refer to Super Mario Odyssey’s Lake Kingdom Theme, Donkey Kong Country’s Coral Capers theme, or the Jolly Roger Bay music from Super Mario 64.
And here is what gets me the most: I don’t understand where Nintendo got the ideas for these two genres of water music. Sea shanties have almost never been in three; they rely on swinging limericks that are in four, so why the waltz? Debussy’s La Mer and Handel’s Water Music, arguably the two “classical water songs” that are most commonly known, do not follow either of these tropes. So why does Nintendo rely so heavily on them? An easy argument would be “oh, they’re Nintendo’s original ideas so they are establishing them as the genre for water music”. To that, I say Nintendo can get a little more creative than relying on waltz and lo-fi music, no matter how good that music might be.
If this blogpost is leaving you wondering how I feel about water music, then that is a good thing because I myself am still so confused about my feelings towards water music. Because yes, the music is written wonderfully. Both styles fit work for their respective games (the waltz music helps you feel like you’re going somewhere albeit the terrible and slow movement mechanics, and the lo-fi music perfectly encapsulates the player’s sense of hopelessness and lostness), but they are so overdone that it feels like Nintendo is doing an injustice to the genre. Just give us a new style of water music, it doesn’t hurt to try new things.
Swimmingly,
Oswaldo.
scatterbrain 