ALBUM REVIEW/STREAM: Cory Johnson - The Legend of Zelda

By Steve Jones.

You might recall that last year I made a post concerning several musical Legend of Zelda tributes that caught my ear. If you do not recall, you can read it here. More to the point, one of my favorites was the collection of demos by one Cory Johnson, who took Koji Kondo's familiar pieces and added a healthy dose of post-rock flavoring. Despite their demonstrative nature, they were extremely enjoyable and left me waiting for the day that a polished post-rock Zelda album would come to life.

Well, that day is today. Or, more accurately, it was May 12, but it could be today for you.

The Legend of Zelda takes all of the promise from the original demos and hones and expands it into an almost 2 hour collection of 23 tracks spanning from the earliest days of the series all the way to Skyward Sword. Don't let the length be off-putting, as you'll be more likely to wish for more once the album finishes. The strength is certainly in the concept, which stands unique amongst a surfeit of remixes and covers for the popular Zelda series, but the execution should also be lauded. Johnson's arrangements, while homogenous enough to keep the album together, include enough variation and ornamentation to not wear thin too quickly. He also often highlights surprising parts of otherwise familiar tracks, which speaks to both Johnson's ear as a musician and Koji Kondo's (and others') prowess as a composer.

Some highlights include a blissful reworking of the exemplary "Hyrule Field" theme, a sweet piano-driven interpretation of the "Lake Hylia" theme from Twilight Princess, and a 10 minute medley of the various "Forest Temple" themes to grace the series. Perhaps my favorite piece here is the "Water Temple" medley, which uses the Great Bay Temple theme from Majora's Mask as its backbone. I cannot think of any other remixes or covers that even touch that track, but it works so brilliantly here. Also of note is the 5-part Majora's Mask suite that is found throughout the "second disc" of the album, culminating in an appropriately heavy arrangement of "To the Moon" (a.k.a. the track that plays when you have to get your shit together and get inside that moon's maw).

Anybody who enjoys the Zelda series owes it to themselves to check this album out. It's a refreshing take on some beloved soundtracks, and that is reason enough for video game and music fans alike to rejoice.

Score: Decent 8

You can stream the entire album for free from Cory's Bandcamp below. Even better, you can pick it up for free, or if you love it you can pay-what-you-want for the whole thing. It's worth it.



(Steve Jones enjoys playing Majora's Mask annually, so his Zelda biases may be slightly tipped. Confirm for yourself on his Twitter @vestenet.)

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MUSIC REVUE: The Year in Zelda Tributes

By Steve Jones.

2011 has been a red letter year for the Zelda franchise.  Not only has it been 25 years since The Legend of Zelda graced NES consoles everywhere, this year has also seen an Ocarina of Time remake as the major selling point for the 3DS,  the release of Skyward Sword as the first console Zelda game in 5 years, and the touring Zelda Symphony which showcases full orchestral performances of beloved soundtrack selections.  While I am waiting to be reunited with my Wii, so that I may swing this golden Wiimote around like a madman in Skyward Sword, I thought I would highlight some of the impressive tributes that independent musicians have created in the past year

Why has there been such a significant response from the music community?  Well, music in Zelda is much more than sound used to fill the background spaces.  Most games in the series have integrated music as part of the gameplay or plot, from the Warp Whistle to the Goddess' Harp, so it is not surprising that so many gamers, and so many musicians, have had this music stay with them long after the games have been beaten.  Here are some of 2011's best love letters to a series that appreciates music as much as we do:


OverClocked Remix - 25YEARLEGEND: A Legend of Zelda Indie Game Composer Tribute

OverClocked Remix has been the go-to site for quality game remixes for years.  In fact, mp3s from OC Remix were some of the first mp3s I can remember downloading on my dial-up connection.  Full album tributes to popular games or series are nothing new to OC Remix, but 25YEARLEGEND raises the bar, as I cannot think of a stronger or more consistently enjoyable collection of songs to come from the site.

As the title indicates the contributors are mostly indie game composers of varying notoriety, ranging from people like C418 (Minecraft) and Souleye (VVVVV) to other less well-known, but still formidable musicians.  The diversity of styles is wonderful; you'll hear more straightforward reinterpretations of tracks mixed with trance, techno, rock, metal, bossa nova, ambient, dubstep, and other genres.  Some of my favorite moments are the lovely solo piano of "Fushigina Forest," the evolving dance structures of "Labyrinth of Dance Floors," the Boards of Canada vibes in "To Everything There Is a Temple of Seasons," and the smooth Vocaloid singing in "Ballad of the Wind Fish (Kaze no Sakana Mix)."  I don't agree with some of the stylistic choices, such as the commercial(?) sample in "Gimme My Sword!" (an excellent piece otherwise) and turning one of the most crushingly depressing tracks from Majora's Mask into a techno beat, but the strengths of this collection far outweigh the more questionable moments.  I also love how A Link to the Past and the handheld Zeldas are quite well-represented.

This is probably my favorite Zelda tribute of the year.  You can read more about its contributors and download it for yourself (FOR FREE) by clicking on the picture below:

Cory Johnson - Legend of Zelda (Demos)

While this is a work-in-progress, the amount of promise in these demos alone is enough to make them noteworthy.  I have heard many Zelda remixes and covers in my day, but Cory Johnson brings an admirably fresh perspective to what can be a very tiring subject.  Forgoing in-game samples or electronic remixes, Johnson instead creates post-rockish interpretations from scratch, and the results, even in rough form, are fantastic.  For example, he works with one of the best Twilight Princess tracks--the overworld theme--and blends it seamlessly into the Hyrule Field theme from Ocarina of Time. The "Dark World" theme from A Link to the Past sounds heavy and demented, and I think he does the only cover of the Water Temple from Majora's Mask that I have ever heard (and it's great to boot!).

You can listen to the album in full or download it (FOR FREE) from Cory's Bandcamp below.




Shag - Flyrule

Zelda beats.

Beats sampling Zelda.

However you want to spin it, if you ever wanted to rap over the Spirit Temple music, look no further than Flyrule, in which Shag turns your favorite Ocarina of Time tunes into beats you can groove to.  There isn't a whole lot going on here besides that, and the songs aren't modified much at all aside from the infusion of some hip hop, but do you really need more than that?  It does what it sets out to do, and it's a good way of revisiting some classics in a fresh, but not too fresh, manner.

Check out the album via Shag's Bandcamp below.  It's only ONE DOLLAR to download if you feel like supporting a cool dude.




BADBADNOTGOOD - "Title Theme / Saria's Song / Song Of Storms" from BBNG

While not a full album per se, one of the more excellent moments in BADBADNOTGOOD's excellent album BBNG (which you can download FOR FREE) is the jazzy Ocarina of Time medley you can hear below.




Zelda Reorchestrated - Twlight Symphony
 
Technically, this is a project to look out for, rather than one you can experience in full at the moment, but there is a lot to look out for here.  Zelda Reorchestrated is a team already known for creating new versions of classic Zelda tunes using modern and more realistic sound libraries.  While I do find a lot of charm in chiptunes and cheap MIDI sounds, even I have to admit that many expanded reorchestrations sound so much richer than I would have imagined.  Hear for yourself.

Twilight Symphony is their most ambitious project to date: a complete overhaul of the underrated Twilight Princess soundtrack involving new arrangements, real instrumental sounds and samples, and a full choir.  Estimated to now be over three hours of music in total, it will be released on CD and in digital format sometime in 2012.  As a fan funded project over three years in the making, it has much to live up to (including those $$$ I contributed to its Kickstarter!), but it seems set on exceeding those expectations.

Read up about Twilight Symphony ZREO's official page.



Please let me know if I've missed out on anything!  And shoot these musicians some love if you like what they're doing.

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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

By Austin Kirley


Hi internet. On account of the recent release of Skyward Sword, I figured that it would be appropriate to write a lil' sumthin'/sumthin' about Zelda. Although I don't have and have never played Skyward Sword. And I don't have Wii. Or money to buy either. What I do have, however, is a recently Craigslist-purchased N64 and a tattered copy of Ocarina of Time borrowed from a friend (shoutout to my friend Keshav).

And so here we both are. Yes, I know this game is from 13 years ago. And we both know that I am in no way an expert when it comes to video games. In fact, this is one of the very few games that I've picked up and scrounged up the determination to say, "I'm gonna beat this."

One of my earliest experiences with video games (short for "videolectric gameules") was at a house my grandfather owned in Virginia. It was this super-rural, very out of the way farm house, and it was definitely not the kind of place you would associate with video games. I would say butter-churning comes more to mind. Fortunately, my uncle Chris was pretty hip to new technology in 1986, and I found this old NES collecting dust (and covered in bird shit) in a toolshed across from the house. With it, my uncle managed to find 5 games: Maniac Mansion, a really awful point and click horror/adventure thing (apparently produced by George Lucas); Shadowgate, a marginally better fantasy point and click, text based game; Demon Sword, which is a really great, underrated Ninja Gaiden-esque martial arts game. It's actually really fast-paced and has great controls, and I still play it today; The Legend of Zelda II, which was WAY too hard for 8-11 year old me; and, lastly, Super Mario Bros., which really came to define my views on video games for at least the next following few years.

I had a really pretentious attitude towards video games in my early adolescence. I was all, Oh Halo? Call of Duty? How droll. And while a lot of that was just me being annoyingly contrarian, I really did find myself not enjoying all the first person shooters that were popular at the time; they all seemed to redundant. I played a lot of the great platformers for the PS2, because, I'm assuming, I was so influenced by playing Super Mario as a kid. But after a while, I really stopped playing games all together. I guess I just got bored with them, I don't know.

But then one day at the farm house, many years later, I got bored of all the natural beauty and cows that are so plentiful there. So I decided to breakout the old NES again, and to my surprise, I found myself becoming re-addicted to these old games, Mario especially. I spent a lot of my time there getting really good at that game specifically. In fact, I enjoyed them so much that I took the NES back home with me, where it resides to this day. And it still gets copious amounts of play time; I even played it yesterday. [SIDENOTE: I'm going there for Thanksgiving on Tuesday, and apparently there's also an Intellivision there, so be expecting a post or two about that.]

This is when I really started to get into these games in a very intense way. After getting as good as I could at the original, I picked up Gameboy ports of other Mario games like SMB2 and Super Mario World, which I will always contend is the best 2D Mario game. I picked up the DS port of Super Mario 64 (I only got a 64 about 2 or 3 weeks ago), which I played the hell out of. I really started to respect the games as more of an art form than as just entertainment. After you play them enough, you can really start to just enjoy being in that world, especially with the 3D games. It's colorful and trippy and fun. You can play through the levels, or you could just admire the architecture of Peach's castle and get the same satisfaction out of both. It really is escapism to the maximum.

So one day, that same uncle comes to visit, and he brings with him a few more NES games he dug up: Faxanadu, which is very reminiscent of Zelda II without the mind numbing difficulty; the original Final Fantasy, which is awesome needless to say, I still haven't beaten it; and, most importantly, the original Legend of Zelda. Ironically, I saved that one for last. I had been led astray by my bad experience with the sequel, and I thought this would be similar. I played the others for a while before finally popping in Zelda (and then unpopping it, blowing on it, then repopping it). Saying I was in for a pleasant surprise is the understatement of the century.

I don't know if you've played this game, internet, but lemme speak truth at ya: it's intoxicating. Almost everything about it is perfect. For real. When I was playing Mario, I had been stuck at levels before. There are places in those games that take a few tries, or sometimes a lot of tries, to beat. But all that takes is just some basic coordination. Even the most basic player can pick up the controller and be pretty good at it. But Zelda was something different entirely. It was the first game that actually took practice on my part. You actually have to work to be even halfway decent at that game. I had never really been challenged like that from by a game. It was kind of a revelation. And that's just the physical aspect of the game. There is a mind boggling amount of content on that cartridge. The Overworld of Hyrule is massive. As a lifelong Mario player, I was used to a certain order to progressing through a game, that being "You start at the beginning, you go to the end". Zelda didn't buy that. Do it in whatever order you goddamn please was their philosophy. And if you don't know where something is, save it and pick it up from where you left off! No password needed. This game invented the concept of non-linear gameplay. Then, of course, there are the dungeons. At first you think Well hey, these seem fairly easy. It's just a maze and a boss battle. Them around the 5th or 6th dungeon, you realize that no matter how much you explore and hunt, you can't find any other dungeons. When you realize that you can bomb the walls of the dungeons, it really gives you the feeling of how huge this game really is. And that can scare a lot of people off, or it they can revel in how tiny they feel, and wander around for hours as they get to know the place. And that, to me, is why Zelda gameplay is so good, and so challenging. It takes work to know what the hell you're doing, or where the hell you are. It makes you feel so incompetent and minuscule and when you finally get good, it's more rewarding that you can imagine.

If you know me at all, you know that I like to take things to their extreme. If I start listening to the Ramones, I'll end up listening to Merzbow. Ocarina of Time does this for the original Zelda. Zelda was a humongous game, there's no denying that. It pushed the limits of what the NES could do. Ocarina of Time did the same, but with the massive more able medium of the N64. I can't even describe to you how much of a real world this seems like. From your first step into Hyrule Field, you can immediately realize that this isn't a type of setting that anyone had played video games in before. You wander around the field quaking in your Kokiri Boots at how little you know about this place, and the day shifts into night. Come on, how cool must that have been? This place is more of a living, breathing Earth than any other that's ever been contained in a cartridge.

I'm not going to waste your time talking about gameplay and controls. The game is 13 years old, all of that has already been written about. Needless to say, for a game that's considered the best of all time, both are fantastic. It makes me jealous, in a way, of that kid in 1998 who turns on this game for the first time and can look around. They can look up and down, full 360 degrees. That must have been an amazing feeling, to walk down the ladder into Kokiri Forest. Everything must have looked so organic and so true to life. You could practically smell the dirt. This is always been a problem for me: nostalgia for things that I've never experienced. Which is depressing in a way, that I'm never going to be able to experience something I love for the "first time". But I think it gives me a fuller appreciation of that thing. I can have a better understanding of this game knowing it's place on the cultural radar. And while you could argue that it's not as pure a love for that thing, it really makes you aware of every iota of awesome that this game contains.

You know how I mentioned before that the original Zelda invented non-linear gameplay? Well Ocarina, as it is wont to do, takes that to yet another extreme. There is ZERO need to play the game in any sort of order. Sure, there is a sort of plot order, and you need some items to continue to other portions of the game, but there is absolute freedom in this place. There is no time limit. You could literally spend and eternity here. Say your stuck in a dungeon, and you have no idea how to continue. You can explore Hyrule searching for more pieces of heart or gold skulltulas. Or you could play one of the numerous mini-games throughout the world. Or better yet, just walk around and enjoy the scenery. Think about that. This is a video game that you can just exist in. You're not going to lose a life when a timer runs out. You don't have to collect all the coins, or get the highscore. You can just go and look at a waterfall or a range of mountains or go fishing.

One thing that everyone always mentions when talking about this game is how cinematic it is. Do you know why they all say that? Because truer words have never been spoken. Video games, at least to me because of my experience with plotless Mario games, have never been a source of emotion. And I'm a cynical guy, I don't get emotional about much. But I managed to immerse myself so much in this game that I found myself reacting to it like a child. Which is what the game does, or any decent piece of escapism does: it reverts you back to child-like innocence. You actually feel anger at Ganon, and you laugh at all the goofy visual gags, and you feel a legitimate sadness when it all ends.

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