First of all, I personally think I would be in a much worse-off place in my life were it not for the care and attention that Sakurai-san has put into his deep and abiding commitment to celebrating game music. This is a fantastic video that I think does an excellent job of illustrating the contributions that Smash Bros. has made to the VGM space.
To summarize the relevant portion of the video, Sakurai discusses his philosophy for overseeing the arrangement of existing game music for Smash Bros.; in particular, he imparts the notion that, at least for the purposes of Smash's soundtrack, recapturing a player's experience of an original piece of game music is more important to the arrangement process than adhering to music theory. An example given is a piece from the SNK arcade game Athena; Sakurai discovered after a back-and-forth review process that he and the arranger had a fundamental disagreement about what constituted the "main melody" of the piece. In the original game, the mixing of the sound channels caused a theoretical counter-melody to be significantly more prominent to the ear than the theoretical melody, and after clearing up the misunderstanding, this perspective still ultimately determined the direction that Sakurai gave for the arrangement.
Sakurai then goes on to describe an arrangement of another piece from the SNK library where decisions were made about the structure of the piece, again based partially on subjective experience of the original. This got me thinking about my own subjective experiences with game music that have colored my preferences for how certain pieces should be arranged, and I'd like to talk about one notable example today.
hello please enjoy my completely from-memory analysis of the systems governing the Hyrule Field theme from Twilight Princess