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.
The theme of Hyrule Field from Twilight Princess takes after its predecessor in Ocarina of Time in that it is a piece made up of many sections that will dynamically reflect the current state of the game. These include:
- An ostentatious intro, heard when entering the field during the day
- An alternate intro which quotes OoT's "Sun's song," heard when night changes to day while in the field
- Two primary sections (we'll call them "A" and "B") for general on-foot traversal, consisting of a gentler, woodwind-dominated arrangement
- A very soft loop consisting mostly of staccato string chords and snare drum, heard whenever Link is standing still when another section ends
- A rather long "battle" section for on-foot traversal, heard whenever Link has the attention of an enemy
- Louder, brass-heavy versions of primary sections "A" and "B" for horseback traversal
- A triumphant third primary section ("C"), heard only when Link is riding on horseback, uninterrupted by enemies, when Section "A" ends
- A "battle" section for horseback, similarly louder than the on-foot version
- A sleepy outro, heard when night falls while in the field
Given that this piece was written so that its sections could be shuffled around on the fly during gameplay, any attempt to arrange them into a coherent order for general listening will be vastly subjective, though there is still a defined structure to the order in which sections are heard if the game state remains the same. Many "game rip" compilations of the Twilight Princess soundtrack will attempt to include most if not all of these sections, while official examples like the Twilight Princess HD Sound Selection release and the piece's appearance in the Smash series will opt to only include the first intro, followed by the three non-combat, loopable "horseback" sections.
I myself opted to follow the lead of the latter two examples for my recreation of the piece.
However......
My ulterior motive for making this recreation was actually my desire to hear the sections arranged in the way I prefer!
You see, the official releases of this piece will unilaterally opt to arrange the sections like this:
Main Intro -> Section "A" (Horseback) -> Section "C" -> Section "B" (Horseback) -> Loop back to Section "A"
It may be obvious at this point that I've chosen to label these sections in a way that's inconsistent with this order, but that is of course the crux of my disagreement with the decisions made for this official arrangement. By its nature, Section "C" is one that the player will hear significantly less frequently than essentially every other main section of the piece. Enemies will spot you constantly while you're riding on horseback, and the "standing still" section will always transition back to Section "B" when Link begins moving again. Additionally, riding on horseback can be a sporadic occurrence, and the player won't even be allowed to ride Epona through Hyrule Field until the lead-up to the second dungeon, so the player's first impression of this piece of music will be one in which Section "C" simply cannot occur.
What this means is that, by my reckoning at least, the most likely scenario in which the player will hear Section "C" is this:
Main Intro -> Section "A" (Horseback) -> Battle -> Battle/On Foot/Standstill -> Section "B" -> Section "A" -> Section "C"
In my time with Twilight Princess, hearing Section "C" felt like a reward for playing well, rescuing Epona, and riding free while avoiding enemies through the grassy plains of Hyrule. It's a special melody, one you don't hear all that often, and so it only made sense to me that it would be treated as such by an official soundtrack release... and yet here we are!
To close out, I'll leave you with a video of my recreation of the piece, complete with section markers visible at the top of the screen. Hopefully you'll see why I prefer this way of ordering the sections!
Oh, and as a side note, I don't necessarily think that Sakurai is to blame for the way this piece appears in Smash. That arrangement is consistent with Nintendo's other releases, so I expect that's just the version he was provided, and he may even simply not have strong opinions in this case. I personally find the official arrangement to be a valid interpretation, even if it's not my preference.