My Gaming Audio History: The Adventure of Link (1988)

Today, Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link.  This is a game I played a ton as a kid.  Not even necessarily because I liked it very much, but I think I was just gaining a completionist attitude.  I'd beat both quests of LoZ, and I couldn't stand not to be able to beat this game too.  Unlike these players who can zip through the game in one "life," I often went on suicide missions, with the only goal being to obtain a certain item (the hammer, for instance) and then was happy to die before I could make it out of that area.  Thus, in terms of audio, that means I heard Ganon's annoying laugh many, many more times than the zero times heard in a playthrough like below!  Note: This is just part one of two, though someone's compiled them into a single video here.

The music is by Akito Nakatsuka.  Unfortunately I can't find much of anything about him in English.  I'm going to link to this interview in Japanese and hope that I can get some funding soon to have a student help me translate things like this into English.  He also worked on the soundtrack to the NES version of Mike Tyson's Punch Out! and composed the audio for Excitebike.  I was reading an interview with Koji Kondo where the interviewer asked about major sound differences between games and cited the differences between LoZ and AoL.  Kondo's reply: "I didn't work on AoL, so that would explain the sound differences."

There's not a whole lot of similarity between the music of this game and its predecessor.  This is undoubtedly because there's a new composer for the game, but also it suits the game to sound so different because it's very different from the original.  The receive item sound carried over from the first game.  Also, the intro to the LoZ overworld theme is reused in this game, but it only plays the very first time you hear the overworld music at the start of the game, so you might hear it only once if you're a very good player!  I heard it lots of times!  One of my other favorite musical things about the Zelda series is the fact that an instrument (whistle, flute, ocarina, harp) is key to completing the game.  That's continued in this game as well.  Otherwise, the music and sound effects in this game are completely new, as is much of the gameplay!

What role does the music play in the game?  Basically the music in this game serves to separate various locations of the game world.  Dungeons vs towns vs battles.  There are also shorter musical punctuations/fanfares for completing certain game events, like getting items, beating the dungeon boss, etc.  The acceleration of new music toward the end of the game seems to be a pretty common feature of NES games in this era.  The last 15 minutes of gameplay (entering last castle to end game) has about a minute and a half of new music for the player to hear.  I wonder how composers feel about that?  Many players may not finish the game and never hear these themes, yet they're the "reward" for those who make it so far in the game.

This is one of the longest games I would've played at this point in my gaming life.  The playthrough I studied is three hours long but it's a lot harder for a six year old kid!  I probably spent more like twenty hours or more playing the game.  Considering that there is about six and a half minutes of music, that makes the game to music ratio something like 1:28 for a great player and something more like 1:185 minutes of gameplay to music for a lousy player like me!  I've not encountered a game with anywhere close to six minutes of music yet, so that's pretty exciting.  Granted, lots of this music has inner repeats that lengthen it out, but I consider the music to be from beginning to end of the entire loop, not only new pieces of music.  Practically, though, that meant memory could be saved by repeating sections of music before playing a new section in the same loop.

One thing I've noticed about many of these NES games is that much of the music is saved until the end of the game.  Consider SMB 2, which had a special theme for Wart and then quite a bit of ending music, nearly half of the music in that game is at the end.  This game is much the same with a theme for the last dungeon (LoZ also uses a different theme for the final dungeon), a theme for the final boss, and ending music.  In fact, if you played the game but never made it to the end of the game, you'd miss out on nearly a minute and a half of the music-- about a quarter of the game's music!  

Here's a link to the soundtrack with my notes/reactions below:

Title screen:  G major.  68 sec.  I-bVII-bVI-V motion.  Lengthy!  Variations over the bass
Overworld: F major  45 sec.  Same intro as the original LoZ overworld theme (7 sec)- doesn't repeat with overworld loop (38 sec).
Battle:  G minor  29 sec.  bVII bVI-bII-V
Town:  C major  67 sec.  Lengthy!  A-A-B-B'-C
House:  G major  7 sec.  Very tight loop!
Palace: g minor.  64 sec. Intro A- B- A- C- D- D- B- Loop  3 sec intro doesn't repeat
Get item: 1.5 sec.  Bb
Boss:  f minor. 11 sec.  Simple loop:  i-bvii.
Level up: 2 sec.
Crystal: C major.  4 sec.  I-bVII.
Game Over: 3 sec.  that damn laugh!!!
Flute:  A major.  2 sec.
The Great Palace:  A minor.  32 sec.  i-vi motion.  Reminiscent of the palace music
Last Guardian: f minor.  16 sec.  i-biii- tritone.  Sounds similar to the normal guardian music, but more demonic.
Receive Triforce:  C major.  4 sec.  I-bIII-bVII-I.
Ending 1: F major- e minor.  5 sec.  Simple loop.
Ending 2: F major.  30 sec.  I-iv-bVII-biii-bVI-V
Fairy/raft: 2 sec.
Building appear: 2 sec.