SNES Archives - The Greatest Game Music

Battletoads & Double Dragon Soundtrack (SNES) – Review

Battletoads & Double Dragon Soundtrack (SNES), David Wise, 1993

In 1993, the Battletoads franchise was in a slightly curious spot. The 1991 NES original had been successful enough to spawn several ports. There was also Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, a SNES (and later Sega Master System) game that ultimately felt like a remix of the 1991 NES title. So where to next for the burgeoning, but not quite yet established franchise? Publisher Tradewest had released Battletoads on several platforms and held the home license for the venerable Double Dragon franchise. Why not combine two forces of nature in one amazing game? The match seemed to be an entirely natural one, given that Kevin Bayliss, co-designer of Battletoads, was a big Double Dragon fan.

However, things didn’t quite pan out as expected. For starters, with Rare developing the game, Battletoads & Double Dragon felt like it was shoehorning the world of Billy and Jimmy Lee into the more comic-like antics of a Battletoads game. It didn’t help that Double Dragon characters made appearances under the wrong names. Ultimately, Battletoads & Double Dragon garnered respectable but rarely enthusiastic reviews at the time of its release. That impression seems to continue with more recent assessments of the game: a decent enough brawler that doesn’t live up to the potential of the franchise crossover.

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Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest Soundtrack (SNES) – Review

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest Soundtrack (SNES), David Wise, 1995

While Donkey Kong Country remains the most historically important (and best-selling) entry in the franchise, it is Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest that is usually most fondly remembered among gamers. Polished and bursting at the seams with ideas, Diddy’s Kong Quest remains one of the best 2d platformers ever created.

The one component of Donkey Kong Country that has arguably aged best is its soundtrack. Collaborating with Eveline Fischer, David Wise created a haunting, minimalist opus that underscored the lavish graphics with understated grace. For the Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest soundtrack, Wise returned and wrote the entire score on his own. In short, this might well be his career-defining masterpiece. It’s a stunning example of musical world building that pushes the ageing SNES sound hardware to its very limits.

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Donkey Kong Country Soundtrack (SNES) – Review

Donkey Kong Country Soundtrack (SNES), Robin Beanland / Eveline Fischer / David Wise, 1994

It’s probably safe to say that Donkey Kong Country was always destined to be a blockbuster. What set the game on course for domination of the 1994 Christmas season were its ground-breaking graphics. More than nine million sold copies later, Donkey Kong Country had become a milestone in gaming history.

While it was the game’s quasi-3D graphics that made waves back in 1994, what has arguably aged better is the Donkey Kong Country soundtrack. For the first time in Rare’s history, David Wise was joined by co-composers: Eveline Fischer (now Novakovic) and Robin Beanland. The latter’s contribution only extended to one track (“Funky’s Fugue”) that Wise converted to run on the SNES. Fischer – recently graduated from college – on the other hand contributed seven compositions. The soundtrack was one of the very first Western game scores to receive a commercial release – on both sides of the Pacific.

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Lock On Soundtrack – Review

Lock On Soundtrack, Akihiko Mori, 1993

Using the SNES’s famed 3D capabilities for a combat flight simulator seems like an obvious choice. However, despite the popularity of After Burner-style games in the late 80s and early 90s, not many titles of this kind were released on the SNES. One of the few SNES flight simulators was the blandly-titled Lock On (not that the Japanese release name Super Air Diver made any sense, but it sure sounds more fun). For post SNES-era gamers, the best way to view developer Copya System‘s Lock On is probably as a kind of simplified Ace Combat. Some of that simplification was inevitable, given that the SNES’ famous Mode 7 could only generate 3D graphics of limited complexity. However, in the eyes of many reviewers, the bigger issue was the monotonous mission and gameplay structure that distracted from the game’s fluid, fast graphics.

Where Lock On easily shines brightest is in the music department, thanks to some outstanding work by young composer Akihiko Mori. Mori had been working as a game composer since 1990, but mostly on smaller and less thankful projects. His biggest assignment so far had been to generate the sound effects for Copya System’s Paladin’s Quest (scored by none other than Kohei Tanaka). Lock On was easily the most high-profile project that Mori had been assigned to yet as a composer. And indeed, throughout the Lock On soundtrack, Mori displays the enthusiasm of a talented composer who senses that this project could be his big break – and that turned out to be the case indeed.

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Mystic Ark Soundtrack – Review

Mystic Ark Soundtrack, Akihiko Mori, 1995

Scarcity and nostalgia can have a powerful effect when working hand in hand – just take Mystic Ark. A representative of a particularly popular genre amongst retro game fans – the 16-bit RPG – Mystic Ark’s status was elevated further by the dual facts that it was released towards the end of the SNES’ lifespan and only in Japan. Was this one of the great untranslated SNES gems like Star Ocean and Tales of Phantasia that pushed the hardware and its beloved pixel art to its limits?

As a ROM translation released years later showed, not so much. Mystic Ark’s gameplay turned out to be solid, but not particularly inspired either, settling for second-tier status in the SNES’ busy RPG library. The one thing that set the game apart from the pack was the inspired weirdness of the various worlds its heroes traverse. Pick your favourite: a desert whose only inhabitants are pirate cats and a witch named Matoya; worlds where colour and sound disappear depending on your location or where all adults have disappeared – or maybe cities made of fruit and vegetables?

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