OST of the Day #53: SMW2: Yoshi's Island - Above Ground

taco.cat (67)in #game • 4 years ago

Hey Steemit!

OSTs make up the majority of the music I listen to, and they're so underrated I just had to share them! Feel free to listen while reading. 😊

If you caught the last post, you'd know that I've become quite addicted to the recently released Animal Crossing: New Horizons! It's so good; I just get sucked into it for a couple hours every day.

Source: wallpaperaccess

But since I already did an Animal Crossing song (technically a remix) last week, I wondered what other islands I knew in games and the first one that came up was Yoshi's Island, of course!

Source: wallpapercave

If you've never seen this game before, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is a 2D platforming game developed and published by Nintendo for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1995! It is the sequel to the very famous, Super Mario World, and follows the story of Baby Mario as he falls from a stork delivering him to his parents, onto a strange island filled with dinosaur-like creatures known as Yoshis. To reunite baby Mario with his brother Luigi, who has been kidnapped by Kamek, the player controls Yoshi, through 48 levels while carrying Baby Mario.

As a Super Mario series platformer, Yoshi runs and jumps to reach the end of the level while solving puzzles and collecting items. In a style new to the series, the game has a hand-drawn aesthetic and is the first to have Yoshi as its main character. The game introduces his signature abilities to flutter jump and produce eggs from swallowed enemies.

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The game was ported to the Game Boy Advance with few changes in 2002. This version was rereleased for the Nintendo 3DS in 2011 and the Wii U Virtual Console in 2014. The Super NES version was rereleased for the Super NES Classic Edition in 2017 and the Nintendo Switch in 2019.
Yoshi's Island received "instant" and "universal acclaim", and sold over four million copies. Reviewers praised the art, sound, level design, and gameplay, and posited Yoshi's Island as a masterpiece and one of the greatest video games of all time!

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Yoshi's Island was one of the first games I ever played on the GBA and it's one of the more nostalgic games for me to this day. I don't think I ever completed it because it's actually a pretty difficult game and I played it when I was around 8 years old or so. But I do remember the gameplay being pretty solid and after watching a few playthroughs I definitely still agree. The controls are quite intuitive and the puzzles are fairly legit. While there may be some mechanics that make it quite unfair for completionists (i.e. red coins going off-screen after like 2 seconds), it's still a really solid game after all these years; 25 to be exact (it's actually as old as me)!

Source: nintendolife

It was really difficult to choose a specific song for this one because all the songs are so great in their own way. But ultimately, I decided on this one:

This song is simply called, Above Ground, and is actually one of 4 themes that play on 6/8 of the stages in each world (stage 4 and 8 of each world are bosses). The reason why I chose this particular song is because I think it's one of the songs people forget about/don't know as much since it's not a meme like Flower Garden.

Which, if you didn't know is this:

Anyway, the song Above Ground, can be first heard in stage 1-7, the very infamous stage - Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy. If you know Yoshi's Island, you'll know that this is the stage where, well, Yoshi essentially gets high.

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The music and the stage itself gets wonky after you touch a fuzzy, and your controls get all messed up, as if Yoshi was drunk.

But the song itself is pretty catchy. It's a happy upbeat tune, with the light bongo drums, maracas and cowbell in the background. The melody and harmony (sorry I don't really know how to describe the instrumentals!) is quintessential Yoshi's Island music, perfectly encapsulating the cheerful sounds of the dinosaurs' home.

Source: nineteeneightyeight.com

The entire soundtrack of the game is a little over 30 minutes long; pretty standard for games of the time. And it was composed entirely by Koji Kondo (the god of video game music)! He is truly talented, and his songs are definitely one of the main aspects that keeps me a loyal Nintendo fan to this day.

Thanks so much for reading!