P-Vock's Music Box: Not So Tear-able

Hello and welcome back to P-Vock's Music Box. It's finally here. After years of believing it would never happen, a full-on remake of Super Mario RPG is finally here! I'm so excited I just peed a little.

I fell out of love with the Mario series over the last decade as the heavy majority of releases have felt bland and unremarkable, so them going back to classics and reminding me why I love the franchise is definitely a welcome timeline.

Almost nothing could make me happier. Not unless they did something insane like announce ANOTHER amazing remake while hyping up the Mario RPG remake.

All I saw was the book and I started screaming. Thousand Year Door is probably the most beloved RPG in the portly plumber's history. The world, visual style, characters. writing, music. Everything is top-notch. Between the darker tone, amazing Bowser moments, and watching Peach make Hal-9000 fall in love with her, TTYD is truly a one-of-a-kind game. But, that's enough waffling, let's get on to the music.

Truly unique and interesting while maintaining enough familiar motifs to always remind you of the franchise from which it hails is the perfect description for TTYD, so it's also fitting that it would bleed into the OST, and Petal Meadows is the prime example. The allusions to the most iconic video game track of all time are a wonderful compliment to such a distinct sound and boisterous composition. A truly wonderful track for one of the first field areas the player gets to explore and a fantastic note to kick off on when the adventure really starts to get going!

That's not to say the soundtrack always relies on nostalgic callbacks.

It would have been so easy to reference the classic underground theme from the OG Super Mario Bros in the composition for the Rogueport Sewers theme, but composer Yuka Tsujiyoko decided to go in a completely new direction and it totally paid off. Those intro notes have been stuck in my head for decades and always make me feel a carnal need to wiggle my fingers and shake my shoulder in sheer joy. Add in those funky drums and the incredible lull you hear about 25 seconds in and you have a theme that is varied and interesting and makes Rogueport one of the only sewers I would love to go visit (minus the ones that have four heroes in a half shell).

Believe it or not, the area themes in TTYD only get better as you play.

So many games have an area nearing the end of the adventure with a significantly more intense area theme to help signify the finality and increase the tension of the current situation. So why does a Mario game have one of the best examples of this of all time? Almost echoing the Rogueport Sewers with the incredible opening that serves as the wonderful backing, the X-Naut Fortress theme only gets better as more and more instruments and sounds are added, giving the theme some funk and techno that really hammers home how cool it is to be raiding a base on the moon!

I almost don't want to beat the X-Nauts because that means I'll have to stop listening to this incredible music.

Meeting Vivian in Twilight Town. Playing as Bowser in an unbelievably funny platforming segment, Destroying an evil peach that may have been part of what awoke my taste in goth women when I was young. No matter what you're getting up to in TTYD, it is entertaining as all hell. In an era when Nintendo let Intelligent Systems go all out and run with some truly insane ideas, TTYD was a truly wild and unique game. If you go on the internet and find discourse around the Paper Mario franchise, you'll find an army of idiots in their late twenties and thirties who will scream about how this game is simply incredible and everyone should play it.

I am one such person.

Please play this masterpiece of a game when the remake launches next year.

Thank you so much, as always, for checking out my nonsense, and I hope to catch you back here next time with another suggestion from my Musix Box.

Stay Brutal!