“The Hidden Musical Depth of Kirby’s Adventure”

In celebration of Kirby’s 30th Anniversary this year, let’s analyze the music from my personal favorite soundtrack from the franchise, Kirby’s Adventure on the NES. Released in 1993, three years after the SNES launch, Kirby’s Adventure was one of the last games for the NES, and it shows.

At this point, the developers had a firm grasp on how to maximize the console’s power in both visual and audio design. The music is surprisingly deep. It would be easy to go with cutesy, little ditties to match Kirby’s simple, circular, salmon-coloured image. But instead, we’re treated to an OST that is rich, jazzy, progressive, and consistently of high quality. There is so much depth and subtlety that gets lost when you incorporate higher fidelity samples, or even high-budget orchestras.

In the days of the Game Boy and NES, there would normally be one or two people with free rein over a game’s sound—compositions, sure, but also their implementation into that system’s sound chip. In Kirby’s Adventure, these overseers were Hirokazu Ando and Jun Ishikawa. That commitment to only a couple of artists gives the series a greater sense of control and consistency.

I would argue that this was one of the first instances of chiptune as a genre. I don’t mean the inherent “bleeps and bloops” that defined music from the NES or Game Boy due to technical limitations, but chiptune as a deliberate style. Listen carefully for any tracks that are attempting to emulate the tones or timbres of real life instruments or styles.

Strings? I don’t think so. Trumpet? Perhaps. Flute? Maybe.

With Kirby’s Adventure, it’s not as easy as, say, Dragon Quest, which uses clear renditions of classical pieces. My argument is that the NES sound chip was its own distinct instrument, and thus, birthed a new style. The aesthetic took its most defined form in the 16-bit era, with Kirby Super Star on the SNES. At that point, there was no longer any need for the limited sounds of 8-bit pulse waves. This newer title chose to work backwards, incorporating the chiptune sounds of its predecessors. This is how we know for sure that it’s no longer about synthetic imitations of real instruments limited by machines, but rather its own unique identity!

NES-era composers and sound programmers might have attempted to emulate the unfettered freedom of non-video game music, but quickly found that they had to adapt to the four- or five-channel restrictions of the console—only four sounds playing at once—one being limited to noise (usually for drums), and one to a triangle wave (usually reserved for bass). That’s why the music would sometimes cut out while playing a game.

One can imagine that having such tight restrictions would force composers to be extremely precise in their compositions. Many would just opt to throw “real music” into those limitations, resulting in essentially dumbed down imitations of the real thing. Chiptune morphed into whatever worked best within the given constraints. The NES can’t do ambient, reverb-heavy music. There are no nuanced dynamics, like in film music. And it doesn’t do dissonance (tense sounds) very well…

Think of most video game music at the time: extraordinarily melodic, and often rhythmically complex. Stylistically, you might see a lot of contrapuntal (independent in rhythm) harmony—you can’t do big chords, but you can simulate the harmonic implications of big chords using counterpoint, which also injected an abundance of rhythmic momentum. Composers couldn’t use lots of notes at once (i.e., big chords), but they could play lots of notes one after the other. Perhaps, unintentionally, classical music techniques, like the aforementioned counterpoint, arpeggios, Alberti bass, and pedal point, were strange bedfellows of many composers in the 8-bit era.

Title

It’s so cool how Ando and Ishikawa managed to concoct such a consistent sonic signature from such a simplistic sound engine, and this title theme is an excellent setup for that aesthetic. We’re instantly made aware of Kirby’s carefree, childlike personality. Those first few notes in the introduction are pretty cliché “kids’ music” to my ears. I mentioned earlier that Kirby scores are complex, but I think it was intended to make the music be overly cutesy and saccharine on the surface, while cleverly hiding depth. It reflects the sharp tonal shift toward the end of any Kirby game’s story… spoilers? I really love the way that second note in the main melody at 0:02 was programmed—it sounds like a marble being dropped. The bass line, which bounces between the chord’s root and the perfect fourth below, will become a pretty popular go-to across the soundtrack due to how goofy and childish it sounds.

Vegetable Valley ~ Green Fields

The more I listen to this soundtrack, I rediscover how each and every note was handcrafted with the ultimate goal of being “as Kirby as possible.” Try to think about what each instrument is doing, and what sorts of emotions or images they’re trying to convey. In other musical styles you may associate a violin to weeping, or a guitar to screaming, and the same can be done with 8-bit music! Every instrument is dancing or bouncing, kind of like Kirby doing his little fanfare dance at the end of a stage. It sounds weird to say, but that’s the closest description I can get. Seriously, just listen to how every instrument is constantly in motion, gyrating, shaking, and shimmering. Almost every instrument is programmed to be very short and choppy. In technical terms, notes have barely any sustain and cut off very quickly, which is called staccato. It makes the music so much more cute-sounding, and is a common technique in children’s music.

Vegetable Valley 2 ~ Grassy Bluff

In my opinion, percussion is often an underutilized tool in this era of music, but Ando and Ishikawa don’t skimp on that department. In fact, it’s vital to the Kirby sound, and remaining consistent, the drums are all staccato and bouncy. This piece makes great use of the very limited sound palette to give us the illusion of bongos. There’s a constant hi-hat playing eighth notes, and a snare and kick drum creates the vibe of a rock drum kit. At 0:25, the whole piece repeats itself, but with added bongos. I love that attention to detail. At 0:19, we hear this percussive flute-like instrument that bounces between two or three pitches, a common technique across Kirby music. One thing I like to think about with regard to chiptune is, “what can chiptune do that ‘real’ music can’t?” One of those things is, you can crank up the tempo! You can also make instruments play notes in ways that real musicians wouldn’t have the breath nor the dexterity to realistically play. Chiptune may be limited, but there are limits to those limits.

Ice Cream Island 1 ~ Island Paradise

Notice how, every time a new section begins, the lead instrument changes. A simple trick, but it infuses each track with so much more interest. What I find fascinating in a lot of early video game music is the subtle polish done to make the track flow as organically and “humanly” as possible. Just because you couldn’t record the music in real-time doesn’t mean you couldn’t “perform” the music by programming in little live-like nuances, such as adding vibrato at the end of a melody line to make it sound more vocal, or using a wide bend from one note into another to simulate a wailing electric guitar. That’s what the best composers did to make this little pocket of music history special. It’s not as simple as just putting in the right notes in the right time signature and calling it a day.

Butter Building ~ Tower of the Sky

This track so perfectly encapsulates Kirby. Everything I’ve talked about so far is here: the dancing instruments, the attention to detail, the fills, the percussive flute thing, the bouncing between notes, the staccato! *chef’s kiss* The melody, like every other tune here, is so catchy. That’s a whole topic on its own, but in short: video game music placed extraordinary emphasis on strong, memorable melodies, mainly because of how VGM was repeated over and over again during gameplay. It had to be entertaining without getting tiresome. Listen to the instrument playing the lead melody, and how it swells into the longer notes, instead of just hitting them robotically on-meter.

Grape Garden ~ Cloud Tops

There’s something about the 3/4 time signature (“waltz time”) that evokes a dreamlike feel, like floating in the air or drifting through space. I believe it’s the further distance between stressed beats which reflects a sense of gracefulness and floatiness, which the waltz dance represents well. Koji Kondo does it regularly in his Mario underwater themes, and it is just as suitable for Kirby’s Adventure’s Grape Garden level, where you’re traversing the fluffy cloud floor, high up in the sky.

Orange Ocean 2 ~ Starry Sky

This seems like an extension of the ideas from the previous “Cloud Tops”, in that it is in 3/4. This time, however, there’s a finality to it. The chipper and cheerful chiptune of most of the rest of the game is replaced with something less so. It maintains that surreal elegance of the waltzing rhythm, but the use of jazz chords and impressionistic planing chords (chords not in any particular key) gives us a sense of unpredictability, or even unease, as the tonal center is constantly shifting. Right off the bat, the song begins in the key of C# with a jazzy C#maj7 chord. The major 7 extension softens the sound and pulls us into a dreamy state. However, when the main melody line comes in, the song shifts to the key of D, with a Dmaj7 chord. It’s completely unpredictable, but it’s uniquely beautiful. This “nonfunctional harmony” calls to my mind impressionist music, which evokes images of scenic paintings. Yasunori Mitsuda used this technique quite often on his amazing Chrono Trigger soundtrack.

Final Battle 2 ~ The Moon / Nightmare

The spectacular piece starts with this heavy and imposing intro of climbing chromatic power chords, ramping up the tension until the true final boss, Nightmare, finally emerges. It’s one thing to write a good piece of music, but to tie it into making a surprising reveal is another. Players weren’t expecting for there to be a second phase, so it makes this theme so much more effective. I love how all of the musical techniques and signature sounds of the score come to a head here, for something intense and heroic. Those constant eighth notes are fast and technically demanding, reflecting how Kirby is literally fighting for his life in the void of space. Some words that come to mind are “risk, tension, on the edge.”

Green Greens

This is my favorite version of this song. It is interesting that it’s a reused piece from Kirby’s Dream Land, for a remade version of that game’s first level. It’s an early instance of games self-referencing themselves for nostalgia. The triangle wave being used for the lead melody is a great choice. While the triangle is usually reserved for bass, Ando and Ishikawa are keen on squeezing the best out of the system. The melody’s pitch is subtly detuned here, probably to simulate a piccolo or something. Slightly off-pitch instruments are a common trait of children’s music because it just sounds cute. There is so much hidden depth beneath the surface of seemingly simple, childish games from our childhoods.

shhwonk, in his natural habitat, is commonly found wielding his weapon of choice: his 8-string guitar. He is fascinated with studying the arts and history through a critical lense, with focuses on new media and ancient literature. His YouTube channel showcases his dedication to writing challenging progressive rock and metal music, as well as experimental rearrangements of video game music.