The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Last Battle (Patreon)

TND listeners who have been around for a while have been waiting a long time for this arrangement! Like many iconic VGM songs I have yet to cover, I put this one off due to a fear of not being able to do it justice. However, these past few years I feel like I've really found my footing and I'm getting closer to the sound I've been trying to achieve! 

This track is fairly simple, but intimidating to cover with sampler instruments due to the slow, emotive and exposed chords. To work around this, everything is sort of layered in an orchestral mush. Save for the solo voice, individual instruments rarely shine through the block chords. Also, any sample/legato imperfections can be pretty safely hidden by the forward placement of the percussion!

@0:45 - I've been playing a lot of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor this month and I think Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab's amazing John Williams-esque orchestrations have been influencing me with these muted brass segments. With Star Wars and recently Star Trek it's unfair how good Stephen Barton + team is at mimicking other composers' orchestration styles. 

@1:30 - Tangent aside, I couldn't help but throw in Ganon's motif to close out the loop. It just fits so well in the various Zelda battle themes out there (I think it was in my ALttP Boss Battle arrangement?) And like the versatility of the Link/Zelda Series' theme, it can harmonically fit almost everywhere if you try hard enough. 

@1:35 - For the following loop, I added in an arpeggiating solo viola and some additional percussion to give the piece some motion and to indicate some sort of progress in the battle. 

@3:35 - I feel like I took a big risk with the ending and I'd like to hear people's thoughts on it. This piece has always felt very tragic to me, so for the final loop I decided to accentuate that by cutting out all the major percussion and leaving a dry, focused solo string section (accompanied by piano, harp, organ and some various percussion) to play the block chords. While working on the piece initially, the chords almost reminded me of DS3's Firelink Shrine theme. It became more apparent that this also mirrors the energy of OoT's Spirit Temple, so I chose to lean into it. 

@3:57 - During these suspended chords I decided to briefly cut the notes short. I feel like this could be a controversial move on early listens. Leaving these tense chords briefly unresolved kinda put the picture of Ganon's waning life force in my head. 

I'm curious to hear everyone's thoughts!! If it isn't a total disaster I'm thinking of uploading this tomorrow in the looming shadow of TotK's release. (Because let's be real, everyone will be too busy playing the game on the actual release date to listen!). Regardless, I hope you all have fun with the game, and stay tuned for the eventual Link's Awakening Revision this month!