Download Kirby Music
Oliverio Gallman
What is your favorite thing about studying and/or playing music at NIU? My favorite thing about studying and playing music at NIU is the people. There are so many genuine people here at NIU and I feel really blessed to be able to make music with them. I remember my first experience playing in a collegiate ensemble was truly breathtaking. You see all these different people conversing before the downbeat is given, yet when the rehearsal starts, there is an immediate focus. I love being able to create music with such genuine people who are focused on making beautiful music together.
Are you involved in any student organizations or extra-curricular activities? If so, which ones? How have they added to your experience as a Huskie? Some of the student organizations and extra-curricular activities I am apart of include: Harmelodics A Capella, Huskie Marching Band, Supplementary Instruction Leaders and Refuge.
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The game has its share of darker, moodier themes that still manage to retain the bouncy energy of Kirby music, as well. The Iceberg theme is one such song: there is a real emphasis on horns and ambiance, as well as electronic, computerized sounds, but even though it sounds so different from everything else in the game, it still fits.
Kirby\u2019s Dream Land 3 wasn\u2019t a resounding success, critically or commercially, and it\u2019s kind of easy to see why: it was never really given the chance to be. It was so very different from its Super Nintendo predecessor, Kirby Super Star, both visually and in gameplay, and considering just how good Super Star was and still is, it should not be hard to imagine the next game, even if it was a good one, being something of a letdown. Throw in that Kirby Super Star released in 1996, months before the arrival of the SNES\u2019 successor, the Nintendo 64, and that Dream Land 3 released in November of 1997 \u2014 over a year into the life of the N64, at a time when 2D sidescrollers were being pushed aside both on consoles and in the minds of critics in favor of 3D platformers \u2014 and it\u2019s pretty easy to see how few were impressed by Dream Land 3.
I\u2019m not about to tell you that Kirby\u2019s Dream Land 3 is a hidden gem, necessarily \u2014 I ranked five Kirby games in the Nintendo top 101, and Dream Land 3 was not one of them for a number of reasons \u2014 but it does have a worse reputation than it deserves. I had a tough time with it when I was younger, myself, since it was not Super Star, and all I wanted, at that point, was more Super Star. There\u2019s a lot more here, though, than with, say, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, and much of that has to do with the system it was released on. Dream Land 3 was developed by a team that had fully mastered what the Super Nintendo was capable of, and they put that mastery on display.
It\u2019s a beautiful game, artistically speaking, utilizing a graphical technique referred to as \u201Cpseudo high-resolution\u201D in order to achieve its unique look. This technique, which the SNES hardware was capable of rendering, allowed for color blending between adjacent pixels, which in turn meant the soft, hand-drawn-with-colored-pencils look of Dream Land 3 could exist. The game also employed some impressive visual tricks, like clouds in the foreground obscuring your vision, and the highly expressive animation stands out even for Kirby. Look at the little guy doing his Naruto run in this game and then try to tell me he isn\u2019t disarmingly and adorably animated.
The sound, though, is where HAL\u2019s familiarity with the Super Nintendo\u2019s hardware truly shined. Dream Land 3 was the third of four Kirby games on the Super Famicom/Super Nintendo \u2014 Kirby\u2019s Super Star Stacker was a Super Famicom exclusive, since it released in 1998 \u2014 and the developer had also worked on a number of other SNES titles, like EarthBound, HAL\u2019s Hole in One Golf, SimCity, HyperZone, Arcana, Alcahest, and, of course, Shigesato Itoi\u2019s No. 1 Bass Fishing. By the time 1997 rolled around, HAL had already been making video games for this platform for six years: Dream Land 3 was title number 13 in that stretch. It was very obviously composed by someone who knew exactly what the sound hardware was capable of, which is how Dream Land 3 presented a wildly varied mix of instruments and genres, with whatever kind of pacing was deemed necessary for the moment.
The bass is the real standout, regardless of what kind of sound composer Jun Ishikawa was going for. While Ishikawa, who is still with HAL and still working on Kirby titles, rarely composes a Kirby game on his own \u2014 Hirokazu Ando has been there as a partner or as the lead himself on nearly every Kirby title since Kirby\u2019s Adventure released on the NES in 1993 \u2014 Dream Land 3 was a rare occurrence where he went at it alone. Now, Ishikawa is responsible for what most people know of as the Kirby sound. He composed the original title, Dream Land, on the Game Boy in 1992. So, all those songs that have survived throughout the years, getting arrangement after arrangement or being incorporated into new songs for new games, are from Ishikawa. Mt. Dedede, of course, is used every time King Dedede shows up anywhere, but the original invincibility theme came from Dream Land and Ishikawa, too, as did the theme for Green Greens, which has to this point appeared in 25 other games in one form or another, and is the central focus of the Grand Opening track for the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra\u2019s 25th anniversary concert celebrating the Kirby franchise.
It is, essentially, Kirby\u2019s own theme, even if that wasn\u2019t really the initial intent. Anyway! Ishikawa created the sound that would be and still is at the heart of Kirby\u2019s soundtracks with Dream Land, but Dream Land 3 is where things began to take the turn toward more and more depth and musical variety. That\u2019s not to say that the efforts before it were simple or anything \u2014 Super Star\u2019s soundtrack is incredible and diverse, too, with the kind of bouncy tunes you expect from Kirby mixed in with some more epic tracks and an exploration of sound that even resulted in a spaghetti western theme \u2014 but the sheer volume of instrumentation in Dream Land 3 did a hell of a job showing us where HAL was going with not just Kirby\u2019s sound, but even in games like Mother 3: Shogo Sakai composed the songs for that game (as well as the canceled N64 version of the title), and it took some obvious inspiration, stylistically, from Dream Land 3. This particular Kirby title itself took audio inspiration, to a degree, from another HAL-developed game and the predecessor to Mother 3, EarthBound. Dream Land 3 is something of a bridge, musically, for both those entries in the Mother series as well as between the Kirby of the 90s and the much more varied and busier musical stylings of Kirby yet to come.
It\u2019s the brass, the wind instruments, the drums, the bass. It\u2019s HAL blending the more Game Boy-aesthetic sounds of Kirby with the aforementioned bounciness that Super Star and the SNES hardware allowed for with these four sections that made something completely new, that was still very much Kirby: and would directly lead into the kind of massive, sprawling soundtracks that games like Return to Dream Land and Star Allies would bring to the table in Kirby\u2019s distant future.
Those drums are constant, and moving the song along with a pacing that moves so much faster than the sleepy-looking, hand-drawn Kirby might make you think you\u2019re going to move at, and the horns are ever-present, too, feeding into the song\u2019s energy and giving the sound so much more depth than its simplistic, chime-y intro suggests is coming.
If the idea of Kirby sounding kind of like EarthBound and Mother 3 was confusing to you before, it probably is not after listening to that track. And it\u2019ll be even less confusing after hearing Ripple Field 2, which sounds like someone crossed up preexisting Kirby music with Mother 3 tracks:
There is just so much going on here, and the beat throughout, even as the emphasis shifts from one instrument type to another, keeps you engaged in a way that actively makes platforming in Dream Land 3 feel even better than it actually is. That\u2019s not to say the gameplay is bad, no, but without the visuals and the excellent composition here, Dream Land 3 is certainly lesser than what it ended up being.
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