Feast Your Eyes On The Official Japanese Zelda: Link's Awakening Soundtrack

This looks amazing!

Looks amazing and I know it includes the original but were there really 205 tracks?! Is some just sound clips?

It’s a shame it’s not on vinyl, I’d snap this up in an instant especially if the records themselves had that art. Nintendo in general don’t seem to print much vinyl even with the amazing work Mondo and others are doing.

@Yorumi Gameboy music is midi music, and midi files can be a few kilobytes for hours of music

I’m jelly. Very jelly

Very nice! Lovely music in that game.

@nessisonett I believe there was a special Mother Soundtrack vinyl in Japan that Ape made. It was for the 30th Anniversary nintendo neglected. I would love this along with The Mother Series soundtrack on vinyl. And if not vinyl put it on soundcloud or spotify cuz I'm tired of youtube videos being taken down

@PickledKong64 Yeah, Earthbound and Mother have vinyl but unfortunately it’s not the whole soundtracks, just a selection of songs. That was why I didn’t preorder the FF7 and remake soundtrack, it’s just a few select songs.

Hmm, I was a bit disappointed with the LA soundtrack tbh. It seemed like they were too slavishly devoted to recreating the original without adding any new charm. Same goes for the gameplay and the story, really, although I did enjoy it quite a bit.

I don't know Japanese but if my intuition serves me well, I think the Japanese says, "Sounds of Link putting on his outfit. Also, includes the sounds of Link's quiet footsteps". I don't know if the cd's are worth it. Hmmm.

Pre-ordered! That's it!

@sanderev That's true, except when MIDI is converted to WAV files for CD audio it takes up the same amount of memory as any other audio. If you download Gameboy soundfiles it's only 100kb or so. If you downloaded them all as compressed mp3 files that soundtrack soars to 1.2GB!

I imagine heaps of Gameboy games have over two hours of music, especially if it takes you 10 hours or more to complete. Even if it is a short song, if they loop it twice that'll take up time. Super Mario Land can easily be stretched to 35 minute soundtrack if you loop each song to 3:00.

Another thing to factor in is that even though a CD can hold 80 minutes of audio, if they had 85 minutes of music, they'd split that across two CDs as roughly 42.5 minutes per CD. So just because there are four discs doesn't mean each one is full to capacity.

However, looking at Zophar's domain, it appears that there are 288 tracks for the original Gameboy title. So if you played each one for only 30 seconds, that would still be over 140 minutes of music which would just fit on two CDs. https://www.zophar.net/music/gameboy-gbs/legend-of-zelda-the-links-awakening

Japan knows how to do physical release soundtracks! You should show off the ones for Octopath Traveller and the Xenoblade OSTs. Absolutely gorgeous!

@Averagewriter haha. I can just imagine someone putting the music track for that sound on loop.

@Yorumi : The maximum would be 2 hours and 40 minutes spanning 2 CDs. Game Boy games can easily house quite a lot of audio as they would occupy very, very little space (even less than MIDI files, which are already really small).

@nessisonett : There is no point in producing vinyl versions of material that has been digitally mastered. I understand the novelty of the format, but it's just that, a novelty. Likewise, the overwhelming majority of music nowadays is digitally mastered, and I would wager that even modern reprints of archive recordings (from the early 80s and prior) would be replicated from digital masters as opposed to being sourced from native/analogue sources.

@Rexenokid : Complete soundtracks are intended to include every piece of music from the game, from incidental cues to the grand orchestral pieces during heightened moments from the game, so of course you'll have a lot of unremarkable pieces in addition to the good stuff. Still, I prefer having everything as opposed to "Sound Selections" where only a very small number of noteworthy songs are chosen.

@Silly_G Vinyl is a far nicer format to collect. Especially with the goodies most of them come with and the liner notes. Most CDs (not collector’s editions) I could do myself in an hour with a rewritable CD and some files off the internet. Plus, my record player cost a mint and sounds incredible with my speakers, far better than any CD or Bluetooth device has sounded with it.

@nessisonett : "Some files off the internet" will not sound anywhere near as good, presuming that the audio is sourced from dubious sources that have been subjected to multiple rounds of compression as opposed to FLAC or lossless WAV, the latter of which is the standard for official CD releases.

But if 3MB MP3s are your frame of reference, then of course they won't compare favourably against vinyl.

@nessisonett that's sad. I really want video game soundtracks on vinyl. The novelty of listening to vinyl is a treat to begin with so I would love to do it with game ost

@sanderev Ik it's super late, but the Game boy used chiptunes, not MIDI