Overworld Theme | Zelda II: The Adventure of Link Orchestral Arrangement

Playlist:    • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link Orche...  
Yet another Zelda overworld track. When I played the game for the first time, I felt like this track in particular felt a lot like an 8-bit version of a minstrel singing about Link's epic adventure. The melody is very overbearing, with no places to rest and no break in the rhythm. Even when it gets broken up when you enter a battle, the music just doubles back to the beginning and blasts the fanfare in your face again. I also remember the intro portion got me so pumped, expecting for the main Zelda theme to kick in, but the actual melody comes in and I felt so cheated.

When I approached this track, I wanted to fix all the grievances I had with it, but interesting enough, I abandoned my intentions and ended up keeping all those annoying elements intact, even amplifying it in many places. While I made great effort in the prologue track to set a darker tone for my overall Zelda II arrangement style, the overworld track in the game is far too happy and optimistic for me to cloud it in any way. I tried so many ways to change it, but it would just render the piece unrecognizable, even while playing the exact same notes. I had to reconcile my feelings and accept that while the story context may be dark, Link is just so determined that he utterly blocks out any fear and dread and focuses on his mission.

In the prologue I took some inspiration from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves' soundtrack. Here, I channeled the spirit of the earlier The Adventures of Robin Hood film from 1938, with a small dose of Zorro thrown in. I believe the first time I watched it was around the same time I played Zelda II. It's got a lot of the same rhythm motif with the snares, and the skipping energy of the melody, and I wouldn't be surprised if the composer referenced it himself. It's a stark contrast to the main melody from the first game, and at the time when a lot of Zelda conventions haven't been established yet, my guess is the Overworld theme in each game put a unique stamp on its tone. My original plan was to emulate my arrangement of the first game's overworld by adding a lot of different moods to the piece, but decided against that. The player always moves Link through the overworld at the same speed, and I assume the majority of the time wants to avoid the enemy spawns as much as possible. So instead of slowing the piece down, I just extended out the melody using the same beats and rhythm in the track.

The opening solo cello in the melody is actually a blend of 3 different cello sample libraries. I found this one sample that would play every note aggressively, and it sounded to me very similar to the 8-bit "theremin"-like sound of the melody, especially when it plays the high notes!

Now while the melody played out in the original 8-bit, I noticed the note rests don't really break up the theme when you're only dealing with 4 simultaneous sounds, but in a fuller orchestra, when all the instruments rest at the same time, it sounds pretty jarring and really changes the feel of the track. As a solution, while the rests happen in the melody I had different instrument families always "doing something else" in the background. As an example, right before the melody jumps into the high "da-da-da daaaaaa, da-da-da daaaaaa," I have the woodwinds lead in first with an arpeggio. From this I subconsciously started to do this all over the track. The brass would regularly fanfare in out of nowhere and all the time, and different instruments would snatch the melody away, and this ended up being the main signature of my arrangement. I'm glad I learned this technique here.

Fun fact, but these first two Zelda II tracks are actually the tracks in the game I was LEAST looking forward to arranging, and is a big reason why it took so long to make them up to a level that now I really like them. This entire time, I've been humming/tapping out ideas for all the later tracks, and I am beyond excited to finally get to commit my ideas to the music.


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Arrangement and illustrations by Jeremiah Sun
Original Theme by Akito Nakatsuka
You can play Zelda II on the Nintendo Switch Online NES app

#ZeldaII #EpicVersion #Orchestra