Aight fuck what I said last week, this week we’re gonna talk about Kirby, specifically my favorite Kirby game, Kirby 64.

Released in 2000, this game did a cool thing with the Kirby formula that I would love to see repeated; you could combine two different powers together to make something crazy. You could of course just make a super strong version of a vanilla power by combining two of the same thing, but I always found the mixes more interesting. You could get some pretty badass combinations. Rock+Cutter was one of my faves; you turned into rock versions of Kirbys animal pals, and you were nigh invulnerable in this state. One of those animal pals was a bird. He was the only good one and the selection of what you turn into was random, but I didn’t mind spamming the power button till I got the bird because it was pretty much overpowered. Another one of my favorites was Cutter + Electricity, which gave you a big double bladed lightsaber ala Darth Maul.

Thinking back on it I’m pretty sure almost all of my favorite powers involved the cutter somehow, except the vanilla cutter, which was garbage.

Anyway.

I think if I could sum up the music from this game in one word, that word would be “Frantic”. I really don’t know how they approached the sound design in this game, but the sounds that they use are in general kind of tinny and heavy on the high end. I feel that the Rock Star Theme illustrates this observation better than most;

Like holy shit this track kicks you in the face with it’s weird synthesizers and constantly chugging “electric guitar”, but it is deceptively slow. It just seems blazingly fast because of the ever present CHUG-CHUGGA-CHUG-CHUGGA-CHUG. It clocks in at about 160 beats per minute, which is still fast, but not as fast as the hell drums would lead you to believe.

Yo the Factory Level was a really big change of tone for this game. It was unfailingly bright and bubbly until this point, and then all of a sudden everything is dark and industrial. Cool thing I noticed about this music; fret noise from a guitar is used in the drum kit. It’s on every beat. 

I totally forgot about the Ripple Star theme before writing this article. In the game, this is where reality is breaking apart and it’s up to Kirb-o to save the day. Fuck man, this music is so fast and frenetic that it barely makes any sense to me. The more I listen to it, the more that I feel that it is also listening right back, and that someday it will step into my body, and I will open my mouth to speak only for furious jazz bass to come from my lips. Charles Mingus would be proud. I won’t say anything more about the music from this game, but I will leave the Final boss music here, because it’s what really stuck with me all these years and I think it’s best presented without comment.