It’s often said of remakes and remasters that the most effective ones are not the most dazzling, but those that look like the images the originals conjured in players’ heads. Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is a great example of a remake that might be light years ahead of the originals technically, but that also has a deeply comforting familiarity; this is how your rose-tinted brain remembers it looking. The Shadow of the Colossus remake by Bluepoint (RIP) and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD get close, but miss by a whisker due to subtleties of shading and texture. They look too new, too sharp and three-dimensional.
I’m not sure that Star Fox passes this test — visually, at any rate. It’s a pretty game that follows the blueprint of the original Star Fox 64 with painstaking care, but in my head, I don’t think Star Fox 64 had this cinematic sheen, or this much hard detail. I think of it as being cleaner and more toylike. And that’s before you get to those distracting new character designs, which I quite like, but which bear little resemblance to the determined, animated plushies of the original.
But there’s one facet of this remake that absolutely nails its brief, taking the original material and blowing it out of the water in terms of fidelity, while perfectly realizing its spirit. I’m talking about the music.
Star Fox‘s approach to music is lavish, but simple. It takes the original score by Koji Kondo and Hajime Wakai, as performed by the Nintendo 64’s sound chip, and arranges it for a full orchestra. That’s about it; there are a few new compositions, especially for new cutscenes, but the main themes and level tracks are transposed note-for-note.
It’s fabulous. The orchestra sounds thrilling and rich, energizing the action. Arrangers Matt Pirog and Stephen Barton have gone full John Williams on it, appropriately enough, given Star Wars’ enormous influence on the original game. The sparkling glissandi, dramatic strings, and triumphant brass fanfares are all there. Williams is often imitated like this, but the beauty of the Star Fox soundtrack, unlike most other imitations, is that Kondo and Wakai’s clear, memorable melodies can stand the comparison. It’s not just Star Wars noise; it’s music you’ll be humming to yourself the next day.
Obviously, Pirog and Barton have embellished the original arrangements somewhat to fill out a symphonic orchestra’s range. But it’s actually amazing how little they’ve had to. Listen to the new tracks and the originals back-to-back; a selection of Star Fox tunes and the full Star Fox 64 soundtrack are available on Nintendo Music. All the musical ideas are present and correct to a startling degree.
This isn’t just true of battle epics like “Corneria.” Listening to the new game’s “Star Map,” I marveled at how a simple piece of looping menu music had been transformed into urgent, atmospheric scene-setting. Then I listened back to Star Fox 64‘s “Map Theme” and discovered that, while pared back, the whole thing was there: the rattling, martial snare drum, the ominous brass riffs, the deep orchestral swell.
It’s abundantly clear that the Star Fox soundtrack is exactly how Kondo and Wakai’s compositions sounded to them in their heads. They wrote their own John Williams score and knocked it out of the park, then compressed it down to the N64’s basic audio fidelity. Star Fox does them, and us, the honor of fully realizing their original vision. It’s elegantly done, and greatly deserved.
