Playlist:    • Zelda II: The Adventure of Link Orche...  
Alongside the palace theme, I kept humming ideas for orchestrating the Boss Theme since the start. I found myself mistaking it for the battle track Stand Your Ground from Final Fantasy XV. It's only off by one note, and the phrase alternates up and down a key. I ended up mostly recreating it verbatim to use as a launch pad. The idea here is to have the first loop represent the bosses from the first two palaces, and the 2nd loop for 3rd and 4th palaces.

In addition to FFXV, I took inspiration from a lot of Square Enix's properties, because they really know how to hype you up for a boss. The track Traveler's Road from Legend of Mana consists of a thundering and relentless beat, yet it leaves from some emotional phrasing that I just really like. Yasunori Nishiki's many boss themes for the Octopath Traveler games are culminations of the boss's theme built up over time across multiple music tracks, and I love the constant callbacks he makes. Since the Title Theme of Zelda II has phrases that get reused elsewhere, I thought I could extend that to this track and also do a callback to the Title theme.

Finally, Masayoshi Soken's music for the Eikon fights in Final Fantasy XVI are pretty much worth the price of admission alone. They make a great case for music in modern games should still be able to take center stage and not be regulated to the background underneath the voice acting and audio. Compare that to Dark Souls, which Zelda II shares many connections to. Even though the music there is also epic during the boss fights, there's no real hook to them to make them memorable. Besides, Link himself is iconic, so it's only fair to add that much more emotionality into the music.

I had planned for the track to consist of just the opening rhythm from the original, which would lead straight into the phrase at 1:22, and then it'll be over. However, as I was experimenting with instrumentation and constantly being sublimely influenced by Octopath and FFXVI, I kept stretching out the track to accommodate every idea I wanted. I made a point to keep the rhythm persistent throughout the entire track. I wanted the track to mirror a player's first time experience fighting these bosses. In Zelda II, you are stuck in a single screen, and the bosses immediately comes at you, forcing you to react. There's nowhere to escape and you'd probably lose all three lives and get sent back to the beginning of the palace to make your way back, all the while thinking of how to attack its weak point and dodge its attack pattern. Link is at his most acrobatic and speed compared to all the traditional Zeldas, and I really wanted to push the music to epic Final Fantasy levels to reflect that.

I think it's just hilarious that I extended the track out to 10x its original version (40x compared to the FDS version as it lacks the alternating keys haha), and I still consider this a generally "faithful" arrangement. This will afford me the freedom to switch genres for the 2nd Boss Theme!

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Arrangement and illustrations by Jeremiah Sun
Original Theme by Akito Nakatsuka

#ZeldaII #FFXVI #Souls