Man, what I wouldn't give to hear the Rundas/Gandrayda themes on there.
I read a theory in the announcement topic that they recycled music so as to conserve file space. Not sure if that's how it works, but if that's the case, I don't think Smash 4's Metroid music selection would excite me, lol. Can't they at least unabridged the Melee Brinstar theme?
Both Mario Maker and Pirate Ship forced their hand on the "no repeated songs" issue, because these two stages
had to have repeated music.
They just couldn't go and not include SMBU and SMB3 Grasslands on the stage because they were already used, that would have been silly. And at that point, you're already making an exception for two songs, why not go all the way and just open it to everything and bulk the sountrack up a bit.
With Pirate Ship, the pickings for its original soundtrack were slim. Just Great Sea and Molgera, both direct rips right from Wind Waker. From that, they'd have to figure out how to plug the holes and try and replace the many remixes the stage had with rips from various games and try and make it all feel the same. Music is part of the identity of a Smash Stage, and having two Wind Waker rips as the only pieces of the original soundtrack wouldn't have worked.
Now I'm not really sure why Molgera didn't came back. That's a real puzzler. It's one song, and it's an iconic, well liked song. I'm sure they could have managed. Great Sea is easy because it has a remix on the stage already and for a lot of songs when they remixed them they cut the original.
Adding any music, requires localization of the song titles and the credits and possibly requires licensing (although Molgera wouldn't have).
I think ultimately, Pirate Ship was a neat little thing they did for fans. It was a super popular Brawl level and lots of people missed it dearly. But being Wii U only, obviously the resources can't really be expected to be allotted to filling an entire new soundtrack. As it stands I'm entirely impressed at the Omega for how amazing it is given it's a Wii U only stage.
And actually, I appreciate the re-used music on Pirate Ship. It works. For the 64 stages, they had only one song to bring back, so they needed to fill a soundtrack by default. But the Brawl stages came built in with soundtracks.
Mario Maker actually has a "normal" DLC soundtrack once you strip away all the repeated songs except the 2 grasslands.
- Changing Grassland
- Mario Maker Main Theme
- SMB Grassland
- SMB3 Grassland
- SMW Grassland
- NSMBU Grassland
That's 5 pieces of music, which is the same as Peach's Castle 64. So really, they only had to re-use two songs, but decided, what the heck, let's go all the way. And so we get cool stuff like SMW Bowser's Castle and the Airship theme that would have otherwise not been on the stage, but are iconic songs that are in Mario Maker,