SonicGAF's Song of the Day - #65
Song: Tropical Coast Zone 1
Game: Sonic Lost World
Composer: Tomoya Ohtani
Brass Arranged by: Takeshi Watanabe
Steelpan: Yoshihiro Harada
1st Trumpet: Yusuke Nakano
2nd Trumpet: Teppei Kawakami
Trombone: Makoto Igarashi
Alto Saxophone: Kei Suzuki
Tenor Saxophone: Naoya Takemura
Electric Guitars: Susumu Nishikawa
Electric Bass: Akinori Yamada
Dat production quality. I mentioned before that Watanabe had also done brass arrangements for Rhythm Thief, and it turns out that it shares three of the performers here as well. It shows; compare 1:10 here to the intro in
LAST DANCE. In general, Ohtani seems to have enjoyed getting to stretch his wings in that game, because it's one of the bigger influences on Lost World's music, along with Kumatani and Tokoi's work on Unleashed and Yokota's Galaxy 1 tracks. Small wonder that the OST is named
Without Boundaries.
This piece in particular was one of the pleasant surprises I ran across while listening through the OST (available now on iTunes), as one of the better tracks I wasn't already familiar with from gameplay videos. The instrumentation certainly starts with Mario's beach themes as a jumping off point, but as is usual for Sega, the arrangement sounds nothing at all like what Nintendo would produce. You may have noticed a
slight focus on brass, and Ohtani's percussion is still unparalleled. As much as the series has no specific musical style from game to game, there's still some hard-to-define quality that's been maintained all these years that screams, "This is Sonic music!" and sets it apart, even in a soundtrack as eclectic as this one.