Retronauts - 755: The Magic of GBA Soundtracks

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Nadia Oxford, Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, and Victor Hunter talk up the Game Boy Advance's under-sung music hardware.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week on Retronauts. No, that's not a death battle coming for my GBA. That's just Mega Man Zero music. Hello, and welcome to Retronaut. How are you all? I hope your ear canals are nice and clean because this week I'm going to talk about some Game Boy Advance and its sound capabilities.

And maybe it's possible lack thereof. It depends how you look at the Game Boy Advance. We're going to have some opinions, I'll tell you that much, because I am joined by a really great panel of friends with great taste in music. First off is my partner in crime from the Axe of the Blood God podcast, Victor Hunter. Say hi, Victor.

Hi, Madia. How are you? Oh, you're either being a subway announcer or you're being a Game Boy Advance character. This is just normal sound quality. Victor Hunter coming at you at 11 Hertz. Oh, yeah. And coming at us also from 11 Hertz is Jeremy Parrish, who may or may not own this podcast. Let me tell us about yourself, Jeremy.

Yes, you've all been owned. Hi, my ear canals are not clean. They've got earwax. I am canal retentive. Oh, I'm sorry to hear it. Canal retentive. That looks, that took me a second. Thank you very much.

Uh-huh. Yeah. What the martini is for. Diamond fight. How about your ears? How are your ears doing these days? Oh, well, you know, I'm getting older, so there's a lot of hair in there. But I feel like I can hear everybody and they can hear me.

So let's just. with it. Let's just let's go. Let's pump up the volume and up and up because dear God, we're all losing it. I've had my iPhone tell me to turn down the volume like consistently every week for basically since Proto Man X3 came out and beyond. So I'm going for good things and this is all going to work out really great for me in the end. But for now, let's talk about the Game Boy Advance because what a lovely little system. It is the direct follow-up to the long-lived Game Boy. It was an ambitious little platform that was arguably smothered before his time by the success of the DS. It's even known for some early handheld 3D games like Asterix and Obelix XXL,

Kill Switch, and Hot Wheels Stunt Race Challenge. Don't forget about Ayridion. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry, you're right. Absolutely. And what's the, had a bang and soundtrack. Yeah, that's, that's, and made by like demo scene people. Maybe we'll get to that.

That's why it had a bang and soundtrack. Yeah. Yeah, that'll do it. Also, James Bond, Nightfire on GBA is incredible. Incredible. What a beautiful game that. Oh, yes. X and Sever. It's crazy what they were doing on that hardware.

Yeah. You laugh. You may well may you laugh. However, nevertheless, X versus Sever was a profoundly impressive achievement on the Game Boy Advance. It's just, it's when those three words come up in a row, I have to laugh. It's a law. So it's X and Sever? Is it like...

X versus Sever. Is it like, is it Mega Man X versus some character named Sever? No, it's E-C-K-S. Oh, X-X-X-E-S. To tie into the beloved action film, X-V-V-E-V-R-S-VER. We all remember. That extremely successful movie that has made a huge imprint on the pop culture memory. Clearly, because I remember it.

And they did an ambitious Game Boy game for this, Game Boy Advance game, is what you are telling me. They did two, didn't they? Wow. I think so, yeah. With an X version and sever version? Yeah, yeah. No, the sequel was called Sex versus Ever. Sex versus Ever, never.

So I think we've named some of our favorite 3D Game Boy Advance Games. By the way, Uncle Derek, whomst I asked to be on this episode, he politely had to turn us down, but he will show up Sunday, I promise. he's done some great videos about what the E Game Boy Advance is capable of, especially as a 3D system. If you have some time to kill, by all means, or if you just want to learn something, by all means, go there and partake of his stuff. I mean, from a technical perspective, the Game Boy Advance was really kind of groundbreaking. It prefigured modern mobile devices because it was a portable platform based around an arm architecture, which is what every mobile device now is based on. I'm recording this on a MacBook Pro, which is based on an arm architecture. So Nintendo was really kind of ahead of the curve on that one.

It was a groundbreaking, pioneering little guy. It really was, especially once the SP version came out. Of course, we had the original, which, but the way you're tenting your fingers perish. I feel like you want to say something about the original Game Boy Advance. I'm just going to tell you to get back in the Ava. So, no, I think it's great that you brought up the Game Boy Advance SP because it really showed how much Nintendo loved the sound capabilities of the Game Boy Advance as a platform because they said music and audio are so important to this platform that we're not building in a headphone jack. So we took it out, you've got to buy a special adapter dongle if you want to listen to your music with headphones. Whereas the original GBA model had a headphone jack.

They took it out for the SP because they just didn't give a crap about the audio capabilities of this system. The end. Yeah. And what I think about those stupid dongles, I think about the ones I have for my iPhone because it took the headphone jacks out of that as well. And I can tell you that the sound sounds like... Again, groundbreaking. Yeah. So brave.

So brave. And it sounds like garbage through the dongle half the time. like especially if you're not using a proprietary one. So I can only imagine that you're losing something with the GBA dongle. And GBA soundtracks don't have a lot to lose to begin with. So that's a little troubling. I mean, maybe it helps. Maybe it's, you know, like how they master music now to be listened to on bad headphones.

So they get rid of all dynamism. It's just like a blast coming at you. Maybe a bad dongle connection actually helps the GBA audio hardware. I guess we're not really selling the primals. I'm really not, but that's the thing. I want to talk about how flawed and yet kind of brilliant the GBA sound was on its own. Because when I think about the GBA, I think about, you know how when a butterfly goes through its metamorphosis? It starts as a caterpillar, it spins into a cocoon, and then it becomes a beautiful butterfly.

And in between, in that cocoon's phase, what's actually kind of disturbing is that the butterfly, or the caterpillar, rather, breaks itself down into a liquid form and rebuild itself into. a butterfly quite literally from the building blocks of life. The GBA, I don't want to be like dismissive, but it is kind of that soup, that experimental soup from which so much more rose in the coming years. And that transition, that clumsy but somehow beautiful, overly saturated transition, that clam shell that came with it, I don't know. I think it's just worth celebrating and the music that came with it as well. Because when I think of the GBA and its music, I think about how different it is compared to the Game Boy, which is a very crisp, clean, still celebrated kind of sound. I was actually thinking back, my first experience was stereo sound in a video game because that

was the, I had headphones that I could put into my ears and listen to, dun da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da no no dogger required and my parents like at home we had a crappy ass mono sound TV that like the ones that were like big enough to kill you if it dropped on you like they was a floor unit, no stereo sound out of any of that. So yeah, that was my first experience. And the GBA, by comparison, uses, really, it's kind of like the S&ES and that it's more sample based. And yet, as I understand it, the GBA doesn't really have the hardware. Like, I don't quite understand the hardware of the GBA sound. So let's talk a little bit about that, because we have some professionals on about this. Yeah, I mean, you say that the GBA sounded really different

from the Game Boy, but it had the Game Boy sound processor in it. That was what they carried forward. So it did have the same processor. Yeah, like it had the GB, the Game Boy sound chip in it. Okay. That was kind of like the default basis. But it also had the capacity to, you know, basically brute force sampling or streaming. I would describe it as actually being a lot more similar

to the Nintendo 64, which also did not have a discreet sound chip. That was the first Nintendo console where they were like, audio, who cares? We'll just, you know, we'll just do it with the processor. So effectively, for every sound channel you had, I mean, this is kind of a rough approximation, but for every sound channel you had on N64, that had to be created out of the central processor units duty cycles. So every sound channel was essentially like doing a 1% assassination hit on GBA or the N64 like core CPU performance. So they had to like basically allocate bandwidth, you know, from the, and processor cycles from the whole like having game logic and displaying graphics and all that sort of thing. in order to have sound at all.

And GBA kind of expands on that by giving it the Game Boy audio chip as kind of like the fallback position. And then allowing it also to dedicate CPU cycles to create music, you know, like generate it somehow. Mostly, you know, through sampling or like I said, streaming, you know, something like Circle of the Moon is, I think it's streamed from the chip. which is why it's so fuzzy. Yeah. Vick, you look like you're about to say something. No, just that, yes, this is, I think this is what makes the Game Boy advance so interesting. And kind of, I would say it's almost an evolutionary dead end because it is this combination of you have the original Game Boy DMG.

So you've got the four channels from there, right? We know this. If you're listening to Retronauts, you probably know this. But we've got our two, you know, square wave channels, our one wave channel, and then our noise channel, right? That's classic, classic Game Boy. It's basically the NES audio chip minus the sampling. Is that correct? Yeah.

And even then, the one wave channel is capable of doing some sampling. If you ever hear, there's, uh, soccer awards, G.B for Game Boy Color has, has some voice samples in it. I'm just going to bring that up because I'm doing my due diligence mentioning soccer awards. Happy 30th anniversary. But it has some voice samples in it for the end scenes. And anytime you hear a voice sample, that's probably being streamed through the one dedicated wave channel. So that's the Game Boy. That's the DMG side of things.

And then Game Boy Advance added two channels that are PCM or their direct sound channels. And those are you can take your home sound generating hardware, whatever modules you've got, whatever you're using to create music. And if you can make like a MIDI synth track, then chances are the GBA doesn't use exactly MIDI, but it's kind of close enough that it's easy to transpose into MIDI. and then you're basically, you can stream that song. Now, it doesn't have, those channels can't do all the effects and modulation and things that the DMG channels can do because those are operating on a hardware level, whereas this is, like Jeremy says,

just sort of streaming music. Right. But what makes this so cool is that so much of the GBA library actually, actually, uses both. So, like you were saying, Nadia, GBA has a different sound, but that's because it's layering other streaming audio on top of the, the, the, the PSG sound that you're familiar with from the 8-bit days. And then, like Jeremy is saying, depending on, I think there's, I think there's four modes that these channels can operate in at different. levels of

Hertz, depending on how much CPU usage your game is commandeering. It gives you a little bit more room to do higher quality streaming of these

two sound channels. There are some games that don't care as much, and those PCM, those direct sound channels can sound pretty, pretty crusty, pretty crunchy, pretty grainy, lots of noise in there.

Because it's, also the sound is being generated and then interpolated and you have this digital, the analog converter inside the GBA that is not very good. So all of these things, every step of the way,

things are getting rounded off, numbers are being approximated, and you're losing fidelity at every single step. And then, the final kick in the pants is just the GBA's speaker, which is a single mono speaker. Despite the fact that it is capable of stereo sound, they just gave it a mono speaker. So right from the beginning, you can see we don't really care if people are getting the optimal sound experience from this machine. It's just kind of there.

Well, I think it had stereo because the Game Boy had stereo. Right. And the Game Boy had stereo. It didn't have a mono speaker, but it had stereo because the sound chip was designed by Hiro Kazu Tanaka, Hipp Tanaka. And he was like, you know what? I'm going to make this sound chip like kick ass. It's going to be the audio chip that I want to use. So he gave it the capabilities he wanted. And then the hardware designers were like, yeah, we're just cramming that through a tiny little half inch a mono speaker. Yeah. But he got the head. phone jack is a compromise.

That's cool. Yeah, that's a cool compromise, actually. And like you were saying, Nadia, we'll talk about a lot of the transposing Super Nintendo music to the GBA because for a lot of people, the GBA felt like, oh, this is the game, this is the console that you play Super Nintendo ports on that kind of thing. But, you know,

Super Nintendo ports with voice samples. Ha! Yeah! Just what I needed. Sorry. Ha! Here. Here.

But notably, the Super Nintendo's sound chip was developed by a little company called Sony. Yeah. So what could have possibly happened between the Super Nintendo's release and the Game Boy Advance's release that would have led to Sony maybe not wanting to cooperate with Nintendo on some sound hardware? Birthday parties? They had a good job together. They were friends. Ape Escape. That's what it was.

But to put a point when Victor was saying earlier, yes, we will be talking a bit about how certain soundtracks compare. Would you have a game like Final Fantasy 6,

which is so famous for its soundtrack, and you put it on the Game Boy Advance, you're going to have some compromises. And I still love that soundtrack for what it does, but that's something else to talk about. That opera scene is amazing.

It is sublime. I don't even know of you being serious or not. It's just, it's so fascinating. Fascinating. Exactly. Everything in Final Fantasy 6 advance just sounds out of tune. It does. So you have an entire sequence based around musical performance.

And on Super NES, it was a showcase. It was like, hey, this isn't a CD-based system, but you've got something that's pretty cool. I mean, they're gargling. It's fine. But, yeah, but it's still, you know, it's still. still like opera. But Jeremy, it's truer to the experience.

Celeste isn't a trained opera singer. That's true. Why would she sound amazing? Yeah. I mean, when I go up to seeing opera, I also go, everyone in the seats are like, what the hell? I paid $80 for these tickets. Exactly.

But you take that and put it on GBA and like throw it half a step out of tune and then give it like that sampling hiss. And you've got a stew going, baby. You know what it reminds me of? When I was younger, my dad, like, he plays guitar and he's pretty good at it. And when I was younger, I used to kind of be in a grade five class that did nothing except sing songs and do nothing in terms of learning. And our teacher loved to put on performances, musical performances, and he used to play guitar. And it was always out of tune.

And my poor father would sit there through these performances of us singing Beatles songs out of tune and the guitar is out of tune. And to amuse me when he would get home. he'd be like, I'm going to play the guitar like your teacher. And he'd play it just slightly out of tune and have that buzz. And it's like, that's kind of what the Game Boy Advance, Final Fantasy Six soundtrack is like, not to say it doesn't try. But as Morgan Freeman taught us in the harshest place on earth, life finds a way. No, I'm getting things mixed up. Anyway, you know, there are horrible restrictions in place on Game Boy Advance audio.

and people persevered, and they made some pretty damn good music. Agreed. You cannot play the original rhythm to Ngooku and not be amazed. It's incredible. And I think that's one of the things that I find charming about the GBA, and I think maybe a generation of GBA players feel about it, is that, you know, especially in retro game spaces, it's one of the things we always talk about,

that when consoles had limitations on them, it meant that there was room for people to experiment and for devs to get creative with their hardware. And I honestly, for all of its hissy sound and compressed audio, I think the GBA still falls under that category. I still think, you know, you can look up demo scene stuff now, and there are still people messing around with GBAs and pushing things, not as much as some other consoles, but, but it is, I think there's still a lot of room to play

in the GBA space and, and maybe the tools aren't as available or easy to grok as, you know, people have been popping an LSDJ into their, their Game Boys for decades at this point. So there's, there's a vernacular that has grown out of that and an understanding, whereas the GBA equivalents never quite reached that saturation. And because a lot of it is based on samples and providing your own input to get the most out of it, it's maybe not as easy as, say, using a FAMI tracker or something like that. But I think there's still a lot to what makes the GBA charming. It's a weird little gestalt of the past and a future that was inevitable that I think is really beautiful.

Also, like the caterpillar soup. It's a bit like, if you would imagine a soup inside a cocoon, it's not unlike that. Sorry, Mike. I can only assume the episode artist is going to be the butterfly meme and the guys look up like, is this a GBA? That's what we're going. It's a pile of slime It's a soup made out of Caterpie Oh no, poor Caterpia

Happy 30th anniversary Pokemon as we record this Yeah Have any of you? Soccero Wars and Pokemon came out on the same date? Amazing Oh my gosh, yeah

How about that? Musseltov Boy, both of those have been world-spaning Colossuses that have truly left an impact on children

It has. Hey, I'm just, I'm just trolling. I'm sorry. If you want to know how much of an impact Soccero Wars has had, go to patreon.com slash bloodgod pod for our Soccer Wars special. I remember when they finally brought that to the U.S. I went to the Nipanichi NIS America event where they were showing it off on we. I was like, oh, great. It's Sacra Wars finally.

But, you know, we sat and looked at it. And we didn't want to say anything to the rep who, she was very nice. We really liked her. but we were just all like, why this one? Yeah. And that's my Soccero War story. Was that not a particularly good one? Oh, five is still fine, but it was not the one starring Gemini Sunrise, the Cowgirl?

The Samurai Cowgirl of the West. She was in Cross Zone, too. I remember her. She is, yeah. I think David likes her. Have any of you ever used like a tracker for making music on a GBA or anything? I'm not really a music-making type. You heard the extent of my musical talents a moment ago when I sang the Final Fantasy

Six opera. That's about it. It was very beautiful. I cheered up. Thank you. Thank you. There's something, because it's all in hexadecimal, right? So if you're a music-minded person out there and you're used to counting time signatures,

you know, one, two, three, four, changing to counting your music to, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B. C is a real, it's a real, that's a mental exercise. Yeah, that's very interesting, actually. The lead singer of the offspring, I'm completely blanking on his name, something with the D, Derek, I think. He sees music as math. And I don't know if that's exactly what he means by that,

but whereas I see music as like, you know, images or colors or whatever, He's like, no, I see it as like equations. Like, God damn. Music, music is entirely math. It is, yeah, the whole musical theory, triads and peritameter and I don't know. On the wonder I suck at it. Honestly, I tried to take my, I was signed up for piano lessons when I was like six years old. And I had a great teacher.

And I liked to play the piano, but she had me doing theory and stuff when I just really lost interest. And that was the end of my piano adventure. I mean, there's, there's music theory. And then there's also the physics behind music, which is like what we're kind of talking about before when all of this music gets interpolated through different circuits and different systems and these waveforms and their values all get rounded off in weird ways that, I mean, it's the resolution in the same way that graphics, you know, get interpolated when you're talking about your bilinear filters, your nearest neighbors and stuff. that stuff all applies to music as well. Again, that's why I suck up music theory, I suppose. I just love the idea of hexadecimal. So I'm going to play this track in C4 time.

See, that sounds like one of those jokes from Mega Man Battle Network 3, where they make a joke about computers, and I'm just like, I'm an idiot, I don't understand this. But it's also a military joke, C4. There you go. Colonel. My ass is too big or however that joke goes. What?

That's exactly it. I went to a different direction than I was expecting. One thing I do want to kind of admit, personally, what might have thrown me off with Game Boy Advance soundtracks to begin with was full disclosure. I was really damn poor when the Game Boy Advance came out and I emulated a lot of his early games. And those early GBA emulators were not at all. concerned about making the music sound good versus making the game actually run. So I think a lot of games that were, frankly, pirated during that time had that really, kind of like, I don't know, like a crunchy stutter to them that I don't think was actually in the games themselves.

And that might have left an impression on not just me, but other people as well. Yeah, that that could have been the fact that it was trying to sort of interpret it as MIDI data when it's not exactly how the GBA functions. You know, we're trying to use a one-size-fits-all sort of solution when GBA does have slightly more bespoke hardware than that. But I could be wrong. That's just me. See, my perception of the GBA was skewed because the first thing I got for that system when I imported it at the Japanese launch was Castlevania Circle of the Moon, which cheated hardcore. They were like, we don't care about using the built-in Game Boy chip. We are just going to stream all of this audio. we are going to use 90% of the available ROM space to put the best of Castlevania music in here.

And it's going to blow your mind and you're going to think the music on this system is incredible. This is mind-blowing. This sounds almost as good as Symphony of the Night. This is going to be an incredible handheld gaming experience. Headphones on at all times. I cannot wait for the next Castlevania. its soundtrack to come out on Game Boy Advance. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. And, and when do we get to talk about Harmony of Dissonance? I mean, I named myself for Harmony of Dissence. It's right there. It's

right there in my screen name. Jeremy of Dissence. I got to say Circle the Moon. I remember that a lot because it was a launch title when it came out in America, and I remember playing, I didn't buy it my friend had it and I played it. And I remember just thinking right away that, A, there were a lot of covers. So it was like, I already knew these tunes from somewhere else. And I think in the case of the GBA, that really doesn't do it any favors because I've already got a version of that music playing in my head. And it's not what I'm hearing now. And, well, that can work to an advantage because, of course, Castlevania has as many remixes over the years. I feel like the versions on Circle the Moon really don't do justice to the tunes that is borrowing. Like, the one that comes to

not especially. There's a tune that Circle the Moon borrows from Super Castlevania 4, which is an S&S game, of course. Right. And it's the freaky music that plays during the level where they have all the mode seven effects going on. The Karakuri Mansion. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that song.

And it's a great bit of music. And in the original, you know, 1990, 1991 version, it's extremely jassy. It's got all that instruments sort of overlapping. It's getting kind of freaky. It's all about the notes that not playing. You got the bass? Yeah. And then the GBA version, like, it's got the hits, you know?

It's got the structure you recognize it, but it's like this, it's just not landing the same. The percussion doesn't have any oomph to it. Like the, you know, it just, it doesn't, it doesn't land right. I don't know. The bass in that version is really good. Like the baseline carries that cover. It's, it's such good bass guitar. That would be a weird, just a weird game to cover in general, because that was one of my favorite

S&E S&S soundtrack. of all time. And if I heard that version of bloody tears on the GBA, coming out of the GBA speaker, I would probably cry because I absolutely love the reverb in Super Castlevania 4. And one thing in GBA is not much good at is reverb, sadly enough. I can't comment on that because I'm not allowed to talk about the Castlevania 4 soundtrack on Retro-No, when you talk about this Castlevania 4 at all, I get mad. So we can't talk about that today. somehow the day when I feel like getting mad.

But yes, I mean, to the point, you know, after the Circle of Moon came out, I think clearly someone internally in Konami felt they had to make a lot of corrections for the next game. And in both, you know, color choices because they wanted to make sure that people could see on the screen. Yeah, yeah. And musically, they kind of went back a step. It's like, no, no, we're going to make the next one it's going to sound like it's a Game Boy game. And for reasons, I don't quite understand the last 20 years, people have, have, have insisted that this is a bad soundtrack, when in fact it is not a skepticastard.

It's a very good soundtrack. And I think at some point... Make your talkie. At some point, I think the opinions will shift over in the direction of justice and righteousness. But certainly at the time, like, before I even played it, everyone's like, oh, yeah, the music of that one sucks. Like, what do you mean the music sucks? And I played it...

You know, I was like, wait, this is good. What do you mean? What do you mean sucks? Wasn't the music composed by someone from Lark and Seal? I don't remember the composer. Soshiro Hokai is the composer. I don't know. You just do that on top of your head, did you?

Wow. No, I looked it up for the notes. Okay. I knew I wanted to have that one because I want to do him justice because I think you're right, Diamond. And I think it's sort of backwards from there because when you look at Harmony of Dissinence, I mean, all three of the GBA trilogy, Castlevania games, the numbers of frames in the sprites basically doubles each game.

The amount of, you know, it's not called Mode 7 on GBA, but the amount of enemies that are doing pretty elaborate things. Fod seven. Yeah, the effects on a lot of Joust's. special attacks and things. It is using a lot more CPU. So I think he went in knowing that he was going to have less bandwidth for this soundtrack. So that's why it's so PSG heavy. And within that, you're right.

It is, if you were to just take the PSG out and play that on a tracker on a GBA, you'd be like, this is really compelling. Like the, everyone sort of knows that, you know, you use the noise channel for percussion because it's so low bandwidth that uses very, very little memory because it's, it's basically the remainder of your memory, just generating a burst of static sound.

It's, you know, like it's, fighting for its life. Yeah, it's kind of a nothingness. But that ends up where. working really well for high hats and percussion and for punctuating phrases of music. And for explosion sound effects, things like that. But if you listen, I would highly recommend if you can get your hands on the Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance vinyl that I believe was from limited run games. Was it not? Yes, absolutely.

I know we did a few. I can't remember exactly which. Yeah, Aria and Harmony of Distance, I believe we're both going to do run games. Oh, Ariya has such a good soundtrack. If you get a chance to listen to it and really, there are math heavy drum fills going on on that soundtrack. There is some really, really sophisticated drumming and percussion going on in that soundtrack that I think is really beautiful and totally underrated. I am inclined to agree with you both that Harmony of Dissinence has a good soundtrack that maybe did not find the right audience. And also, it didn't have the populist appeal of Circle of the Moon soundtrack because that was like the best of Castlevania just streamed.

So as a handheld experience, it was like nothing anyone had ever heard before, truly amazing. harmony of dissonance goes in a different direction. And I mean, they called it harmony of dissonance in the U.S. Like, there, there is some deliberate, I feel deliberate, like, maybe not atonal qualities to it, but definitely, like, sounds that are meant to be kind of uncomfortable and to sort of put you in a weird headspace, along with, like, the color schemes they use. Like, it's, It is a like physically, visually, like the synesthetic experience of Castlevania Harmony of Dissinence is unsettling and kind of unpleasant at times. But I feel like that was by choice. It's meant to like make you aware that this is a horrible place.

You're, you know, someplace you shouldn't be. This is all wrong. Satan huked up cotton candy. Yeah. So the, when you go like down into the basements of the alternate castle and it's it's supposed to be sort of like. like hellish in one world full of lava. And then in the other world, it's like a neon. Like, it's just a horrible, like, fever dream of color blasting you in the face.

It's great. And the, the melody, what's the successor. It's sort of one of dissonances main melodies. But it's, and I apologize. Successor of fate. Successor of fate. Some of these intervals are not going to be correct. But it's the, ba, ba-da-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.

Like, there are so many, there are so many jazzy accidentals in there that are like you, if you didn't know what key you were in, you would be lost adrift in the abyss. Because it's so all over the place. That's like, that's, that puts Sondheim to shame the number of weird accidentals. in there that I think are just like, that's thoughtful composition. That is, that is, you don't do that kind of stuff. You can't do accidentals when you're programming

chip tunes. It's deliberate. I mean, it's like, that's what makes the you know, the clockwork manner theme from Super Castellania for so interesting. Because it's, it's meant to sound, like a lot of that soundtrack is meant to sound like, almost like freeform jazz, but that's not how that was constructed. It's a very

conscious, a very conscious effort to create that impression through cunning calculation. And that goes, back to Outrun. Outrun kind of was like, you know, it's got the main theme. And then they just blow for like two minutes. Yeah. Except they're not, it's not a blow. It's not, it's not like a jazz blow. It's, you know, thoughtfully, meticulously constructed and programmed. Yeah. But there is a certain, there is a certain sliver of the game composer audience that's into like fusion jazz and it's like, I'm going to do that in my video game. And it's going to be the most hellish three weeks of my life making this song work. But it's going to happen. Yeah. And everyone's going to love it. They're going to sit about it and talk about it on a podcast. Or if it's Castlevania,

they'll hate it. There's also a part, I think, I think it's in successor of fate or it might be thinking of one of the other songs I want to bring up. But there's a part where, um, there's a breakdown and you've been you've been hearing the percussion through the PSG through these noise channels and and also the the the PSG is also really good for uh, base. But there's there's one part where the the noise channel takes a back seat and then the the streaming, the GBA channel is used to then add in a sample of a drum fill. and then it goes back to giving you this noise channel.

So it's like it's using the strengths of the DMG sound chip and what the GBA has to sort of synthesize this really, really cool sound. I, it's good. That's going back to like the the breakout moments of NES audio design when people started to realize, you know what? I can use the sampling channel for something other than a guy going, yaw, yo! Yeah. It can be, I don't know who did it first, but you know, you started to hear like, say, for example, Bayou Billy's guitar strum or the really great drums in techno music. Yeah. You know, Ninja Guide in and that sort of thing.

Sunsoft is kind of infamous for taking sound channels and doing whatever the hell they want with them. Like there's this meme of Sean Michaels kind of like saying, you know, this is how you use the S&EAS sound trip. and he's like listening how it's supposed to be done. And that's the second panel of Sunsoft as Stone called Steve Awesome, giving him the finger. So, yeah. I want to, you brought up guitar strums in Bayou Billy, and I selected this tune because I think this is a series that genuinely, I think, does some of the best stuff with the bespoke GBA hardware. Boktai, that is Norahiko, Heibino, the unsung-Hung Hewana. of the Metal Gear Solid series.

Forget Harry Gregson Williams, Norahiko Hebrino is... All the good stuff in Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 was Hebino. Yes, absolutely. But because Boktai is going for this spaghetti western feel, Hebino tries to emulate this real Ennio Morricone, good, the bad and the ugly feel, that, you know, if you were just doing this on a PSG channel, it's incredibly hard to simulate a guitar chord being strummed. Because more often than not, if you're strumming a guitar, you're trying to get all of those sounds out at the same time.

If you're just strumming a chord, unless you're very deliberately opening that cord up to hear the individual components. So on older hardware, really tough to just strum a guitar and make it sound like a guitar, unless, you know, you use a guitar sample. But in the past, you would have to take those components and you'd want to arpeggiate those notes. So pull them apart, give them space, and place them in rapid succession after another to sort of kind of compress the time and make it sound like you're doing an actual musical chord. But you can't because you've only got four sound channels. And the two other ones are doing something else and the noise is just your high hat. So you've got to fit a guitar chord into one channel. And the other one is a little sunflower saying, it's going to be a great bacti day.

The other one is you saying, sunlight. But again, he just does this incredible job of if you listen to, I'm going to say, hey, toss in. Boktai 3's sealed dungeon somewhere in this episode. Because I think this is the clearest GBA example of using both the PSG and the PCM sounds, while using all of them to create really clearly defined instruments. At one point, you're hearing an electric guitar. Then all of a sudden, you're hearing like a mariachi strum, A lot of it sounds even like a steel string guitar strum.

Those really like those harder but still acoustic sounds. You've got flutes that are doing woodwind stuff. You've got these strings in the background that are very clearly strings. And then you'll hear a horn, like the shots from a horn section that is just so morricone on a GBA that it just. and then there'll be a baseline in there that sounds so much richer than it has any right to be. And it's all, oh, it's so good, you guys. It's like, I really think, and especially, you know, we had, we had GBA games coming out into the, into the DS's lifespan. Right.

And I feel like with stuff like Mega Man Battle Network, the latter Battle Network game, especially Battle Network 6 or Boktai 3. We were just hitting on a time when composers knew how to use the hardware to its actual fullest. Yeah. When did Aria of Sorrow come out? Because that is one of the best sounding GBA games. July 2003. Yeah, they were very close together.

So Circle the Moon was launched, 2001. Harmony Distance was the next year, 2002. and then ARIA was 2003. And again, you get the sense of someone's overcorrecting because they must have like, okay, well, that didn't, people didn't like that music. So let's go back to the samples. And it's too bad in part. I mean, okay, Arisaro has great music.

I'm not going to say Ariasaro has great music, period. Yeah. Semicolon, there's, the problem is because it was made for the GBA and it has these certain quality of samples, there is this perpetual hiss. So even today in the Year of Luigi 2026, if you buy an official soundtrack or stream an official soundtrack online, you're going to hear the GBA quality sample

and this big persistent hiss sound to the point that if you have to basically look for fan stuff because there's two routes. There's two routes. Number one, there's a version where they somehow compress the sound like, oh, this is what it would sound like if you were listening to it on a GV, BBA, which sort of depresses the hiss a little bit.

And there are even more heroic people who are like, okay, I just went ahead and got fresh samples and I remix them all. So now it's the same composition and the same samples, but without the hiss. And so basically this is what they wanted you to hear. And it's just kind of crazy to be like, you basically have to go on the internet and find fans for that because the official version is still this sort of... I kind of like that hiss. It gives me kind of like a nostalgic feel, like especially in the hanging garden.

Like, I love that level. It's familiar, but it's also like, I just want to hear the music. I just want to hear, I want to hear Yamane's music. This is why I like the Etrian Odyssey official soundtracks, because Yuzo Koshiro, I mean, this is going on to DS, but he composed all of those in a tracker, like a PC tracker that emulated the sound of the PC 8801. Yes. And then the DS soundtrack was. kind of like extracted from that and, you know, sample down and so forth. So the DS sound or the Entry Notacy Soundtracks for the DS games, they give you the actual DS audio, like direct audio,

but then they also give you the second disc that has Kosciro's original source files on it. And it's the same music, but it's so rich and so good. And it kills me that Konami did not do that. But I mean, whomst among us is Uso Koshiro. I mean, unless you are talking about Portrait of Ruin, in which case, yes, that is, they tapped Yuzokoshiro,

because why wouldn't you? Yuzikishiro is great because he's still out there, like, say, hey, everyone, I just made this PC-88 song for fun. Like, he just makes music for the hell of it. Sega Genesis shooter of all time. Just for the hell of it. Yeah.

I don't want to derail us, but it's because they've both come up, have to mention this. So last year for Tokyo Game Show, the 8-4 crew had a, had a big party, and they had hip-tona-kate, well, sorry, now he's Chip. They had Chip Tanaka and Yuzokoshiro on stage playing music. And so I just- Was it dueling banjos? Not the same time. Not at the same time. No, no, no, no. Was that like a Donald Duck that thing? Yeah, I was going to say, I would love that Roger Rabbit, Donald Duck versus Daffy-Duck thing. They took turns. And I just, I think back to how much, how much, how much.

much of Tanaka's set was based on music he made for the Game Boy, and how much of Koshiro's track was made for the 16-bit era, and how both of them sounded amazing in that large setting. I believe one of them, I think it was, I think Koshiro had a drummer, a live drummer with him to sort of make it more impactful. And Tanaka just had like extra computers, like, okay, we're going more electronic. But I kind of feel that was Koshiro's thing with the Etriene Odyssey soundtracks, though, is like, especially when you get to entering Odyssey 3, it's like, it's basically live drums just being sampled. Like, I don't know if that's PC88 music.

I think it might be like actual drums. There's just like a heat and clarity to it that you don't get in the other instruments. Jeremy. Totally in keeping. You play any of those seventh dragon games, Jeremy? I did. I'm sad that the original never came to the U.S. Because it was very cute.

That was good. And there was a great Tokyo game show demo where like a little chibi Rieko Kodama was like, she had a whip and she was beating up the director I totally blinked on his name. Nino, yeah, Kauzia Nino. Yeah, it was like part of the demo. She was like, play this game correctly. It was great. I think part of this, related to this. is the Mega Man Zero games and their soundtracks because those, they, they don't even bother

to release the GBA versions of those soundtracks. They make arrange soundtracks that are, that are just higher quality, higher fidelity, higher. There is a Mega Man Zero box set, vinyl box set. On route to me, as we speak, it's supposed to be arriving within the next few days. I think that is taken. I mean, it's part of the same series by Laced Records, I want to say, that are, they use source files. So I think it is going to be from the GBA. Interesting. Okay. Actually, one thing I want to bring up is Victor. I think it was you who added the Game Boy Micro, because that's something I completely forgot about, but it did bring back the headphone jack. I'm sorry. Diamond. Diamond. That was me because I actually was in Japan at that

time as a student. So I saw all the hype around it, but also I already knew that the DS was out. And I knew that the DS played Game Boy, advanced games and was going to, and played new games as well. So me, um, an idiot looked at the Game Boy Micro and I'm like, oh, I don't want this little thing. It doesn't do have the stuff that I wanted to do. I'll just, I'll just get a DS at some point, maybe. And I'm kicking myself to this day because it's such a tiny little thing. I love it. And whenever I look for it, it didn't. sell well, again, because the DS was already out. So when you look for it now, used, it's, it's like more expensive than most other Game Boys

because it didn't sell well. So there aren't that many out there. So, yeah, I was real lucky. I was working at EB games at the time. And right when they were discounting those micros, I got the, I got that Famicom anniversary micro for like $30 Canadian. No, why, God. $30 Canadian.

That's like two beers. Come on. Two premium beers. Yeah, I just find it interesting. They brought back the headphones act for that. I guess they just figured, well, may as well. If you're going to be, you know, at a bar,

playing video games, looking cool after work, do you want to enjoy the music, really soak it up? Well, with your custom faceplate. Oh, who's that guy in the corner of the bar with the custom faceplate on a game game. That's not custom.

That's his import Final Fantasy. for Yoshitaka Amano artwork. Oh. I was going to ask, okay, you've got to have that. The one with Kane and Cecil, right? Yeah. I did have that, but I sold it. Now I've just got the Famicom one.

Why would you sell that? I do have, because I had to survive. Okay. I do have the three boxes that have all the Famicom mini games in them, all 30 games. Yeah, those are cute. I do not count the existence of the 31st game because I am not, independently wealthy. That's fair.

Yeah, it was a cute little system. I considered it for a moment, but as you all have said, it was pretty much, the Game Boy advanced was pretty much on its way out, even though I did look at that Famicom one. And it was so cute. And something you said, Parrish, it gave me pause. You mentioned looking cool on the train while playing one. No, no, in the bar. In the bar.

That was a sales pitch. It's like, this is like the Metro Game Boy. Yeah. You can hang out and play it in a bar, you know, just to kill some time and it'll be cool. The salary man, Game Boy. Yeah, okay, so I can understand why they put the headphone jacks back in. So you got to hear that really cool Final Fantasy Six gargling while. It did come out around the same time as Mother 3.

So, like, if ever a Game Boy Advance game demanded headphones, it was Mother 3, which not only had phenomenal music, but also the back. battle system was based around it. So you had to listen. You did. Like Mother and Mother 2, Mother 3 is one of the very few RPGs that changes your battle music as you play. And I mean frequently. It's basically on a per enemy basis. It is. It's on a per encounter. Per enemy spawn set. I don't know how you describe it. Yeah. It's like that as well in Earthbound where certain enemies, like robotic enemies, would bring up like this really cool technology. no theme that I still love.

But I remember most about Mother 3 is the the fate song that's like has that really like just that like and you had to like tap to it was called fate. And it had it was like

paired with a monster called the carpet monster and it was like underneath the carpet and you had to learn that that was the fight I remember really learning how to use the button tapping alongside to the percussion because, yeah, that was something that you didn't necessarily have to do to be good at the game, but it definitely didn't hurt.

Some people said they didn't really like the game because, you know, they couldn't do that. There were some complaints about when the ROM first came out translated by Tomato. Tomato, yeah. There's complaints about lag at which you can't really tap along to lag, as it were. But I didn't really have a problem. It was a great game, great soundtrack. And had a really rich soundtrack, too, for a gameplay advance game. If you'd like to hear more of our thoughts on Mother 3, head to patreon.com slash bloodgod pod.

Yeah, we have a mother 3 pantheon. That was a lot of fun. That was actually Victor's first time playing Mother 3. And I'm always interested to hear from, well, I don't know how much younger you are than me, but the youths. I'd like to hear the youth's opinions on Earthdown and Mother. So let's talk a little bit about just how some of our friends. favorite S&S soundtracks or other compared to the versions on the GBA. This is just a quick overview because I think some games came out pretty good for it. Like, for example, I find that link to the past. There's not like a huge difference between the soundtracks.

Whereas, say, Final Fantasy 6, we already went over. Final Fantasy 4, I always felt like sounded pretty good on the GBA. Did you want to shout out? I'm sure you do. You want to shout out something, Victor? Do I? Why? How did Soccer Awards sound on Game Boy Advance?

It wasn't on Game Boy Advance. There are no Game Boy Advance Soccer Awards game. There's two Game Boy Color Soccer Awards games and there's a DS Soccer Awards game. No Game Boy Advance. So it really just slept in between like a very... It was the Sega Saturn of 10 homes. Yeah, yeah.

The stuff you love just skipped that generation. Yeah, I mean, the series was kind of on its outs in the mid-2000s that was it was experiencing diminishing returns. I don't think they were super interested in trying to revisit it. That's why we had Gemini Sunrise. She brought it back for us. She saved it. I, yeah. Gemini Sunrise died for our sins again. Save the series. Absolutely. That five year

late, we release of Soccero Wars 5 really saved us all. In two weeks, Don Quixote is doing a collab with Soccero Wars. Diamond. Oh, really? Don Quixote, the stores in a few

No, Servant is his hero. Yes. He's back. And this time he's teaming up with Gemini Sunrise. So long, Sancho. You know, in Soul Hackers, too, they have a Don Quixote with the serial numbers filed off called De La Mancha. How good is that? That's pretty good.

Come on. Come on. That's so nice. Incredible stuff. Character designs by the same character designer as Seventh Dragon. There we go. Tide it all. Hey, hey.

We're doing a lot of like connecting with the dots here today. I will say, because I think you added this, Victor, the Dunkin Country games, they came out to the GBA and they had, obviously, David Weiss's score is iconic, especially on the first game. Dunkin Country 3. Now, there's a really interesting case. Yeah. So this, I know we all love David Wise's compositions, but yes, obviously. They're okay. They're great.

I love D.K. D.K. Country 2 is one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. Yeah, absolutely amazing. I was just, I was just Joshin you. Okay, okay. So Nintendo was re-releasing all the Donkey Kong country games for Game Boy Advance. And Game Boy Color. Well, yes, they had done that. And then Donkey Kong land on Game Boy.

There was a whole thing. But specifically the Game Boy Advance versions. Yeah, again, they were blasting out the colors just so people could see what was going on on the screens. They were tweaking the soundtracks here and there a little bit to mixed results. So along with David Wise was Evelyn Fisher, who also composed some of the original Donkey Kong country and basically did all of the three soundtrack. If it wasn't a returning composition from Wise, then it was probably an Evelyn Fisher piece. So, for whatever reason, Donkey Kong Country 3 comes out on Game Boy Advance, and David Wise decides that, now I think publicly what was sort of said is, oh, Donkey Kong Country 3's soundtrack was just, it was too difficult to make it sound good on the GBA hardware. So instead of trying to transpose it, ah, fine, pull my, pull my leg, I'll just, I'll just, I'll just, I'll just,

I'll do a new soundtrack for it. Does a completely new score, twist my arm is what I was trying to say. Pull my leg. Twist my ankle. Twist my arm. Pull my finger. No.

So David Wise does this new score for all of Donkey Kong Country 3, which for the record, I think, is quite good. It's fun. It really, look, this game, that game is all, It's either supposed to be Scandinavian or Canadian. It's tough to tell sometimes. We claim that for Canada. I think it's supposed to be Canada.

But it's got a fun soundtrack. There's a lot of good tunes in it, good new ones. But I do think it's a bit of a bummer and feels a little weird to sort of sweep Evelyn Fisher's solo score under the rug. Yeah, I don't know. I don't have much to say about it besides. I think Evelyn Fisher deserves her flowers for her contributions to the Donkey Kong Country games. That's a weird argument to make that they couldn't get it right because that didn't stop them from the first games. Yeah.

I'm sorry, right before we recorded this, I actually, I didn't realize that Donkey Kong Country was on GBA. So I purposely went back and I did a quick, like, back and forth listening on my computer here. And I was actually kind of a little offended. Like, oh, geez, this does not sound good at all. I really, it was very poor, in my opinion. Like, the obvious, the core, the core tune is there. But for some reason, the chirpy, like, bird noises or whatever, it sounded pretty good. But, like, the instrumentation and the flow of the music just did not match, did not match it at all.

Yeah. The Game Boy Advance kind of had a problem with that. Like, it really blasted out those sound effects. Like, I used to play Star Wars, Star Do Valley Friends of Mineral Town on the Game Boy Advance. And, you know, I had it on a plus. Harvest Moon. Harvest Moon. Whatever we felt.

Harvest Moon. A Boca Joe Monogatari. Friends of Mineral Town on the Game Boy Advance. And every time you selected an option, like a yes option in that game, you had a little chicken sound. And it really blasted it out of the

speaker in a way that you did not want it to blast if you were on the public bus. It says, what are you playing? What are you doing? it's a game about farming. You're doing what to your chicken on the bus? Exactly. But the, yeah, I agree with you, Victor.

I think that Evelyn soundtrack is wonderful. I think it really fits the S-N-E-S version of the game in particular, which is a very, as you say, kind of dark and cold, like not in a bad way, just like we're no longer in the tropical jungles of wherever the hell Donkey Kong lives. Yeah, you're in the oppressive Canadian wilderness. gorillas do not belong here that kind of

kind of atmosphere too cold with bears snakes don't belong in Alaska gorillas don't belong in Toronto we do have to do

yeah so Fun Fantasy 6 I just want to bring that up again one very quickly before we move on because I feel like the lack of reverb where I really felt it in that game

on the Game Boy Advance and they tried really hard is the dark world which is, or the world of ruin, which has the song Dark World. And that song has this beautiful haunting reverb to it, especially when you hear these bells at the, further into the song. And they just kind of sound like someone took a xylophone

and just like hit it with a plastic spoon and left it for that particular part of the song. So yeah, I appreciate GBA Final Fantasy Six for really, It does some clever things to try to pay tribute to the soundtrack, but we love you, GBA. That's what we got for you. I think where Final Fantasy shines on the GBA is the original score for tactics advance. Because a lot of that is, you know, that's Hitoshi Sakimoto's, a lot of his usual evalese sound. Again, a really good use of both the PSG.

and the PCM. And, you know, when something's higher fantasy like that, like the Evalese games, you don't necessarily associate that with with a PSG sort of sound. But I think it's masked really well. This is one of those ones where it's not about being overt with the, with the PSG wave sounds, but it uses it really well. Again, a lot of stuff using the wave channel for baselines, things like that. and the Sakimoto's compositions are always good for percussion.

So I think that lends itself well to those sounds. And then a lot of the Tactics Advance soundtrack was composed by Ayako Saso and Kaori Okoshi. And they both do a really good job of replicating Sakimoto Sakimoto's style, but on a GBA. It's really, really cool. I feel like the original Tactic soundtrack is the most intense use of reverb ever heard on PlayStation. Yeah. So how did it? It's been a long time since I played Tactics Advance.

How did they capture that essence of just like, you know, here's a concert in a massive empty room? With less, less reverb. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but I think that fits the scope too, because it's the GBA, they're smaller skirmishes. Yeah, it begins with the snowball fight, so it scales accordingly. Yeah, yeah. That's actually one of Katz's favorite fights in a strategy game.

It's great. One of the best tutorials in video games, as far as I'm concerned. That's what she called it. She called it one of the best tutorials she's ever played. Although now apparently snowballs are considered terrorist implements, so. Can't do that. No way. Man, the way they were banned from my school, though, because kids found out you could put chunks of ice.

And ice is pretty easy to come by in Toronto. So, yeah, there was an announcement one day and there were no more snowballs. You could also go with shrapnel if you want, screws and razor blades. It just depends on how serious you are about your snowball fights. Yeah. They can get pretty serious. There's a lot of things. You could throw at a lot of people.

There are. Right now in this time. Let's list some. No, that's not. Final Fantasy Taxes Advance. What a game. What a game. I love those Viera. Yeah. Sonic Advance, I want to shout out. Can I show you? Please. I've never played Sonic advanced. So go ahead and shout out. No, I've never played. David has. It's got some good stuff too. This is one of those games. I don't think the GBA is suited great for, I'll say, swing for big band jazz sounds. Probably not. Probably not so much. It's tough to sound like you've got that many instruments at your disposal, but the casino stages in Sonic Advance, I think, are really good.

And what Jeremy was talking about earlier, being able to make it sound like you are improvising a solo that is meticulously programmed is a real skill. And this track has a, it's a 16 bar, I think, yeah, probably a 16 bar piano solo that replicates whatever samples they're using for these piano keys is really, really good. There's a, there's a sense of decay to them and, and a sustain, a difference in sustain that sounds way more analog than you should be allowed to have on a GBA. So I'd recommend giving that one a listen to. That is in comparison to the Game Boy Advance release of Sonic the Hedgehog, like infamously, one of the worst ports of anything ever put on anything.

Right. To the point that I remember distinctly, I played that game, which the soundtrack is completely effed. I think it plays at like half speed or something. It's just wrong. It's so bad that I went on my live journal. And I wrote, whoever port of this game needs to go to jail. And I was serious about that.

And I still am. So you're a big fan of the carceral state, I see. I will say that the quality of music or lack of quality of Sonic music in Sonic Advance was eclipsed by the ad games, one of the Sigogenesis systems they used. I did a recording of this. I posted it on my YouTube channel. It is, it's not just bad, but it like can't maintain a consistent tempo. So it like goes fast and then it slows down and then goes fast. Have you ever like been streaming Wi-Fi to your phone and run it through your car?

Yes. As you pull away from your house and you lose your Wi-Fi connection and all of a sudden it just like jumbles up and starts doing weird things. Like that's how that system emulated Sonic the Hedgehog. music and it's really wild and really upsetting. It sounded like a creepy pasta game of some kid put together. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum of the PSG sound, so I played Kingdom Hearts chain of memories on my Game Boy Advance before I owned a PS2 and could play Kingdom Hearts on that PS2. This was also before YouTube.

So when I got to the end of Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories, and during the end credits, it streams Utada Hikaru's simple and clean through the Game Boy Advance speaker. I handed myself the ox cord and plug that into my stereo. And I made a save file that was right at the end of the game. So I would do the fight with Marlusha, which also has incredible music. Speaking of, you know, the Mario and Luigi's, your chain of memories, there's some great Yokoshima Mora compositions on GBA. But doing that fight just so I could then have simple and clean play through my Game Boy advance into my stereo so I could listen to it was of a time.

Yokoshima Mora could make anything sound great. I saw Distant Worlds a couple of weeks ago, and they did, I can't remember the name of the song that she did for that game. the waltz, but it was pretty damn good. A lot of waltzes. Shimon Mora's done a lot of waltzes. Loves a three-four-time signature that lady. Anything else that we want to say.

I see here, Victor, you wrote like a really nice summary of what makes the Game Boy Advance sound ship and sound capabilities in general so unique and so cool. Did you want to just kind of give us your lesson? Yeah, why not? I mentioned sort of at the beginning that this was kind of the last major console where with the PSG sound being really, it's the hardware. You are interacting with the hardware directly to make it make sounds as opposed to the PCM streaming of audio, which is sort of just where audio went from there.

The DS, I mean, it was already, you, home consoles, you certainly weren't limited anymore to a bespoke sound chip. But this was really the last console where you had to work on a hardware level. Right. And that's the case with the sound. And that is a case, that's the case with the assembly language you were using to make games on a Game Boy Advance. You know, there was no unity for Game Boy Advance. This was before middleware. This was not before middleware, but you know what I mean.

Yeah, yeah. So I see the Game Boy Advance and there's a really great Canadian writer who wrote a wonderful book about the Game Boy Advance. I've brought it up on Blood God before, but Who Are You by Alex Custodio is a really fantastic look at the Game Boy Advance. on a hardware level. And it's what makes the graphics unique. It's what makes the sound unique. It really is the last bastion of needing to work with the actual architecture and understand the hardware thoroughly to make.

Yeah. You've got to do the math. You've got to do your homework. If you want to make something for a GBA, you got to know how to make something for a GBA. I think there's something really cool about that. And as someone who has a dad who is a car guy and is very much a, I don't want to work on a car with computers in it, computers are boring. I want to work on a car that is made of car parts. GBA feels like the last thing that was made of video game parts, you know, before everything just became a computer.

And yes, did the arm architecture of the GBA sort of lead to that? Absolutely. But it's something, there's a, there's a tactility to the GBA that I don't think anything else had after it. You're right. Can I ask a question? Definitely a unique piece of hardware. Of course you may. Is it a hot take to say that the Metroid games on GBA sound great?

I don't think so. I think they sound amazing. I think Fusion has a great soundtrack, especially against the nightmare. By all means, if someone out there, or maybe Victor, if you want to tell me why this is, my theory, my theory is that because Metroid's, the both games, of course, have a very electronic sound. And so it's like, sure, if it's, so it literally is beeps and boops. So yeah, go ahead. Yeah. And that, that hiss is the space station air ducts. Ah, there it is. It's all diogenic. Yes. Yeah. Samis's pneumatics.

Yeah. Honestly, Game Boy, sorry, the. The, uh, Samus has, uh, return of Samus for the Game Boy has a really great sound to it. Like, as you get deeper and deeper, you get less music and more ambient crickles and crackles and strange little sounds. I, I love it. And I think that the Game Boy advanced games do kind of carry that tradition on to a certain extent. Although I must say, they recently added, uh, Metroid 2 Return of Samis to the Nintendo music app. And, uh, yeah, exactly. People like. We're like shopping together, like, pictures of people dancing to the weird B-Foops. And it's like, yeah, yeah, that's, you know.

The caption was Nintendo fans from the worst music in your ever heard. Pleasant's the day floor. Yeah. It's good. It's just not what I would dance to. Well, I think this is the end of retronauts now because when Nadia finally came back around to talking about Metroid 2, that's where we started. now it comes full circle. Oh, whoa. How about that?

My lasting memory of the very first episode of Retronauts is you saying that Metroid 2 looked like cabbage. Was that the very first episode of Retro Notts? That was episode zero, actually. God, was that the one Jen Frank? I think she was on that. That is crazy, man. There you go, people. I had no idea I was on the first episode.

Well, it's been a great 20-year ride, everyone. Thanks for listening. We're happy I could be here. I think we all know where this is going the planet explodes but I'm in the little pixel that flies away in the distance save the animals man

save the animals I Jeremy Ettacoon parish I think I think if you're the kind of person who hasn't cared for GBA sounds in the past try checking out some higher resolution

versions of that music. You know, listen. If you can get a GBA soundtrack on vinyl, I think that is genuinely a really, it's novel, but it also reveals some stuff about it. The GBA being a combination of digital and analog in the first place makes, makes listening to it in an analog format kind of fun. It would be, yeah. And like I say, the Castlevania GBA trilogy sounds. sounds great. There's, I think it was a ship to shore thing. So RIP, but the Mega Man Battle Network's one, two, and three. Those soundtracks are all on vinyl as well. Yeah, I'm sad they didn't get four, five, and six out. I was just thinking that.

It's incredible. I would do, look, Battle Network four, five, and six and the Boktai trilogy on vinyl. Jeremy, it's a limited run has a good relationship with Konami, don't you? Last I heard. So the rumor goes I mean we just you know we just announced that Marvel collection yesterday and you don't get you don't get X-Men the arcade without Konami saying like ah you guys are okay you're good you're good you're fine that's Marvel maybe maybe let's see if we can get some Boktai on vinyl um but yeah I think or um so games like uh golden sun um motoy Sakuraba yeah everything he's ever done sounds the same and also because it was all using the Roland SC88. He uses the same sound samples for 30 some odd years across his career.

I mean, the Roland hangs in there, those samples. Like, those are classic. Yeah, yeah. It's fantastic. But you can find, again, people who have taken those samples and remade or remastered a lot of those compositions in a cleaner format. So, like, give it a listen because the compositions are not the problem. And I would say even the sound quality is sometimes a feature more so than a bug.

I agree. I agree. I think it gives a little touch of personality, a little touch of fairy dust. A little touch of fairy dust. Yeah. Is the fairy dust cocaine, that's that sound you made sounded a little deviated septum to me. Yeah. No, I've got enough nasal problems.

Geez, he kidding me? I'm not saying you. I'm just saying like maybe the ferry. Oh, all fairies. You've heard of the green fairy absent. Now there's the white fairy, which is Game Boy Advance Music Cocaine. All fairies are on Game Boy, Advanced Music, Cocaine. It's part of Irish literature and lore.

How did we get here to cocaine? I don't know. We should probably end this. It's a Nadia podcast. I mean, it really is. That is it in that case for this low-rate sample. I don't know. I feel like we didn't give enough love to... Sorry, I just have to push back. We didn't give enough love to Rhythm Tengoku. Yeah.

Like, we mentioned it. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's fair. Holy God Almighty, that soundtrack coming out of that system is crazy. I mean, I'm sure that's all, you know, sampled, like just streaming music. But it's all these game events. And each game event is based around music. and each event has its own musical theme, and it's not like a 30-second loop. It's like a three-minute song. There's tempo changes, rhythm changes. There's all kinds of different styles of music, and the gameplay is syncopated to the music.

It ties directly to the rhythm and to other elements of the music. And it's an absolute technical marvel. Like, it is peak Game Boy Advance. It is the pinnacle of what that system existed for. I know Mother of Three fans, you're out there. I don't care. Rhythm Tengoku is like, it kills me that they did not localize that. I mean, I would have loved for them to have localized Mother Three also, but Rhythm Tengoku,

there's just something lost in the subsequent releases of it. There was just something special about getting that experience. on that system. It should not have been possible. And it was there. I wonder if the sound hardware being so closely tied to CPU cycles made that it was like the the spark for that game. Like, oh, if we, you know, like if they are so closely tied together, what if we did something that was about the sound and the gameplay working in so tight conjunction, where millions, like hundreds of a second are so important to how that game plays. Maybe, but that game is an evolution of the Wario games.

You have a Wario Land 4, and again, I'm not allowed to talk about this anymore on Repronaut because like Super Castlevania 4, I've just flogged that topic to death, that soundtrack topic. But, you know, Warrior Land 4 had a lot of really interesting audio choices. Yeah. The CD room where you're like, oh, I'm going to get to listen to the soundtrack. No. No, you put on those CDs and it's like it's YouTube poop basically, like 20 years early. It's just the most bizarre non-sequitur noises and images mashed up together.

It's so unsatisfying and I love it. Good Lord. It's all toilet sounds. But the music is great throughout that game. And, you know, I have to stop talking about the tropical island music, palm tree paradise, that distorts based on, like, the effects that are applied to Wario. There's, like, all the, all the themes do that. All the, all the sages, you know, when Wario is inflated with a bee sting, it changes. When he gets crushed into a little spring, it starts to rewry, rewai.

And like distort. But the thing about Palm Tree Paradise is that it's not just game music. It's a vocal track with a woman singing. And it does all those things. It like plays silly putty with the audio sampling. And like that lady's singing, you know, she's singing on about probably how beautiful the sky is or whatever. And it's like, yeah, it's like someone's messing around with a reel to reel or something. something. And there, you know, this was like, along with Circle the Moon, one of those early

Game Boy Advance releases that just calibrated my expectations for music and audio on that system to be unparalleled. But no, it was like, people got really greedy with this technology and were like, I'm going to do something amazing. And then it didn't really get followed up that much, except Wario kind of did because you had the Wario Ware games. Yeah, I was going to do all kinds of weird things with audio. And those like spun out of the little mini-game. that you could get in Wario Land 4, like baseball and stuff. They were like barely, they were barely games. They were just like these dumb little things you could do.

But, you know, you could get extra lives and stuff, extra abilities, you know, to power up for the boss fights. But they took that and turned it into the entire Wario Ware series, which is microevents. But again, like, there's a lot of tempo changes and distortions and stuff based on your performance within the games. and the music tends to be very, even if it's not syncopated with the action, it's very sympathetic to the action. It just feels like the action is built around those soundtracks. So the next generation of that is, I think, Rhythm Tengoku, where it's just like no more Wario, only music. And it's great. Yeah.

No, I was, yeah, you made me think of, I think Mona Pizza is in Twisted, Warrior Were Twisted. and that one gets distorted too. Same with I think, what are the names? The dogs Spits and Dribble and Spits. They also have a vocal song. Like, yeah, and they do some really weird stuff. Or I know it's... Or maybe there was one in Twisted.

Isn't there one in Twisted where one of the toys is you put a record on a turntable and then you turn the GBA to move it? Or am I thinking of Touched where you drag? That sounds more like a twisted thing. but it's been a long time since I've played either. Yeah. We need more Mario Ware is what we're saying. That's the point of the show.

Also, just coincidentally, we talked about them right back to back, but WarioLand 4, one of the first Game Boy Advance Games, and Rhythm 2 was one of the last Game Boy Advance Games. Really? Not the last, I know, but like Nadia talking about Metroid 2. It's bookends for an entire saga. This is fate. Does anybody have anything else they want to say about the beautiful, beautiful Game Boy advances, beautiful sound capabilities? No, I've interrupted enough.

Nah, you're great. You're all great. I love you all. This has been a really fun discussion. Had a great time. I learned a lot because I knew immediately like, oh, wait a minute, this is probably a good topic for Victor. And Victor agreed. And then I brought in Paris. and I brought in Diamond, and we had a great time. And that is it for this low sample version of Retronauts. I hope you, like me, have learned a lot about the GBA soundtrack and maybe appreciate it a little bit more. If you enjoyed this podcast, please visit our Patreon at patreon at patreon.

Patreon.com for slash Retronauts and throw money at us. $3 a month gets to you these episodes a week early and ad-free. $5 a month gets you two extra full-length episodes a month, as well as Discord access and those Monday episodes. And if you join at the Nintendo Ultra 64 level, you would get a chance to set the topic of retronauts once every six months. You get it the other stuff, too, so don't worry about that. Holy moly, what a steal.

There's only one slot left in that category, so grab it up before your hated enemy does. Until next time, though, close the clamshell as hard as you want. We're going to keep playing our tune.