Inside The Score - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Inside Ganon's Castle

An imminent threat

The last chapter in the creepy ambient atmospheric trilogy brought to you by the creative minds behind Dodongo’s Cavern and the Shadow Temple. And like all third entries, it has to be more frantic, intense and over the top than the previous installments but still using most of the same cast with a few additional members (the meal grind died in the original, the female choirs left midway production, the harpsichord was recast as a piano and so on). Musically it is just a bit above Dodongo’s Cavern but below the Shadow Temple on the Sound effect/Music spectrum.

Now that all Triforce pieces are all on the same place, the final portion of the game truly begins in full with a test of all the abilities acquired throughout the adventure; this is Zelda at its most video gamey, with the castle transformed in a mini hub world with multiple rooms full of puzzles. Actually, this was how Ocarina of Time was initially conceived following the blueprint of Super Mario 64 long before the developers knew how expansive they could make the world; gladly for all of us, this idea was scrapped in favor of a more cohesive experience that makes Hyrule feel like a real place out there with its locations connected in a logical way. Each of the adult dungeons encountered is represented here with a room in which Link will either have to solve puzzles or battle enemies in order to open the barrier protecting the central tower. It is a little reprise of your adventure before capping it all.

Musical Analysis

Structure: Section 0 / Section 1

Time Signature: 4/4

Tempo: 100 Melodic and

Harmonic Profiles: B Diminished; B Octatonic; Atonal

As stated, the track is one of the successors to the ideas introduced by Dodongos’s Cavern, building upon them; it is an ambient cue made of different metallic sounds distorted and altered to create a murky atmosphere full of apprehension. The main difference this time is that on Inside Ganon’s Castle we hear a piano featured playing some intervals alongside some deep male choirs.

A piano played on its very low register has always come with the connotation of danger and threat in media; it seems that the timbre of the instrument naturally gains some harmonics that make it sound with a buzz-like quality. Here, Kondo drenches the piano in reverb and creates a delay effect with a second piano panned to the other side, accentuating the characteristics of the instrument’s low end and the hollow setting of the central room. It plays different intervals throughout the piece without any rhythmic framework, trying to disguise itself as a sound effect, sleeping in the basement waiting to be awakened the moment this fortress starts to crumble. The unnatural sounding choir rumbles on the background with chromatic lines.

The sound effects originally from Dodongos’s Cavern are used in a more frantic way, combining and repeating them to generate new sonorities. Here you can hear the solo stem for the sound effects used in the music, all played at different pitches and speeds:

Truly a work worthy of a modern art degree

In general the music emphasizes a low register, this creates a murky sound field without any discernible melody. After all, the main protagonist of the soundscape in this region is the breathing, alien sound of the force field surrounding the central tower. This is the sound that will accompany the player throughout this mission and Koji Kondo certainly took this facet of the sound design into account as to not step and clash with it; the barrier makes a rising and falling glissando sound that is higher than the music.

A fluctuating track full of ambiguity and latent danger. Inside Ganon’s Castle is the last ambient theme heard in the game.

Ultimately, Link manages to dispel the protective barrier to the tower. Deep from within the staircase the sounds of an organ catch the ears of our hero in one of this musical game’s most unexpected and effective deployments of diegetic music.