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Inside The Score – Super Mario All-Stars – Bowser Final Battle (SMB)

Last show down

The companion piece to the previous track in which composer Soyo Oko goes beyond the call of duty to musicalize the final battle of the original game even if it is not that much different from the other encounters with king Koopa (which technically are minions disguised as Bowser). It is kind of an hybrid between rearrangement and new piece since it uses many of the techniques and instrumentation of the previous one but it is indeed a brand new composition. Also so short as a loop that the more experienced player wont even get to listen in full before crossing the bridge and plunging the dragon turtle to his pool.

Musical Analysis

Since this is the real deal, the king Koopa himself, the piece is allowed to get more sophisticated and less diabolical. As we have said over here, the tritone is more for mindless or huge diabolical beasts. The perfect fourths, which are the focus of this piece, are for the kind of more sophisticated villains that would be the main bad behind it all. You can get away with just stacked fourths played in parallel motion and you will get a final boss battle or a dread RPG intro since the fourths tend to be more sinister than purely evil.

Beyond that, this one is also a bit longer since it is expected that you will struggle more, going beyond the vamp between two chords to add a Section 2 where the harmony goes somewhere else. Section 1 is still the vamp between parallel chords but they are not the Phrygian semitone one, rather just an A4 to F4. The electric distorted guitars remain on the main cue also playing fourth intervals. And Section 2 is pretty much a series of chords made of stacked fourths; they technically must have some weird name like suspended something but the important part is that they are just made of fourths.

Another feature is the intro, which is straight from a Mario Kart game—unsurprisingly since it was made by the original Mario Kart composer—due to its particular use of extended harmony which is not often used with real distorted guitars since overdrive tends to muddy chords beyond perfect intervals due to the amount of harmonics that the distortion effect amplifies. With video game music they are parallel maj7/9 chords made of 5 notes that are transposed across the keyboard; use them whenever you want to make a Mario Kart track intro.

The drums and bongoes from the other one remain with the same patterns and here you can hear the difference between the two snare drums used on the score since the standard, non compressed one is used for the intro. For some reason this one does not use the trombone sample as the main instrument but opts instead for the synthetic sounding brass.

Time to receive the smooch of victory that every hero needs at the end of their dangerous quest.

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