Inside The Score - The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Lost Woods / Forest of Mystery

Mystic mist

The last of the big three medieval fantasy inspired games on the SNES is of course The Legend of Zelda. And even though it is classified as an action-adventure game it still has a huge debt to the RPG genre. At the end of the day you go and explore towns, fields, dungeons and of course enchanted forests. You just don’t kill the enemies and bosses with a menu.

The iconic woods present from the very first Zelda whose common thread is their labyrinthine layout, where you may or may not need to solve a puzzle in order to not get lost, receive their own cue for the first time. The original Lost Woods theme that was superseded by Saria’s Song for most of the series. They still share some DNA as this one was the parent cue even if the famous one conveyed the quirky troupe of forest children musicians playing with their instruments and this one the pure mystery as if the fog of the woods took on sonic form.

Of course this trope of possibly getting lost in a forest didn’t begin with Zelda since it is a common occurrence in real life and thus legends and stories about the kind of cursed and supernatural situations that can occur in unknown nature arise naturally; as they say, you can’t grow two trees next to each other without some wizard or demon coming along and enchanting them. The version of A Link to the Past is just a labyrinth full of bandits, the only magic involved concerns the strange mist used to protect the sacred Master Sword which debuted here imitating Excalibur. And the sacred groove is a common place where the sword is located in the games. However this one is particular in that it has lots of counterfeit legendary swords. Since there is no Navi here the text that appears when you pick one up is presumably one of the first instances in which the silent protagonist speaks. This forest also introduced the tunnels made of huge tree trunks found all across the series.

Musical Analysis

The primitive sound of the Super Nintendo strings, which somehow capture the thick foggy ambience, are deployed in similar fashion to the opening of the game. They are played in a staccato way as if an echo is pouring through the forest. They are heard in an unsymmetrical way that adds realism to the performance due to the note lengths between voices not being equal. Like on Saria’s Song there is some tension created due to the tritone interval of the F and B notes even though the supposedly happy C Ionian/Major is the parent profile. However this one even has the more mystifying and ambiguous modal mixture between the C Ionian/Major and C Aeolina/Minor by using the Ab and Bb notes. Resulting in the feeling of an Aeolian Dominant profile which has that hybrid major/minor sound because of the major tetrachord as the head and the Phrygian tetrachord as the tail. Not having a proper key being the obvious choice for a place where ambiguity is the name of the game.

This one is also the roots of the Forest Temple theme from Ocarina of Time which also opened with a harmony progression based around E to F; so the composer certainly favors this progression for his forests ambiences. This Forest of Mystery as the track is officially called opens with an E to F(b5) sound that immediately sounds uncanny thanks to that aforementioned tension caused by F and B which formed the basis for Saria’s Song. The original cue is also so much shorter in comparison but in its short run it also manages to encapsulate everything about the environment.

After this quick intro where the flutes just played a little major second interval decoration based around the B note, we are treated with a simple descending melody with just the white keys of the piano; it opens with the interval of B to F, the emphasis on the B note a curious choice for a piece supposedly based around C since it is its major seventh interval. The harmony progression then gets lost by following the circle of fifths counter-clock wise traveling through G – C – F – Bb. We then reach the strangest sounding Mario cadence ever by finishing with Abmaj7 – Bb and ending on C. Is it really the tonic? Sure, you can say that. But the ambiguity is mostly created with the loop going back and starting with that bizarre E major chord, the same chord that ends Saria’s Song; those Zelda forests really need that E to F movement. The other uncanny thing about it is the melody by itself sounding so happy by just traversing the standard Ionian profile while the accompaniment employs the Ab and Bb notes.

A piece as enchanted as the forest and where no children of the forest or cute Kodama spirits live. Just the good ol’ site where the fairy folk can potentially trick you and with enough menace to be more frightening; like the Forest Temple it is the definition of eerie calmness. You may truly never escape from here until the non-diegetic track makes you as mad as the thieves here.