It's finally finished! Hyrule Warriors is a hack-and-slack game developed by Omega Force and Team Ninja, featuring characters from the Zelda franchise. It was released for the Wii U in August of 2014 and the heavy hitting soundtrack is composed by both Masato Koike & Yuki Matsumura. A fair amount of the tracks are re-arranged versions of classic Zelda tunes such as Hyrule Field or The Legend of Zelda Theme, which certainly sound great but the original songs are some of the best rock songs I've heard in a game—Eclipse of the World being my favorite so far. I'm glad I got around to doing this because, for quite a while now, it's been the most requested soundtrack for us to upload and I always feel bad when it takes a while to get these uploaded but there's only so much free time in a week... I always want to make sure each upload goes through the proper motions of converting, editing, tagging and double checking the files to make sure we didn't overlook any tracks.
This project was very different from our previous uploads because a majority of the tracks have multiple channels and depending on the occurring event some channels are muted while others play; such as Pause and Focus Spirit. Typically the way it's structured is the first two channels are Percussion, 3-4 are Bass Guitar, 5-6 are Brass, 7-8 are Electric Guitar, and the remaining two are either just Cymbals or additional Drums for Focus Spirit. You can mix and match the channels any which way to want, resulting in tracks unheard during gameplay but some of them can be heard at the music gallery in the options menu once you've unlocked a certain track; you can also change the channels there by using the shoulder buttons.
Overall, we came away with 99 tracks. More than I originally mentioned because I ended up adding a few more variations to the album other than just the normal, pause and focus spirit version, for example: Solidus Cave(Techno), Silent Guardians (Rock) or Eclipse of the World (Focus Spirit Ver. 2). Those are the ones I've played around with that sound quite good, so I had to add them. I didn't want to add every channel because the album than becomes less of a soundtrack and more of a channel sampler. Our goal is always to make our uploads as professional as possible and I hope that's shown with our previous uploads. I could have added even more but I didn't want tracks that sounded almost the same as others with just one extra instrument. I labeled each track according to the in-game Gallery Music Player description with the only difference being instead of the games abbreviations(TP, OT, SS) I think it looks better to have the complete titles(Twilight Princess, Ocarina of Time, Skyward Sword). So I changed that.
I really wish someday Nintendo will realize how many people want to listen to the great music they've composed over the years and set up an online store or at least release the albums on iTunes so it's not so difficult to obtain but until that day, you can enjoy the Hyrule Warriors Soundtrack in both FLAC(which is a two part download) and MP3. Enjoy!
