ZREO Tribute Week ~ Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Original Art by X-Cross. Check out his art today.

This past week the group behind Zelda Re-Orchestrated announced that after nearly nine years of performing together that the group was disbanding. To celebrate their near decade of great music, I will be doing a tribute to ZREO this week.

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Today: A Link to the Past Review

Tuesday: Crowning Music of Awesome

Wednesday: Beyond Audiodome

Thursday: Twilight Symphony

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Starting off the tribute week this week, I decided to take a listen to ZREO's first official album, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Going in I was hopeful but as the music began playing, that hope had turned to cautious optimism. The album is good, but when I compare it to their later works like Wind Waker, it is decent at best. When the album first came out years ago, it would have been great, but when you compare it to one of their more recent works like Majora's Mask or Wind Waker, it just pales in comparison.

That's not to say it is a bad album. For the time it is a good soundtrack, but when you compare it to its more recent work, it feels old and rough.

The best track on this album in my opinion would have to be The Dark World remake. While the original was pretty good, I enjoy what the ZREO team did with this track. They turned the original from a somewhat militaristic theme into one of adventure. You have already traversed the light world but now you are in a strange new world where Ganon and his army rules with an iron fist.

What makes this theme great is that it invokes the feeling of mystery and adventure. With this version of the song, one can imagine Link standing atop the Pyramid of Power overlooking the land or traversing through the Misery Mire. Yes the track takes away the military feeling, but it instills a feeling of adventure and courage. I actually prefer this version of the song to the original, because when I listen to it, I visualize the world of Link to the Past as done in the art from the original Nintendo Power Players Guide to the game. It could just be the nostalgia, but whenever I visualized Link to the Past, it always came back to the art from the Nintendo Power Guide.

So how does the album hold up? It's decent, but it's certainly rough around the edges. A couple of classic song's such as Hidden Mountain and Forest (aka Dark World Death Mountain) and Ganon's Final Battle theme are missing which kind of takes away from the album. It's still a good album, but I find the absence of those two tracks to take away from the overall experience.

Overall, the team did fine with A Link to the Past and if you start your ZREO experience with this album and then move onward, you can definitely see how far the team has progressed over the years. I just wish I could have heard the groups version of Hidden Mountain and Forest or Final Battle versus Ganon. Download the album from their website now before it is too late.

This is Daimo Mac and I am lost in the music.