What's This Icky, Paint-Like Goop? A Deep Dive

 

Not that kind.

Nintendo really loves goop.

Good old-fashioned goop, the kind that covers virtual landscapes in neon mess. Goop as gameplay is an arguably niche but time-worn mechanic at this point (Portal 2’s gel puzzles, or better yet, de Blob, innovating further by letting you be the goop) but I suspect Nintendo was largely responsible for pioneering the trend with Super Mario Sunshine.

 

Sunshine’s development didn’t begin, as some believe, as an extension of Super Mario 128, the sequel-that-wasn’t-a-sequel to Super Mario 64. The experiments of 128 seeded the physics approach to Super Mario Galaxy’s planetoid gravity and the herding mechanics of Pikmin (among other things), but the title that became Sunshine was going in quite a different direction under first-time lead developer Yoshiaki Koizumi. Koizumi wanted to make a game about spraying a water gun; apparently this was inspired by the trigger-like haptic feedback of the GameCube’s controller.

 

The entire game was born out of this germ of an idea, a solution without a problem. Why would Mario need a water gun? To clean up graffiti, of course. What kind of environment would contain lots of natural water as a design element? A tropical island. And so on. In Koizumi’s own words, as recorded and translated by Nintendo during a 2002 interview:

 

When I submitted the basic proposal for the game to Mr. Miyamoto, I had already come up with the water-pistol idea. I tried to explain how the analog stick could make players feel the touch of a water pistol. Letting Mario have a water pistol alone wouldn't make the game fun. I started thinking about the best way to feature the water pistol, how Mario should move and show the water pistol. I liked the basic play control style of Super Mario 64 and thought that it should be applied to the new game. I tried to imagine what Mario would be like on the Nintendo GameCube, and, from the very beginning, I let him have a water pistol. This is where I started. […]

 

I asked myself what Mario should aim at with the water pistol. Opponents? A wall? Around that time, we decided to include the Wall Jump move, so we wanted to create a number of tall buildings that Mario could jump around. So, why would Mario have to move around a town with many walls? Maybe he had to clean up the town with the water pistol. I thought of the idea of painting all over the town with mud. The idea of leaving Mario's footprint on the dirt followed this original idea. In the end, I thought we could reproduce the feeling of childhood play. [...]

 

The water pistol game play reminded me of summer and then I came to think about a tropical island. Isn't it great to play with water on a hot island?

 

And so Super Mario Sunshine was created, with all of its idiosyncrasies, and deep goop gameplay entered the mainstream.

 

The Science of Goop

 

Any scientific inquiry first starts with careful observation.

Goop as a programmed mechanic is probably not very well understood by a lot of people who aren’t programmers. I’m not a programmer, either, but I’ve managed to come to a basic understanding of the way that goop actually works within the game’s engine, thanks primarily to this video by Angry_Max and this excellent page on the Super Mario Sunshine wiki.

 

Goop burbles up from the depths of the code via some clever modeling and mapping which cuts down on processing power and is essentially composed of four parts working together. First, let's look at the visual side. Each environment in Sunshine includes a 3D model of surfaces on which goop can possibly appear as a visual effect. This, in combination with a texture file, provides only for the appearance of goop; goop as a gameplay element can still exist outside of this visual model. Think of it like a two-layer Photoshop document in which the one on top has designs or patterns erased into it, allowing the colors of the layer below to appear. The unseen parts of the bottom layer still exist but are hidden from view. This pollution model and the goop texture are two of the four ingredients that go into the production of goop.

An unused 3D pollution map which determines on what surfaces goop can appear. From The Cutting Room Floor.

Next, the areas in which goop -- the interactive gameplay element -- actually will be placed are determined through a binary-color bitmap, a simple 2D shape or pattern which assigns either white or black to a pixel (representing goop or nothing). This is the third part, which is then assembled with the 3D pollution model to produce goop as an interactive object in the environment. Since this entails an transfer of a 2D design onto a 3D object, there is additional "YMAP" code which assigns height to goop placement (and also handles other characteristics such as goop type), and is the last element needed to produce the goop.

 

The bitmap informs the visual code where to place its texture, but it should be noted that if the pollution model is misaligned with YMAP data, it is possible for goop to physically exist on a separate plane from where it visually appears. 

 

This is only part of the goop gameplay, however. The spread of goop is modifiable, both by Mario and other entities, which can either add goop to the environment or erase it with water. The water of the ocean, fountains, etc. of Sunshine is simply a 2D plane which triggers gameplay changes when a point on Mario’s model intersects with it. Water that comes out of FLUDD is a different object. When projectile water intersects with goop, it acts as an eraser, decreasing an internal goop statistic until it passes a certain threshold and vanishes. Juice from Yoshi is similarly handled but does not have all of the same mechanics as water.

 

To manage this functionality, the goop bitmap stored in the game's level is continuously updated in real time, changing areas from white to black or vice versa based on the movements of Mario, enemies, and projectile liquids.

 

Mario can interact with projectile water, which can linger on the ground momentarily before drying up; wetting the ground to perform a belly slide is an obvious example. I'm not entirely sure how this is handled by the game's code, but "wet surface" data may not be stored in the same way goop is since it is always temporary. In an interesting combination of static water and projectile water, Mario’s emergence from a body of water will cause water projectiles to fly off of him. This is not merely a visual effect, as it was in Super Mario 64; the water that drips off of Mario has gameplay effects. This can be used, for instance, to slowly clear a pathway to the mayor in the third level of Pianta Village via repeatedly emerging from a spring near the center of town.

 

It should also be noted that there are a number of things in the game that are, mechanically, goop in name only; things like the M graffiti and portals, the warp pipes and orange juice-soluble goop, and so on. These are merely individual objects and are not handled the same way internally. At least, I don’t think. I’m no goop expert.

 

Goop Through The Years

If there is an earlier 3D game which allowed such a dynamic goop mechanic – by which I mean the ability to “coat” or alter a 2D surface’s properties with great freedom – I haven’t found it. Probably the mechanic has its roots in drawing or painting mechanics which semi-permanently alter an in-game texture, but I am not knowledgeable enough to know when this made the jump to 3D environments if indeed there is a predecessor to Sunshine. Given comments made by Miyamoto in the same 2002 interview, it seems quite unlikely that the technical capability to produce the mechanic was even a possibility prior to the GameCube console generation:

[W]e experimented with watering and graffiti drawing and erasing, among other things. In video games, it is not a simple task to draw graffiti and have it remain there. When you remove a treasure from a treasure box, you shouldn't find the stuff in the box afterward. It's not as easy as it seems. Painting and maintaining a screen-full of graffiti is very difficult in a video game. It can be accomplished only with the GCN. Some PCs can do it, but not at such a fast speed. That is an example of one of our basic experiments.

Post-Sunshine, though, there have been plenty of games which adopt the same basic idea. As mentioned earlier, de Blob (Blue Tongue Entertainment, 2008) picks up the idea of changing the texture of the environment and runs with it. Instead of erasing pre-programmed color, however, you spread color around the world. Epic Mickey (Junction Point Studios, 2010) is another game in this vein and incorporates both a painting and erasing functionality into gameplay.

 

The true non-Nintendo heir to the goop throne, however, is the Portal series. There’s a case to be made for the portal mechanic of the first game (Valve, 2007) is a “goop mechanic” in all but name; the player is modifying the appearance and physical properties of a 2D surface within a 3D environment in real time. Of course, the portal is not customizable, only its placement is. But Portal 2 (Valve, 2011) unarguably acts as a spiritual successor to Sunshine with its various gel puzzles.

 

Blue gel bounces objects off of its surface, orange gel dramatically increases acceleration when traversed, and white gel acts as a portal-able surface wherever it's placed. Of course, water can wash any of them away.

 

Inspired by elements from a previous game, Tag: The Power of Paint (notice a theme here?), the Portal 2 team hired its developers and went to town. Three gel types exist, each with their own properties. In comparison with Sunshine’s various goops, which largely just modify the form of deterrence they present (i.e. electric goop shocks Mario in place, while molten goop bounces him uncontrollably around), Portal 2’s gels actually have major gameplay integration. Sunshine keeps goop strictly as a platforming element, while Portal 2 opens up puzzle possibilities.

 

Portal is also notable in this vein for being one of those games in which the central mechanic determines the entirety of the rest of its design – a very Nintendo-like philosophy. Simplifying the 3D environment in order to allow limited places for the player to modify surfaces required a story narrative of a testing facility, which demanded an all-seeing presence explaining gameplay and delivering exposition, which produced an obvious source of narrative conflict, and so on.

 

Nintendo, for its part, has returned to the well of goop plenty of times on their own. Bowser Jr.’s turn as goop-loving villain feeds into the goop-drenched landscape of Bowser’s Fury, though there’s not a pure “goop mechanic” in the vein of Sunshine. Similarly, Paper Mario: Color Splash promises a de Blob-like ability to color the environment, but this does not allow for the kind of semi-permanent change to surfaces that Sunshine does. Splatoon, however, innovates on the concept by branching into another genre and using the mechanic to create a highly dynamic third-person shooter environment which allows stealth via player-spawned goop. Developer Hisashi Nogami has stated that Sunshine didn’t factor into the concept creation for the game, instead starting off with a piece of tofu which shot ink and could fight “turf wars” with other tofu, winning based on total surface area covered.

 

Again, the design of the game springs forward from goop. Once the developers realized that squids, and not living tofu, are a much more obvious choice for “thing that produces ink,” the post-mammal setting followed; the turf-war action seemed like a mildly edgy juvenile activity, so the game’s aesthetic became youth-in-the-city; and so on. If you choose goop as a mechanic, the rest of the game flows – or maybe oozes – from there.

 

What's interesting about goop in the long history of videogame innovation is that it represents an early form of 3D environment modification. Hardware limitations prevented fully 3D environments from being granular enough to alter, shape, or destroy to the level of detail offered by Sunshine's 2D goop, but as the 2000s wore on, this became more of a possibility. The biggest "modifiable environment" of all time is, of course, Minecraft, building on 3D trends that had been progressing for years. Nintendo began experimenting with highly granular environmental destruction in games like Super Mario Odyssey (the cheese material in the Luncheon Kingdom) and fully committed itself to this idea in Donkey Kong Bananza.

 

So here's to goop, primordial substance from which dozens of interesting gameplay elements have emerged. May we continue to have the opportunity to gawk at icky, paint-like substances for years to come.

 

SPIRIT: Isn't it interesting that when you wield goop as a good guy, the game is all about returning color to a lifeless world and when you're a bad guy, it becomes all about cleaning up other people's eyesores?

The Only Good 1-2 Underground Theme Remix

Gritzy Caves background, courtesy Spriters Resource.

Controversial opinion: the classic Mario underground theme kinda sucks. It's fine, I guess, for an 11-second melody. But having endured hours of bland or unremarkable remixes (Paper Mario, the NSMB games, and so many more just use it as a default), I can honestly say I'm sick of it and I wouldn't be too bummed if I never heard it again.

Except for one remix. Yes, it took the immensely talented Yoko Shimomura for the track to become truly enjoyable, and even she had to take a few runs at it first. I'm not talking about her milquetoast rendition of the tune for Super Mario RPG (though the Axem Rangers theme is fun), or her nearly identical sophomore take on it in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. No, I'm making this post to shine a spotlight on the version heard in Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time:

 

The instrumental texture and contrast is fantastic. The weird, off-beat dunka-dunka-dunka bassy-bitty-keyboard sound sinks way down while ethereal strings and trumpet hover near the top, giving off the impression of beams of dusty light penetrating this cool cave network below the desert. And that hip-hop beat is so much fun. 

Spirit: What are Mario's jeans made out of? DENIM DENIM DENIM. Try that one out on your next date, trust.

Royal Octopi from Outer Space

A mural in the Pit of 100 Trials of Super Paper Mario.

Tentacled aliens are sci-fi cliché, but in the Mario series – across four games, no less – they are given the flair of old nobility, painting a story of a succession of cosmic empires, each one rising, declining, and fading into myth.

King Kaliente was the first to appear as a member of these tribes in Super Mario Galaxy. He is the ruler of the Octoombas and their ilk, which include “brown, red, and blue subspecies,” according to the series of promotional trading cards released alongside the game. Unfortunately for us, the cards offer more confusion than insight into the Octoomba taxa and their ranks. Octoombas are described as “Electrogoombas” – despite not having any apparent affinity for electricity – and are explicitly described as a class of “alien Goombas” which are “adapted for space.” Why, then, is King Kaliente described as a “Blooper-octopus boss” on his own card? 

King Kaliente in his digs during his appearance on MTV Cribs.

Obviously the trading card descriptions are somewhat unreliable. Octoombas are adapted for space, and yet do not appear to be more obviously suited to space than regular old Goombas. They are described as “amphibious” but both King Kaliente and the brown Roctos are clearly suited for lava-filled environs. Are they recent allies of Bowser or are they a branch of Goombakind that separated from terrestrial Goombas in the distant past and have established a civilization in space?

In the sequel, we meet the heir apparent to the Octoomba throne, Prince Pikante. Presumably the son of King Kaliente, Pikante improves on his father’s simple crown and Taftian mustache with a cape – and a war machine! Snugly mounted in a wooden tank, the young prince outwardly models the latest in Octoomba warfare in a show of military capability. The intended effect is, however, undercut by the inescapable impression one gets that he is compensating for a sickly, Habsburg-esque physique, inflicted living far away from the warm glow of his native space lava.

Spriters Resource reveals all.

Poor Prince Pikante is a signal that the Octoomba dynasty is withering on the vine, in spite of its vehicular advancements: its subjects dwell among ruins, its leadership is thinly spread across an empire of intergalactic proportions, and its dead – the even-more-ludicrous Octoboos – have begun to outnumber the living in certain regions of spacetime.

While the Octoomba Empire sinks into a long decay among the stars, the Lanceurs of Super Mario Odyssey are instead quite a young race. Seemingly native to Bubblaine, the Gushen species appear to broken free of planetary gravity quite naturally thanks to their propulsion capabilities. Their empire on the planet of the Mushroom Kingdom is astonishingly robust – the local Bubblaine noble, Brigadier Mollusque-Lanceur III, is not even a king but merely a Dauphin, with a military role to boot.

How does a cephalopod have hair, you say? You should know better than to ask these questions.

The extensive reach implied by the existence of Mollusque-Lanceur, coupled with his ornate dress and intelligible speech, has covered at least the first major milestone on the way to its space empire; that is, reaching the Moon. The Astro-Lanceurs are a hardy best-of-the-best breed of Gushen armored with specialized weaponry mounted to their heads, far more advanced than any rudimentary Octoomba device. Their existence on the Moon paints a portrait of an empire in expansion, bolstered by a strong government at home and impressive strides in technology. 

An Astro-Lanceur on the Moon.

There is one more civilization to consider – the long-dead kingdom of Squirpia of Super Paper Mario. Enshrouded in myth with only a few puzzling ruins left behind, the Squirpians are all but forgotten by the time its last heir, Squirp Korogaline Squirpina, is encountered in Chapter 4. In the Spanish language version, Squirps’s name is instead revealed to be Kalamarx of All Tentacles, a title befitting an ancient prince. 

The Scrappy-Doo of Super Paper Mario.

 In its era of prosperity, the might and benevolence of Squirpia was known widely. Queen Squirpina XIV, Squirps’s mother, is depicted reverentially within Flopside’s Pit of 100 Trials and implies the existence of at least fourteen generations of rulers within the kingdom before its fall. Her guarding of the Pure Heart was not without its sacrifices, as she also chose to place her son in centuries-long hibernation, ensuring one last noble of the kingdom could guide heroes through the alien architecture of Squirpia’s ruins, regrettably known in modern times as the Whoa Zone. 

 

Occasionally, making posts on this blog causes me to question how I spend my time. Captioning an image with "Squirpina XIV" is one of those moments.

Squirps’ fate as a prince out of time is tragic, his dream of a refounded kingdom touchingly naïve. As he sleeps beside a weathered statue of his mother, Squirps represents the sad end of all empires whose tentacles reach far beyond the primordial ocean; boundless and bare, the lone and level stars stretch far away.

SPIRIT: Don’t get me started on Flora Kingdom lore.

But Why Crayk?

Ignore the title and take a guess as to what Eiji Aonuma’s favorite Zelda boss is. Koloktos, a frenetic mano-a-mano fought with giant cutlasses? Twinmold, a thrashing brawl in a barren waste on a gigantic scale? Maz Koshia, a fantastic payoff after sitting through 120 identical monk blessing scenes? Puppet Ganon? Stallord?

It’s Crayk. This guy.

Him?

You remember Crayk? The big hermit crab from Phantom Hourglass? Of course you do.

Crayk is probably not memorable to most Phantom Hourglass players. He’s the boss of the Temple of Courage, the third dungeon of the game; it’s the one which is located after putting your DS to sleep to “transfer” one map’s emblem from the top to the bottom screen. Crayk begins the fight by stalking Link as an invisible presence. Crayk’s perspective is shown on the top screen, so the player must fly an arrow directly into the upper screen’s POV in order to progress the fight. Apart from this mechanic, the fight is pretty straightforward. Various purple marks on his shell must be destroyed, his shell falls off, he has a large and obvious weak spot in his neon blue tail, etc.

Aonuma was asked this in a December 2011 interview for Nintendo Power. The full quote, as taken from Zelda Wiki, is here:

If you mean in the whole series, my favorite is probably Crayk from Phantom Hourglass. It could attack while invisible, but by using the two screens of the Nintendo DS, you could fight it by watching from the boss's perspective, which was a lot of fun. (I'd wanted to make a boss like that for a while.)

I find this very interesting because it gets right into the heart of the issues fans take up with the devs. To the majority of non-Japanese Nintendo players, the perspectives of Nintendo’s head developers are not so much opaque as inaccessible. The people who are willing to do the dirty work of translating their comments – old print interviews being a great resource, as showcased on shmuplations and elsewhere – can usually unearth some juicy tidbits that never made it to a pre-Internet western fan community. More recently, features like "Iwata Asks," the behind-the-scenes looks of Hyrule Historia and Creating a Champion, and others have given fans more insight into the development side of the games. But many fans misunderstand Nintendo’s general development MO – find a new way to play, and never do the same thing twice – and rage against the changes to formulas that produced great games.

I should add, too, that Aonuma’s favorite Zelda game (as of 2017, at least) is Phantom Hourglass. Phantom Hourglass isn’t hated, but it certainly would be an unusual choice for a Zelda fan’s series favorite. Yet, the more I think about it, I can understand why Aonuma would pick it. The dual screen is Phantom Hourglass’s main gimmick and it’s put to full use in the game. The map system, with its scrawled notes, is probably the most obvious mechanic to make use of it, but all the bosses take advantage of it too. You must rely on map symbols to recombine the tripartite Blaaz; draw a Bombchu path on the map itself during Dongorongo; and use the full verticality offered by the DS layout to fight the rest. Even something as silly and simple as the aforementioned map-transference is a direct result of the DS’s hardware offering Nintendo new design possibilities.

There’s even arguably an in-game reason for Crayk’s perspective being visible: he’s harboring the other half of Ciela, your companion fairy who provides upper-screen perspective later in the game. Perhaps this plot point was what enabled Aonuma to justify the boss’s perspective being shown (though I have no doubts he would have done it anyway). It’s worth noting that King Dodongo and Morpha both open with a boss POV. Was Aonuma pondering this mechanic as far back as 1998?

Anyway, all this is to say that these little insights onto the people overseeing the development of these games makes for a different, valuable perspective than what fans might typically offer. One other that comes to mind is Shigeru Miyamoto’s admission in a 2017 IGN interview that the design of the Tox Box – those hollow, rolling cubes from Super Mario 64 and Galaxy – is “probably one of [his] masterpieces,” due to their design communicating everything the player needs to know at a glance, yet still resulting in a play challenge.

It would be obviously false to say that Nintendo devs aren’t focused on what players want and have fun playing. Yet, it’s also obvious that they place a high priority on what is fun for them to develop. And so the fun that comes out on the player’s side of a game is, more often than not, a result of the fun that the developers had in designing it. Aonuma, Miyamoto, and other head honchos get bored designing the same game over and over, so they don’t do it.

SPIRIT: They thought they were soooo clever for that map transfer puzzle, didn't they?

Slim Bankshot's Improbable Career

The portrait ghosts of Luigi’s Mansion are the game’s meat and potatoes, each providing a personality married to a gameplay twist. It’s amusing just how quickly the developers go off-track from what seems like a pretty standard set of mansion-dwellers: the first area contains only a nuclear family unit, the second adds in a butler..? And then it’s off to the races with in-house fortune tellers, polar explorers, life-size toy soldiers, and whatever Jarvis is.

Maybe the ghost of a Foo?

A few more family members pop up here and there, with Nana, Uncle Grimmly, the twin brothers, and a family dog, but by the time you’ve reached good old Vincent Van Gore, the mansion’s roster seems more like a troupe of carnival performers than an old-money family. E. Gadd claims in the instruction booklet that he’s collected the ghosts from around the world – but why does the Boo-made mansion seemingly have portraiture of some of them from when they were alive?

The questions raised by these ghosts and their descriptions can be added to the already-long list of ghost-related mysteries in the Mario-verse. Bogmire isn’t the ghost of someone who died, yet he rises from a gravestone. Neville and Lydia were both alive at one point, yet Chauncey was born as a ghost. The descriptions are all fun and games, clearly not in line with any sort of common sense. And here we find Slim Bankshot, resident undead pool shark.

Despite his chosen sport, he has a pretty bad habit of jumping balls off the table.

Slim’s description says that he’s a legend in the world of competitive pool, yet he never played a living soul. Uh, what? Not only does this mean he hasn’t played a living person in pool as a ghost, but it also means he didn’t play any pool with other living players when he was alive, either. So, to properly overthink this, let's examine the possibilities:

1. Slim was once a living pool player, and only played pool-loving ghosts (of which there must be vanishingly few). Then, he died and continued playing. 

2. Slim never played pool in life but picked it up in the afterlife. He then became famous (?) among living pool players -- perhaps materializing over dusty pool hall tables in the middle of the night.

The first is kind of fun -- maybe Slim got in over his head on one particular game with a legend and became a ghost. This is actually very nearly the plot of the Twilight Zone episode "A Game of Pool."

The second is weirder, but kind of charming. It's nice to think you can pick up new hobbies in the afterlife.

SPIRIT: Fun fact: his Japanese name “Paul Long” is possibly a reference to Paul Newman’s pool-playing title character in The Hustler.

Thank You So Much For-A-To Playing My Gamelan

Concept art of the Lost Kingdom from The Art of Super Mario Odyssey.

Something I admire about Nintendo’s approach to soundtracks is their composers' obvious inspiration from music traditions around the world. The best titles have an overall unifying musical identity, but will make use of heavy genre contrast to accentuate story elements or establish environments with distinct atmospheres. How well would the Twilight Princess’s Old Kakariko shooutout be remembered if it wasn’t accompanied by a Morricone-esque flute and sproingy Jew’s harp? We would never have seen Tom Brier's take on old Mario themes if not for Koji Kondo’s love affair with ragtime, and Wind Waker, a literal series sea change in style, wouldn't have felt quite as new if not for the Celtic-tinged main theme. 

With all that said, I want to draw attention in this post to a small but very memorable use of traditional music: the Indonesian gamelan. Gamelan is both a style of music and the collective name for the instruments that are played, most of which are metal percussion, which gives the music its distinct, fluid timbre, though flutes, string instruments, and singing may also be elements of the music.

Gamelan performance in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 2017. By Wikimedia user Pandjisaputra94, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Gamelan is a cultural tradition on the islands of Java and Bali, but even within this relatively small geographic distribution there are many variations in style, instrumentation, and scale. There exists several different gamelan scales, including the prominent 5-note slendro and the 7-note pelog scales. The variations of scale all have one thing in common, however, which is the effect of unfamiliarity to Western ears. This unfamiliarity has been used to various ends in a few Nintendo scores. 

Perhaps Nintendo’s first use of gamelan came in Super Mario 64, where frantic metallophones fall in under the melody of the Big Boo’s Haunt theme. The other components of the track aren’t exactly traditional, but the overall effect of the instrumentation is that the haunted house actually feels quite active and humming with energy.

Percussion instruments are unexpectedly scary in Big Boo's Haunt.

The foreign sound of gamelan, Nintendo discovered, is useful for scoring strange and eerie environments – it sounds like chimes, but not anything in alignment with the rest of a Western-style score. Spooky-sounding gamelan appeared again in Twilight Princess, when a repeating gamelan clip was woven into the game’s generic Twilight theme (and consequently Zant’s theme). Here the gamelan is front and center for some part of the track, making it feel as though the presence of twilight has affected the fundamental reality of Hyrule.

Eventually, Nintendo began to use gamelan for themes that were meant to sound more exotic than unnerving. Paper Mario: Sticker Star features a gamelan-driven theme for Chomp Ruins, a decaying temple deep in the jungle of World 5. While the gamelan mostly provides rhythm while flute and brass play melody, the flavor of the music -- propulsive, bright, and energetic -- is entirely set by the liquidy tone of the gamelan.

Kondo returned to gamelan for similar purposes in Super Mario Odyssey, in one of a handful of pieces he composed for the game (Naoto Kubo capably handles most of the score). The overcast, murky Lost Kingdom feels somewhat unfriendly, especially since Cappy is immediately stolen. Yet, after becoming familiar with the island’s gamelan theme, set in an unusual, loping 11/16 time signature, the place begins to feel special and warm, a mellow respite from the game’s big, character-filled other worlds. Most recently, gamelan shone in Echoes of Wisdom, where it features in the Faron Temple theme. The environment is humid and tropical, similar to the Lost Kingdom, and the theme complements it well.

These are the tracks that come to mind, but there may well be more that are unfamiliar to me. Let me know if there are others!

Death On Yoshi's Island

 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I listened, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and 16-bit soundtrack of Kondo yore,
While I nodded, nearly dreaming, suddenly there came a theming,
As of a hero “Game Over”-screening, dying in a later score.
“'Tis a Mario riff,” I muttered, “reused in another Zelda score —
An old motif, and nothing more.”

Quoth the Kondo: “I hadn't noticed that before.”