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.”

Bowser's Acupuncture Treatment

Welcome to the Lumbar Nook.

Cozy, warm studio space with a groovy 70s-style conversation pit, now renting at $3200 a month in the Bay Area.

It’s a location in Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, specifically somewhere inside Bowser’s lower spine, in between (or inside?) one of his lumbar vertebrae. After Bowser is betrayed by a trio of Fawful-loyal minions, he is stuffed inside a safe and then discarded into Princess Peach’s royal junkyard, where the safe shatters. Unfortunately for Bowser, the impact also leaves him in great pain. He pleads with Starlow to find some way to fix his spine, and so the erstwhile Brothers Mario travel to the Lumbar Nook.

Finding a boney sort of crevice in the tiny space, the two decide to drill into the spine. Toadsworth and Toadbert set a timer and have a cup of tea. After minutes of waiting, during which the player cannot do anything, the alarm sounds and the brothers reemerge to a rejuvenated Bowser. The Lumbar Nook is never visited again.

The whole episode is one of those Nintendo oddities that were particularly popular during the DS era, like that infamous puzzle in Phantom Hourglass which requires the player to close the DS to imprint a symbol from one screen to another. Is it engaging gameplay? Not at all. Does it ever play a role in the game’s mechanics again? Nope. Will you remember the Lumbar Nook segment once the story is all said and done? Probably not. But it’s endearing because of that baffling, almost standoffish quality, defying the player’s expectations of what should be happening minute-to-minute.

Which is why it’s weird that it can be skipped. Yes, in fact, Lumbar Nook Tea Time can be blown right through if you happen to speak to Toadbert at the right point in the story, specifically after defeating the memory brothers in Bowser’s brain. Toadbert describes a dream in which he is waiting in a small room drinking tea, and then (somehow) hears buttons being pressed – A B X Y L R Y X B A – which, if pressed during the wait, will shrink the time down to virtually nothing.

Screenshots from YouTube playthroughs of aWiibo and LuckySevenDX.

My question is: why? What’s the point in programming such a markedly odd little episode that asks the player’s patience, only to have it be skippable? Why include the skip code in an NPC dialogue that the vast majority of players are unlikely to see? Why does Toadbert have prophetic meta-dreams?

Feel free to ponder this over a nice cup of tea and some relaxing music. Or don’t.

SPIRIT: If Nintendo was an American company, we might have gotten a visit to the Chiropractic Zone, where the brothers play whack-a-mole with Bowser’s vertebrae and unintentionally doom him to quadriplegia.