Pokémon Soundtrack Odyssey Continued - Legends: Arceus

Legends: Arceus | Go Ichinose, Hitomi Sato, Hiromitsu Maeba (Go Ichinose, Hitomi Sato, Junichi Masuda)
As was perhaps inevitable, the music for the new Pokémon has leaked, though let us all hope that there's an official release, because this is the single best Pokémon soundtrack in a decade and I would put it up there with RSE and BW. (As with SwSh, I am using Video Game Music Resources's guesses for composers.) The music for L:A is handled by the team of Ichinose and Sato - the primary composers for DPPt and BW2 - joined by Hiromitsu Maeba, formerly of Capcom, whom also acted as mixing engineer. I said previously that the sound team needed a good mixer, and it got one. All the mixing and arrangement issues that have plagued the scores since XY and gone, completely gone. 

To go with a shift in the mixing, there's a shift in composition style, too, with a greater emphasis on soloists - piano, solo cello, solo violin, and traditional Japanese instruments - then ever before. (Shades of Breath of the Wild.) Taking place in an ancient version of the Sinnoh region, called Hisui, as it does, many tracks from DPPt are rearranged by the composers. Calling them rearrangements really does a disservice, though, because the composers didn't merely update them for new instruments - they broke them down to their base elements and rebuilt them. The various "Jubilife Village" tracks, co-arranged by Sato (the original DPPt "Jubilife City" composer) and Maeba - not just changing depending on whether you're indoors, outdoors, or at home but evolving throughout the game - are a great demonstration of this, but so too is the massive "The Heartwood," (Sato's "Eterna Forest" recomposed by Go Ichinose) which is some six minutes long before looping, as is Go Ichinose's "Coronet Highlands" (Ichinose's "Mt. Coronet"). Samples from the original DPPt are brought over, too - that classic timpani's in a lot of tracks.

The field and area music is beautiful - just listen to any of the tracks I've just referenced above. The battle music is just as good. The regular battle themes deconstruct Masuda's somewhat anemic originals and make them darker and more intense, and the other battle themes are even better: check out Ichinose's intense "Battle! Origin Dialga/Palkia" (recomposing Masuda's DPPt Dialga/Palkia battle theme) which brings in BW2 vibes with the synths, or (once again Ichinose on arrangement) "Battle! Legendary Pokémon." Every stop, it seems, was pulled for this soundtrack, Ichinose and Sato at their absolute finest, with Maeba on mixing to ensure that everything sounds crystal clear and smooth to the ears.