Battle on the Sea

Track 5-1: Battle on the Sea

At last our musical analysis series reaches Disc 5! We’re in the homestretch now, and that also means we’ll be encountering a series of tracks that are even heavier, but I’ll strive to do them justice, so please stick with me! 💪

Giving OT2 new boat travel mechanics meant adding battles at sea as well, so I composed this battle theme for the “ocean field.” This is a category that didn’t exist in OT1, so in a sense I was able to stretch out and enjoy writing this piece.

Musically speaking, the overall sound is based on Celtic music, but the melody was written with Viking music in mind. There doesn’t seem to be any direct cultural connection between Celtic music and Vikings (I only looked into this at the general level, so I don’t have any specialist knowledge, sorry), but I think the musical affinity is quite high—for example, the animated movie How to Train Your Dragon, which is about a Viking protagonist, makes heavy use of Celtic musical motifs. When you consider that both cultures fall within the category of northern Europe, the musical distance surely isn’t that great, right?

On the rhythmic front, “He’s a Pirate” from Pirates of the Caribbean, possibly the most famous pirate song in the world, is in 12/8 meter, and triple meters do have a high affinity with the rhythmic feel of dancing on the waves, so I composed the melody of “Battle on the Sea” with a 6/8 melody as well.

To delve deeper, after composing the melody with the above in mind, I arranged it for acoustic guitar in the lower register. This is roughly equivalent to a male baritone in vocal music, making it a little low-pitched for playing melodies in. But I decided that might work in the music’s favor by conveying a kind of wildness, if you like, or roughness, like men singing while the sea rages, so I set the melody in that little-used register all the same. On the other hand, with that setting alone the melody wouldn’t stand out enough, creating a musical result that isn’t very pop, so it’s doubled on tin whistle in a higher register.

In the refrain, the solo violin offers a virtuosic display—less a melody than a string of lightning-fast phrases—while the strings support the sound from behind by playing a fairly prominent tune like a sub-melody. This technique of combining elements adds to the impact. Putting technically demanding elements like this in a core battle theme like “Normal Battle” would be a major gamble (because, when all is said and done, battle music on the main line needs to cover the classic structure, to an extent), but I decided that because “Battle on the Ocean” is a piece that is used in less central parts of the game, this kind of approach could be forgiven.

When I talked about “stretching out” at the beginning of this post, this aspect of being forgiven a certain degree of compositional freedom for this piece looms large. Music whose position in the product as a whole is simply “this would be good to include” is both easy to compose and easy to fill with interesting concepts. It’s these “concept” pieces that many listeners are kind enough to tell me they like, not the core themes, so I think it’s important to have tracks like this in the lineup to add some variety.

Translation: Matt Treyvaud