Biweekly Music Wednesday! No. 16 ~Float Islands~ (Kirby's Dream Land)

 

Origin: Kirby's Dream Land
Plays In: Float Islands/Kaboola Room in Dedede's Castle
Status: Original Composition

Composers: Jun Ishikawa

Well, I suppose it makes sense go over a Kirby song in the middle of my Kirby-themed feature! To initiate my first Kirby-related Biweekly Music Wednesday!, I figured I'd start out with an oddball: Float Islands.

When I say "oddball," I mean that Float Islands is typically overshadowed by the rest of the glorious music found in Kirby games. It's one of the first songs you hear in Kirby Super Star, yet that game's general orchestra boom steals the show. A secret arrangement is found in Kirby Air Ride, but everyone was too busy playing City Trial and its anime-ripped OST accompaniment. We even witness an interesting techno remix in Kirby Canvas Curse, but alas, I was too absorbed in the Rainbow Resort one to notice.

And yet despite all that, Float Islands is perhaps tied with Green Greens as my favorite song in the title that started it all: Kirby's Dream Land. Whereas Green Greens embodies heartwarming nostalgia, Float Islands is a distant reflection. You're sitting down in the kitchen chair staring out the window one early summer morning, and just like that, memories from what was a lifetime ago gradually slink back. The fragmented memories of a forgotten puppet-based television show. That one road trip from when you were seven. The time you clutched your favorite Sesame Street blanket as your mom rocked you to sleep.

Dreamy.

I once described the Ripple Field theme from Kirby's Dream Land 3 conjures the visual of a resolute chase. You're running down a beach that holds the key to your past, eyes scanning the area for familiar landmarks or structures to satisfy your quench for knowledge. Float Islands is the antithesis--there is no mad dash, for that individual is already content with life. He or she's slowly pacing across the ocean, eying the eternal blue as the wind tickles their cheeks.

I wonder which person I am? I've definitely dabbled into both; at the moment, I'd like to think I'm the latter. I've got great family, a wonderfully supportive English department at school, a great internship, and am constantly challenging myself through writing. Yet there was definitely a time I'd have done anything to get my past back, and if you told me I had to run down a beach to do so, I wouldn't have hesitated.

I don't miss being a teenager, that's for sure.

What about you? If that's a bit too personal of a question, then here's an interesting piece of trivia that blew my mind a couple years back. Doesn't the part at 0:22 sound familiar? That's right, it happens to be the inspiration for this famously chill Kirby song!

...or it might be more famously chill to Smash fans. You decide!

 

Even those we deem to be most ordinary hide the most profound secrets, don't they?

Final Thoughts: So apparently all the songs from Kirby's Dream Land are in Super Smash Bros. for 3DS via the sound test and Smash Run. Beating up Bulborbs and Starmen to this is gonna be surreal. And chill, yeah.