PokeMusic: Viridian Forest

PokeMusic: Viridian Forest

Every now and again, we’ll be looking into some tunes from the world of Pokemon and discussing their points of interest, leave a youtube video or few, and discuss if these tunes should have a jazz-style remix.

First up is Viridian Forest. The first major obstacle, if you will, for the player to overcome in RBY! As it’s from Kanto it has a number of versions of tunes having appeared four times, once for each of the first four generations in the main games (not counting Green). So there’s plenty to look into.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPH9bT2Agc0

For the first ‘challenge’ of the games, the music is pretty fitting for Viridian Forest. Relatively simple when you think about it. The first part involves a set of four repeated notes followed by its pair, usually higher in pitch. Luckily this doesn’t continue forever as that would become mighty boring, but the general mood of the song persists.

Certainly a song deserving of the forest full of ugly Bug Catchers who probably live in the trees (who knew what diseases they might have carried!), and everyone’s worst enemy pre-1st gym in Weedle and its Poison Sting. Yet many still searched just to find that Pikachu. Well, unless they played Yellow, in which case the general aim was to get to the other side as quickly as possible. Not the most memorable of tunes as it doesn’t pop up again and one rarely returned to the area, but it does its job.

FireRed and LeafGreen (the remakes of the original games) keeps to the same tune, so there’s not too much different there. What does change are the instruments; instead of your typical beeps now a variety are used here, which does keep the song interesting for longer. They also tend to have a noticeable echo effect attempted throughout, which adds to the gloomy theme.

Of course, newer gamers may know Viridian Forest is visitable in HGSS, the Gold/Silver/Crystal remakes. But people who have played GSC may be forgiven for perhaps not recalling what Viridian Forest’s theme sounded like…

Honey, I shrunk the forest!

…Because there was no Viridian Forest! Due to size constraints and whatnot a bunch of areas in Kanto suffered, and this included the forest route. One shouldn’t worry though, as part of its theme reappeared anyways:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abWhrifDmtE
Here the opening part remains, but the rest of the tune is a mix of Route 2’s theme! Not a bad compromise with the music, although the reduced size was a disappointment for many… well, those who weren’t too annoyed by the forest in the first place in the original games! Imagine how the NPCs felt about their forest suddenly shrinking on them like that. Or the Pokemon!

Luckily HGSS did not suffer from such memory issues and so (most) areas came back in full or at least were remade. Viridian Forest came back as well in more or less its original shape, and with the bug catchers now with Pokemon levelling around the 50s. Sorta nice to see that they improved.

While you listen to ten minutes of calm cheeriness… consider these two things. Firstly, this song is a remix of a merging of two different themes! And secondly, this tune is way more easy going than before. Even the intro part that carried straight over from RBY is now a happy-sounding part.

This makes sense when you think about it. In GSC, there is no forest, and so there is no dark gloomy place to feel all scared of. Route 2’s theme hence was not a bad choice to use, and some of Viridian Forest’s theme added in to show it wasn’t entirely forgotten.

There still is a forest in HGSS though, but that too is fine for this. Unlike in RBY/FRLG, this is [i]not[/i] the first challenge of the game but rather just another part of Kanto you can explore after having beaten the champion and likely half of Kanto’s Gym Leaders as well. The place hence is of no worry to someone with a few hundred thousand Pokeyen, Pokemon halfway to level 100 and Full Heals by the dozen rather than two Antidotes at most. If anything, there was more danger in accidentally setting the forest on fire than losing a battle there. You could argue a similar thing for why the infamous Lavender Town theme is not quite so sad in the Johto games; the Cubone’s mother event was two years ago and probably unknown to the Johto protagonist.

So while the likes of Ilex Forest were more gloomy in music as well, Viridian really is no longer a concern, and so has happy, easy-going music in its place. In my opinion, it’s both a sensible choice and a neat tune to listen to on its own as well.

 

Written by bobandbill
Edited by An-chan & Bay Alexison