let’s see if this community is better at responding to these than c/kirby! :p
toby fox is famous for his use of leitmotifs. what specific instances do you find compelling, interesting, memorable, etc?
it’s not an easy question for me!
i’ll just highlight things from undertale: first, it’s pretty cool how waterfall is kind of a “leitmotif bridge” between ruins and another medium / core. too bad snowy isn’t connected in the same way
more notably: the way don’t give up uses the variation of the ruins leitmotif from an ending / undyne’s neutral death theme is pretty amazing. with pretty much the exact same melody and rhythm, it manages to go from depressing and emotional to inspiring… and emotional.
may or may not edit with my answers for deltarune later
Okay, the Waterfall one had my jaw on the floor lol.
I really like how Big Shot uses a variety of leitmotifs from both Deltarune and Undertale, and also minor variations of the Spamton leitmotifs introduced earlier. It’s the peak of Toby’s music-making style: https://youtu.be/p-AHtHis15M
my initial thought was that it actually didn’t use that many leitmotifs: just spamton’s two motifs, the world revolving + power of neo, and dummy!. but that’s actually more leitmotifs (5) than hopes and dreams (4: once upon a time A and C, your best friend, and snowdin town), chaos king (3: card castle, lancer, legend), and attack of the killer queen (3 or 4: queen, maybe another queen motif somewhere?, berdly’s 2 motifs), assuming i have everything correct! (i’m counting each distinct section of a source song as a unique leitmotif.)
watched the linked video for the first time, though i’m sure i’ve seen it plenty of times in my recommendations. i didn’t consider melody A’’ to be a variation of melody A, but i suppose it kinda makes sense. i assume this was one of the more influential analyses of big shot’s leitmotifs?
