Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s theme music is better than anything coming out of Hollywood

I can’t stop listening to the theme music from new Zelda trailer.

Nintendo released one of the best game trailers ever earlier this month when it showed off a new preview for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for its upcoming Switch console. That device launches with the new entry in Nintendo’s long-running fantasy adventure series March 3, and I’m planning to spend the intervening weeks listening and relistening to the trailer’s score. The music is soaring and cinematic, but it also rises above anything you’d find in cinema over the last couple of years because it is also memorable.

Today’s Hollywood doesn’t put a lot of effort into making theme songs that get stuck in your head. You can probably hum the music from Batman (1989), Jaws, or any number of other genre flicks from the 1980s and 1990s. But can you recall any original scoring from The Dark Knight, Iron Man, or Suicide Squad? I cannot, and that bums me out. I miss strong themes that have a lot of personality, and I’m happy that I can still rely on video games to deliver exactly that.

The Breath of the Wild trailer is more than three minutes long, and it doesn’t spend that entire time retreading old material. Instead, it introduces a number of new melodies that are already getting stuck in my head. Of course, when the familiar Zelda theme does work its way into this new composition, it is as powerful as you might expect. It’s the clashing of the new with something you are intimately familiar with, and yeah — it still occasionally gives me goosebumps.

You can listen to the theme song by rewatching the trailer, but if you want to drop the dialogue and sound effects and just hear the music, the internet has found a way. YouTube composer ClefferNotes, who covers Orchestral music using the Logic Pro X software, has recompiled the Breath of the Wild theme and posted it to their channel.

Check it out:

And let’s just hope the rest of the Breath of the Wild’s music is just as wonderful.