Overview

Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines! Kazumi Totaka has created a soundtrack worthy of its game, Wave Race 64, which instantly brings you back into the game.

Body

The music itself is hardly original, but it's done well. Here we've got typical racing tracks that make you feel like you are on the waves on your jet ski. It even has a nice theme, too. Except, the only problem is that in all of the tracks, it's hinted over and over and over again. Thankfully, it is used with plenty of variation, which makes that sin forgivable. All of the music from the game is here, but there are a couple of surprises on this album.

When I first listened to this album, I noticed that the "Sandy Beach" and "Southern Island" tracks sounded a lot different than what was in the game. Don't worry though, the original versions of those two tracks are at the very end of the album, labeled the "1996 versions". Wave Race 64 was rereleased in Japan enhanced with the Rumble Pak in an attempt to make it more popular over there, for those of you who want to know the reason why they have the label "1996 version". In fact, this soundtrack wasn't released until one year after the game was released.

Another track took me by surprise was "Port Pirates". It starts out just like it did in the game, but then, after the first 20 seconds or so, a different musical bridge is replaced over the original one we've heard. The original version is not even included on this album!

The album's only serious blunder is track 31, "Game Staff Voice". Like Yoshi's Story Original Soundtrack, we hear quotes spoken from the creators of Wave Race 64, but the music in the background sounds like noise with no themes from Wave Race 64 used at all. Thankfully, it's much shorter than on Yoshi's Story's soundtrack, but still, it's a very unfortunate track.

Summary

The Wave Race 64 Original Soundtrack is not the best Nintendo 64 soundtrack, but it is above average and better than Kazumi Totaka's related effort, a semi-disappointment called Yoshi's Story.