Top 10 Lists : The Top 10 Uses For Music And Musical Instruments As Game Mechanics *SPOILERS*

We open the list with a classic use for musical instruments: calling faithful creatures to your side. Seiken Densetsu 3 has two instances of this phenomenon: playing the Pihyara Flute summons Booskaboo, a giant turtle and personal ferry for hire, while using the Wind Drum calls Flammie, a... uh... sort of furry... flying creature. Flammie kind of defies description, actually... I’m torn whether to be more impressed by the instrument or the creatures in this entry. While the ability to summon a magical taxi service to any seaside location is pretty darn useful, so is the ability to hear a five second clip of music from halfway across the globe and arrive within ten seconds of it being played (a trait these creatures apparently share with Epona and the various magical birds from the Zelda series).

Wonder Boy in Monster Land is one of the earliest platforming action-RPGs and is remarkably well done, even without considering its age. Should you choose to partake of the game’s lengthy sidequest, partway through your journey you will obtain a flute. If you take this flute and climb a large tower in the middle of the sea, the main character Shion will play a little ditty and all of a sudden a fortress will appear out of nowhere! Inside is an item which continues the sidequest, but I think that calling a fortress from the ether is pretty damn impressive in its own right! It’s not the flashiest, nor the coolest instrument on the list, but it sure gets the job done.

This particular musical application always struck me as remarkably odd. Partway through Pokemon, the player comes across a Snorlax sleeping in the middle of a road. Up to this point in the game, sleeping Pokemon had never really posed much of an obstacle. In fact, it made battles significantly easier when your foe was busy catching some Z’s. When I was playing the game, I approached the slovenly creature and was looking forward to an easy battle, only to be told in no uncertain circumstances that what I was looking at was, indeed, a sleeping Pokemon blocking the road and that, for some reason, I was not going to battle this creature. Instead, I needed to make a detour to pick up a strange instrument called a Pokeflute which could rouse the beast from its slumber. I’m not sure what kind of a coma this thing was in such that my usual method of solving problems (which involves large gouts of fire being spewed from my Charizard) would have been insufficient for the task, but apparently the Pokeflute is powerful enough that it can bring borderline-dead Pokemon back to life and inspire them with a will to fight. Amazingly, after I finished beating the living tar out of this creature, its unconscious form did not slump back over the road, but instead was teleported to some nearby mountains, obviously another side effect of the Pokeflute’s impressive power.

I was originally going to give this entry to the Kirby series, but I decided that microphones are dubious entries as musical instruments, so instead, the less ambiguous Donkey Kong 64 gets the distinction. Each of the five Kongs in DK64 can purchase a musical instrument – a set of bongos, a guitar, a trombone, a saxophone, or a triangle – and use it to destroy pretty much everything in sight. A few sweetly strummed notes and any enemy nearby is instantly blown away. Furthermore, the instruments can be used to solve puzzles, open doors, or trick giant lizards with spotlights stuck on their heads into slipping on banana peels. The uses really are endless...

So you’re an up-and-coming ninja guardian of ancient Japan and a request comes in to find and rescue the missing Princess Yuki. Since you’ve got nothing better to do between painting windows, appearing on quiz shows and playing through the first level of Gradius, you decide to take the job. But before you can dash out the door and start beating skulls in, you need to select a weapon. Swords? Way too cliché. Shuriken? Flashy, but too expensive for the job. Pan flute? Yeah, now we’re talking! If you’re Ebisumaru (or Dr. Yang in the western translation), the obvious use for an elegant musical instrument like the flute is to beat people over the head with it. In subsequent years, Ebisumaru would abandon the humble flute in favour of more flashy weapons, such as mallets, sushi cutting boards, and flatulence, but in his first English appearance, he opted for a simpler, more harmonically-pleasing approach. It’s worth noting that Mystical Ninja is far from the only game to realise the obvious potential for melee weapons that musical instruments posess. Amongst other games to follow in this trend were Mario RPG (Mallow’s Cymbals) and Phantasy Star Online (Crazy Tune), but I give the distinction to Mystical Ninja for being one of the first.

No list of notable gaming instruments would be complete without a nod to one of the oldest and most famous of them all: the Warp Whistle. This was actually a shout-out to the NES game Legend of Zelda, where this tool first appeared, but few people recognize it as such anymore. Everyone knows the basic way to get the first Warp Whistle: go to level 1-3, crouch on the white block, run to the end of the level. The Warp Whistle is extremely useful, as it immediately allows you to skip ahead several worlds from the spot that you use it and if you combine the first whistle with the second one, hidden in the World 1’s fortress, you can skip to World 8 before you’ve completed more than three stages. Of course, no one seems to consider the potential ramifications of these actions when they’re in the midst of merrily trotting along to the Dark World. What about all those castles you didn’t go to? The kings who are now permanently stuck as animals and bugs? What about the Koopa Kids you failed to defeat? They don’t just magically disappear when Bowser bites the dust, you know! What if one of those letters from Princess Toadstool said something like, “Dear Mario; Change of plans. Bowser has moved me to World 4 and replaced me with an evil robotic duplicate that he has set up as a trap in World 8. Please come rescue me as soon as possible and whatever you do, don’t storm Bowser’s castle!” Thanks to the Warp Whistle, Mario can successfully half-ass his job as saviour of the Mushroom Kingdom, leaving the Koopa Kids to go on a reign of terror and the kings still transformed into various creatures while he does the absolute bare minimum to defeat Bowser and rescue Toadstool. Way to go, Mario...

Any list featuring Lunar is, in my books, a good list. This particular entry focuses on the game’s leading lady, Luna. Luna isn’t the only insanely powerful songstress in gaming (Tear from Tales of the Abyss comes to mind), but she was one of the first. A singer from a quiet country village, Luna and her beau Alex set out for excitement and adventure, trying to travel to the big city to sell a lump of dragon... diamonds for a healthy wad of cash. Almost straight away, we find out that Luna isn’t exactly your standard alto choir-girl. Her songs can heal injuries and act as an instant Fog-Be-Gone for the requisite haunted woods level. Unfortunately, you’re not the only one who notices the unusual power of her little ditties. The game’s evil villain quickly identifies Luna as the human incarnation of the goddess Althena, and decides to put the plucky songbird and her melodies to work as weapons of mass destruction. Dropping her voice an octave, Luna – now operating under the new stage name of “The Dark Songstress” – causes the village of Pao to fall under a plague and then, just to make matters worse, revives the Fortress of Althena and tries to suck all life out of the Silver Star. All with just a few sweetly-sung notes. Now at this point it seems somewhat obvious that something will have to be done about this malevolent minstrel. So what does our main character do to confront the sinister swooner? Play accompaniment, of course! Yes, the way to bring Luna back to her senses and return her to that lovable serenader we all know and love is to play her a tune on your ocarina. Bonus points for fighting fire with fire and finding another excellent use for music in the world of Lunar: Goddess Sanity Restoration.

As the leading military power in the world of Baten Kaitos, the Alfard Empire quickly runs into a bit of a conundrum. They’re required to outfit their soldiers in a way that will both maximize their destructive potential and provide them with a suitably intimidating visage in order to help them enforce the will of the Empire. So, investing in a new breed of weaponry, they outfit their infantry with a set of brand new... trumpet guns... Yes, you read that right: trumpet guns. In fact, all of Alfard’s weaponry (which you can equip to your resident Alfard diplomat, Lyude) is based on brass instruments. This really isn’t as far-fetched an idea as it sounds; if you were a child with even the slightest inclination towards violence, you have probably at least once looked at the business end of a trumpet and noted the striking similarity of the bore to the barrel of a blunderbuss. You probably then went onto imagine the brass section of an orchestra transported into the middle of a war-torn battlefield, the trumpet-infantry mowing down waves of approaching woodwind skirmishers while the tuba-artillery and trombone-rocket launchers laid down a curtain of heavy firepower. Or maybe that was just me being forced to sit through yet another boring concert band recital in middle school... The idea of using musical-instrument-firearm hybrids isn’t unique to Baten Kaitos (Phantasy Star Online’s Angel Harp and Dark Cloud 2’s Trumpet Gun are amongst the other contenders), but BK is the only game I’ve seen that really took the idea and ran with it, even going so far as to name Lyude’s special attacks after musical movements (Rhapsody, Requiem, etc.). For all those out there who thought Squall’s gunblade was a dumb idea, you probably never thought you’d ever see anything like this.

So you’ve finished a long, dangerous quest involving several nations and species at war, a split timeline with your death at its epicentre, and even a little bit of time travel. Posed with your final goal, you are tasked with hunting down and destroying an ancient evil growing in the darkness beyond time. This diabolical extraterrestrial has destroyed the entire world in an alternate timeline, has bound itself to a prodigal princess of a magical kingdom and, upon reaching maturity, will gain the ability to consume all of space-time, effectively ending the universe as we know it. Worse? The only thing it needs to achieve this frightening goal is your death. Sounds like a fairly serious situation. In order to resolve this dilemma in a timely and efficient manner, you have travelled the globe and gathered to your side an army of 45 of the strongest and most experienced warriors in the entire world, including a mermaid, a fairy, a mostly-naked berzerker, a cave girl, and the clone-daughter of said magical princess prodigy, and outfitted them with all manner of weaponry, armour, and magical abilities. You develop an expertly designed plan to take the beast down and liberate the captured princess in the process. What is this plan, you ask? Why, sing the creature a song, of course! That’s right, the way to beat the Time Devourer in Chrono Cross and get the best ending available is to play it the Song of Life, then use the titular Chrono Cross to free Schala from its clutches. Doing so immediately destroys the Time Devourer, killing it for good. Of all the uses for music, I’d say this is probably the most epic. Oh, and bonus points for Chrono Cross since, in addition to music being the final boss slayer, several of your characters use musical instruments ranging from guitars to harp picks as weapons.

Few non-rhythm-game series use musical instruments in gameplay as frequently as the Zelda series. The idea began with a humble flute that could warp Link around the overworld in the series’ original NES entry, but things quickly escalated from there. I was originally just going to list one or two Zelda entries, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that nearly every game in the entire Zelda saga could place on this list. Rather than go into each one in depth, I will provide a quick summary of the various uses of instruments across the series: Whirlwind Summoner (Recorder, Legend of Zelda – NES), Avian De-Petrification Device (Flute, A Link to the Past – SNES), Liberating Oneself from Oneirological Crises (Various instruments, Link’s Awakening - Gameboy), Travelling Time and Space (The Ocarina of Time, Ocarina of Time/Majora’s Mask – N64), Creating Meteorological Havoc (The Wind Waker, Wind Waker – Gamecube). And these are just the highlights! The entire list could be made out of uses for the Ocarina of Time in just two games! It would actually probably be shorter to make a list of things that AREN’T done with musical instruments in Zelda games. Since nearly every game in the series has a new and interesting use for a musical instrument, it seemed criminal not to put it at the number 1 spot.

It’s actually kind of surprising how many unique and interesting uses for music there are in gaming worlds. Obviously I didn’t have space to fit in every single example out there, so here’s a few that didn’t quite make the list: Celebrating Victory (Donkey Kong Country series), Rocking Out (Guitar Hero), For Purely Decorative Purposes (Animal Crossing), Distracting Semi-Sentient Plants to Obtain Quest-Critical Items (King’s Quest VI), Fortune Telling (Tales of the Abyss) and Causing Ear Damage from Frantic Clawing (Kingdom Hearts II). So the next time you pass a dorky-looking kid lugging around a bassoon that’s bigger than he is, don’t laugh at him; he may be the only thing between you and utter annihilation when the world gets invaded by an evil race of magical creatures.

List by darkknight109 (06/30/2009)

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