The Nintendo Treehouse blog often sheds light on some interesting projects the team has worked on and gives us a great insight into the workings of certain aspects of our favourite games to date. This time, the team have explained the process of localising the annoyingly catchy theme tune to the incredible Super Mario Odyssey, “Jump Up, Super Star”. As well as ensuring the tune was going to go down well with fans, the lyrics to the song had to go through many changes and you can see from the first draft below that the end product is vastly different.
The symbol of a voyage, let’s start to raise the sails
A tailwind dances at our backs
Flip a coin, the goddess who’ll tell our fortune
Blows a kiss
Let’s sing our love as brightly as
All the lights in all the world
Then jump! (JUMP SE)
And grab! (COIN SE)
Say yeah!!! (yeah!!!)
Let’s dream together
Love together
If we walk with our eyes to the sky
Once all our tears have fallen
We’ll get a 1UP
Let’s all
Jump up high and high five
Tap and dance
I’m a superstar lighting up the world
Switching you on to happiness
So, let’s dance the Odyssey!!!
(Chorus)
Odyssey, ya see! etc.
The above is a translation from Japanese and the final version is a product of a lot of back-and-forth between teams at Nintendo. The localisation demo, that was sent to Nintendo Japan, can be heard in the video below.
To learn more about the process that Nintendo went through to localise the theme tune, go and check out the full blog post here.
This version is….. not really enjoyable…
I love with the female voice.
It does not help that he by no means has a good singing voice…
I have actually never heard a song demo that kept the pitch quite so badly.
I’m not saying that to discredit his work in any way though, it obviously turned out a good song in the end.
He can have a good singing voice but he wasn’t in rhythm and his tone wasn’t perfect for that music (at that time).
I believe it’s fair to call being out of rhythm, a hard time keeping the correct pitch and using a wrong tone for the music at hand; having a bad singing voice…
But perhaps that is all semantics at that point, we seem to agree on the issue otherwise.
To be fair, the person in the video probably isn’t even a singer, but someone from the localisation team who only sang the demo to send it to Nintendo and give them a rough idea for how the lyrics are meant to go with the song. In other words: that person was probably never meant to be the final performer of the song in the first place.
Thank you for specify better this question :)
Wow I would of probs like this
This song is great, when your playing Odyssey or getting ready to play Odyssey. But just listening to this song as a standalone without Mario? Not so enjoyable honestly.
Ouch, that had to be a real chore to translate. Still, it’s nice to see the original Japanese lyrics.
This is probably the reason why Mario Odyssey lost the best original score award to BOTW.
With a male voice it would be good nontheless. Instead Arms eventually required a female voice. This one is just a demo with an amateurish singer without full orchestration, you should not judge this performance: it’s just a demo. Anyway the final version with the female voice is very good.
Listening to that, I immediately picture Bill Trinen in a white tuxedo, dancing and singing through mushroom kingdom. So yeah, the female original is better.