Uploaded October 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
Ocarina of Time’s original Fire Temple theme was removed in later versions of the game, replacing samples of chanting with the choir sound used across other themes like Temple of Time, the Goddess cutscene music and the Ganon fight theme.
The voice samples used in the original version (which I’ve mostly panned to the right) are Islamic, and Nintendo has a policy not to reference real-life religion in their games.
Here’s a really good breakdown of the situation:
youtube.com/watch?v=YF6x1WxykaM
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I thought it would be interesting to bring the two versions together, and it shows the ways that Koji Kondo used the original as a guide for composing the replacement choir elements. I assume in part he wanted to retain his initial ideas, and in part simply needed to get something done quickly, and found a way to replace the old elements as seamlessly as possible.
It also made me realise that he slowed it down quite a lot (about 5bpm) for the second version – I would guess so that the choir has a bit more time to transition between notes. I’ve kept the original bpm (113bpm) so that the timing with the chanting samples doesn’t get messed up.
I’ve changed the panning quite a bit in order to try and help all the vocal parts (there are now a lot of them) find their own place in the mix, and rebalanced the volumes. I hope you think it worked out ok.
If you like what you hear, please hit subscribe and leave a like – it helps a lot :-)
Ocarina of Time’s original Fire Temple theme was removed in later versions of the game, replacing samples of chanting with the choir sound used across other themes like Temple of Time, the Goddess cutscene music and the Ganon fight theme.
The voice samples used in the original version (which I’ve mostly panned to the right) are Islamic, and Nintendo has a policy not to reference real-life religion in their games.
Here’s a really good breakdown of the situation:
youtube.com/watch?v=YF6x1WxykaM
-------------------
I thought it would be interesting to bring the two versions together, and it shows the ways that Koji Kondo used the original as a guide for composing the replacement choir elements. I assume in part he wanted to retain his initial ideas, and in part simply needed to get something done quickly, and found a way to replace the old elements as seamlessly as possible.
It also made me realise that he slowed it down quite a lot (about 5bpm) for the second version – I would guess so that the choir has a bit more time to transition between notes. I’ve kept the original bpm (113bpm) so that the timing with the chanting samples doesn’t get messed up.
I’ve changed the panning quite a bit in order to try and help all the vocal parts (there are now a lot of them) find their own place in the mix, and rebalanced the volumes. I hope you think it worked out ok.
If you like what you hear, please hit subscribe and leave a like – it helps a lot :-)
