A small note for clarity: When I was researching this, I found that Kannon's Klaim was referred to as the song in the Gameboy game Donkey Kong Land 2's Kannon's Klaim level and also was used as the song name for the level's song in Donkey Kong Country 2's port to the Gameboy Advance. I left out the bit about the GBA port because it felt redundant at the time to bring it up but if I were to do another edit of this vid, I would have brought that up as well (and tweaked some wording lol). I do acknowledge though that there's a chance that the GBA port may have coined the name first then people went back and started attributing the name to the GB game as well. There's an astonishingly small amount of DKL2 material out there so researching that was... difficult, to say the least, as most stuff redirects to the SNES game. Edit: I think Mining Melancholy may have gotten popularized later on because not many people were pushing for really obscure, niche knowledge like this back in the day. Definitely there were people that were doing that but not many. So no one had a name for the song for a long while. An extra trivia tidbit: In the JP version, this level is called Barrel-Barrel Mine!
The weirdest thing about this to me is that David Wise has never commented on it over the last 29 years. You'd think he would have seen that name going around and provided a correction. Although maybe it ISN'T that surprising, since there was that one track from Halo that was left off the soundtrack and remains unnamed to this day.
I am firmly on team "Donkey Kong Land 2 is not a port" since Donkey Kong Country 2 exists as a more "true port" on the GBA (And the original DKC got released on both the Game Boy Color AND Game Boy Advance). I consider Land 2 to be more along the lines of a "Demake" Though I can see the Port argument, especially because Nintendo liked to use "Land" to signify that a game is for the Game Boy back in those days (Mario Land, Wario Land, Kirby's Dream Land, etc), so calling it "Land" might help people understand what they were buying. I think DKC2 was actively in print at the same time. I liked DKL2 a lot because it worked well with its limitations and didn't try to force itself to be a game it didn't have the power to be. Instead, it tried to be something similar, but different. Man I love these niche videos. I hadn't really even thought about early video game music having official names at all.
I never got to play the one on the GBA unfortunately but I've heard that one is def more of a port than the GBC version. I believe in that version, the song is also called Kannon's Klaim but I couldn't find much on it. My theory is that's technically been the song's name since 1996 but Mining Melancholy got popularized at that point and there was less of a push for really niche bits of knowledge back then. (But that's just a theory... a game music theory lol) I remember DKL2 being HARD. It def has a demake feel but I think that makes sense given the hardware it was running on!
tinfoil hat time: we're either getting DKC trilogy remakes, or they're going to use this song in an upcoming game, and they used the updated name for it.
A small note for clarity: When I was researching this, I found that Kannon's Klaim was referred to as the song in the Gameboy game Donkey Kong Land 2's Kannon's Klaim level and also was used as the song name for the level's song in Donkey Kong Country 2's port to the Gameboy Advance. I left out the bit about the GBA port because it felt redundant at the time to bring it up but if I were to do another edit of this vid, I would have brought that up as well (and tweaked some wording lol). I do acknowledge though that there's a chance that the GBA port may have coined the name first then people went back and started attributing the name to the GB game as well. There's an astonishingly small amount of DKL2 material out there so researching that was... difficult, to say the least, as most stuff redirects to the SNES game.
Edit: I think Mining Melancholy may have gotten popularized later on because not many people were pushing for really obscure, niche knowledge like this back in the day. Definitely there were people that were doing that but not many. So no one had a name for the song for a long while.
An extra trivia tidbit: In the JP version, this level is called Barrel-Barrel Mine!
Yay dkc
The weirdest thing about this to me is that David Wise has never commented on it over the last 29 years. You'd think he would have seen that name going around and provided a correction. Although maybe it ISN'T that surprising, since there was that one track from Halo that was left off the soundtrack and remains unnamed to this day.
I am firmly on team "Donkey Kong Land 2 is not a port" since Donkey Kong Country 2 exists as a more "true port" on the GBA (And the original DKC got released on both the Game Boy Color AND Game Boy Advance). I consider Land 2 to be more along the lines of a "Demake"
Though I can see the Port argument, especially because Nintendo liked to use "Land" to signify that a game is for the Game Boy back in those days (Mario Land, Wario Land, Kirby's Dream Land, etc), so calling it "Land" might help people understand what they were buying. I think DKC2 was actively in print at the same time.
I liked DKL2 a lot because it worked well with its limitations and didn't try to force itself to be a game it didn't have the power to be. Instead, it tried to be something similar, but different.
Man I love these niche videos. I hadn't really even thought about early video game music having official names at all.
I never got to play the one on the GBA unfortunately but I've heard that one is def more of a port than the GBC version. I believe in that version, the song is also called Kannon's Klaim but I couldn't find much on it. My theory is that's technically been the song's name since 1996 but Mining Melancholy got popularized at that point and there was less of a push for really niche bits of knowledge back then. (But that's just a theory... a game music theory lol)
I remember DKL2 being HARD. It def has a demake feel but I think that makes sense given the hardware it was running on!
tinfoil hat time: we're either getting DKC trilogy remakes, or they're going to use this song in an upcoming game, and they used the updated name for it.