In The Final
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
Yoko Shimomura
You know a game has good music when Shimomura is on the team, and this is no exception. This piece is a very appropriately climactic final boss battle theme, with an interesting choice of instrumentation; the leads are an electric piano and a string section, which play in tandem for a pretty neat effect, combining the piano's sudden attack with the timbre of strings behind.
This melody is paired with a continuous rising-and-falling arpeggio in the background (which gets hard to hear at times over the rest of the music), a high-pitched synthesizer filling the role of the 'bass' despite not being bass by any stretch of the imagination, a small amount of choir to give that added bit of finality to it, the occasional orchestra hit, and fast-paced percussion under it all.
#FelthrysVGMSelection
Really, the instrumentation of this piece and how so many disparate instruments work together so well is fascinating. I haven't even had space to talk about the melody itself, which is fantastic, as expected given its composer.
As an aside, I've realized there seem to be three types of Felthry's VGM Selections: ones where I talk about the melodic structure of the music, ones where I talk about the instrumentation, and ones where I talk about the game it's from.