Best Music of the Year on Nintendo Systems: 1990 (SNES)

Consider creativity, sound chip limitations and technical achievement, composition (melody or hook, progression, complexity), dynamics (range between quiet and loud, soft/diminuendo and hard/crescendo), pitch range, instrument and instrument envelope variety and quality, and so on. We're going by original release dates.

Try to say something about your favorite(s), it's more fun to read!

Links (multiplatform list):
https://minirevver.weebly.com/vgm-1990.html
https://minirevver.weebly.com/spc700-snes-music.html

For some perspective, besteveralbums' top albums of the year:
https://www.besteveralbums.com/yearstats.php?y=1990

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NES Poll 1990:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/916386-nes/79088373

F-Zero & it's not close.

F Zero though coming in SMW was the only game for the system I knew came out that year.

2001mark posted...

F-Zero & it's not close.

How so? Sound design is mediocre compared to Actraiser and Gradius 3.

I'm not gonna cast vote, I'm just gonna say it's F-Zero without any doubt.

Haven't heard all of these but I'll give it to Final Fight as its the version with the best music.

Actraiser is the one to top here. Classic orchestral tones in both engagement and pastoral scenes.
Super Mario World comes close with all the sampled remixes (any time Yoshi is around, you get bongos clopping). Because of all the variety, I'm actually finding it harder to say I'd prefer Actraiser's more exciting score over it.

F-Zero gets props for being an early run at something that could be close to club or techno; while instrument emulation wasn't very complex, the arrangement was often impressive.
Gradius III is pretty big on me, purely on nostalgia. The boss ditties alone.

Bombuzal (Kablooey) - is a game I hadn't even heard of, and like SSF2, the Japanese version is oddly a quieter rendition of the same songs.
Final Fight - Toshio Kajino was no Mari Yamaguchi or Yoko Shimomura and these SNES versions were incredibly muffled to boot.

I would like to add HyperZone, another Mode7 technical show-case, composed by Jun Ishikawa (Kirby) before they started to sound like Kirby (Arcana, which was released alongside Kirby in 1992, sounded more similar); this score definitely feels closer to Space Harrier, though not as catchy as F-Zero.

Re: HyperZone - all the good sources say 1991 for that one. It almost made the OP but there's just not enough space here.

Pretty unusual reverb on some of the drums and other instruments in it, more natural sounding than most SNES games.

F-Zero sounds more jazz/rnb to me, besides rock/pop. Death wind is like metal mixed with a bit of jazz fusion or funk. Some nice tracks for sure but I can't really get over how dry and almost windows midi synth-like it tends to sound.

Actraiser by FAR