8 AM – Animal Crossing New Leaf

This is “8 AM” from Nintendo’s life simulation game “Animal Crossing New Leaf”.
The is composed by Manaka Kataoka.
She is also the main music composer for “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild”.

The songs in Animal Crossing are short, but they never bore the listener, do they?

In the video, I play it in Capo 2nd to make it easier to play the high position,
If you play it in Capo 4th, it will be in the same key as the original song.

This song uses different rhythms in the diatonic chord progression (IV-iii-vi) and the subdominant minor (bVI-bVII).
It use antisipated chord chunks in the diatonic part, and distributed chords in the subdominant minor part.

I think this contrast expresses together the cheerfulness and relaxed feeling of the time when we are starting activities.

The scale in bar 9 looks like natural minor, probably because of the modal interchange to aeolian that continues from bar 7 …Maybe.

By the way, the latest title “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” has been sold more than 30 million units in total.
(Financial Results for the Third Quarter of the Fiscal Year Ending March 31, 2021 p.18)
According to Wikipedia, it is ranked 16th on the game sales rankings, which shows that sales numbers have been growing in a very short period of time despite the fact that it is a gaming-specific devices.