It’s called leitmotifs, and Toby Fox is a master of it. You introduce a character and their theme so that a person listening connects the two. And then you can bring up those themes in other songs, and without any context, people can know who those songs relate to and even guess what’s happening.
see I wanna agree but one of my favorite game OSTs, Undertale, does exactly the same thing, so I can’t knock the approach
It’s called leitmotifs, and Toby Fox is a master of it. You introduce a character and their theme so that a person listening connects the two. And then you can bring up those themes in other songs, and without any context, people can know who those songs relate to and even guess what’s happening.
It worked for Super Mario World, too.