Metroid Database.com

Otarie has posted an intriguing video comparing the ending theme from Metroid: Other M with Kalisto's Theme from Rain Children by Didier Lockwood. The beginning and endings to the song are incredibly similar. While it isn't uncommon for two songs by the same composer with a large body of music to sound similar, and it's also not unheard of for composers to reuse their music, basing music very closely on other composers' scores can cause big problems. Both Kinuyo Yamashita and Yasunori Mitsuda have strongly defended themselves against claims of copying music before (Yamashita for the Neon Tiger theme in Mega Man X3 and Mitsuda for Robo's Theme, which sounds an awful lot like Rick Astley)...although it's not like a composer would ever admit to that. That's not even counting known copying, like the EarthBound soundtrack or Mamoru Samuragochi blatantly lying about composing Resident Evil and other Capcom classics. Other cases are borderline: was Michael Jackson really hired to compose music for Sonic 3, or was he ripped off? The world will likely never know. Blatant copying was pretty common in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, but is pretty rare today in games due to the proliferation of lawyers in the game biz, which makes this similarity very surprising, stretching thin the argument of "it's just an honest mistake."

Incidentally, the reason there's no voiceovers in the ending theme - and some static - is because they used the copy of the theme from the soundtrack here on the MDb, where we used a noise filter to remove them.

UPDATE: News post corrected for errors.

Until next time...
Captain Commando