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Put on 【♪Sozo♪】 in 2025 and it’s a different song. When it dropped in February 2021, the loudest thing about it was the banner across the top: Super Mario Bros. 35th Anniversary theme. Fair enough. But after Hoshino Gen’s first original album in six and a half years — 2025’s 【♪Gen♪】 — the picture flips. ‘Sozo’ looked like a party favor for Mario’s 35th, but from where we’re standing in 2025, it was the quiet pivot that set up the next six and a half years of Hoshino Gen.
Key facts
- ‘Sozo’ was released digitally on February 17, 2021 as the official theme for Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. 35th anniversary. Written and composed by Hoshino Gen.
- Released physically on June 23, 2021 as the double A-side ‘Fushigi / Sozo,’ paired with ‘Fushigi,’ theme to the TBS drama ‘Kikazaru Koi ni wa Riyuu ga Atte.’
- MV directed by filmmaker and photographer Okuyama Yoshiyuki. The track is laced with Nintendo hardware startup sounds and Mario SFX.
- Later included on Hoshino Gen’s 2025 original album ‘Gen,’ recontextualizing it from a one-off single into part of a longer arc.
- Four years spent as ‘the celebration song’
- The bones of the song, and the ‘Uchi de Odoro’ connection
- What changes after you’ve heard ‘Gen’
- Iwata Satoru and Yokoi Gunpei — the reference layers
- The sound — an experiment dressed as a party
- A pre-work song, and where it sits in his singles run
- Charts, splits, and where to go next
- Related reading
Four years spent as ‘the celebration song’
For most of its life, ‘Sozo’ has been filed away as the Nintendo party track. Honestly, the song was engineered to let you take it that way — it played in the commercials, the MV was stuffed with Mario Easter eggs, classic celebration format. Line it up now and it looks different. ‘Sozo’ is also the first place Hoshino Gen let something slip about what he’d been thinking between ‘POP VIRUS’ (2018) and ‘Gen’ in 2025. Even the title, meaning ‘creation,’ is a weird word to build a Mario tribute around. It’s about the posture of the person doing the making, not the thing being celebrated — the moment the subject shifts from ‘celebrating’ to ‘creating,’ the song has already stepped half a foot outside the brief.
The bones of the song, and the ‘Uchi de Odoro’ connection
Hoshino Gen appeared in the Nintendo commercial that used it. Threaded through the track: the GameCube and Famicom Disk System startup chimes, the Super Mario Bros. fireball, the enemy-stomp sound, stage BGM from Super Mario Land. Nintendo tribute and Hoshino Gen, double-exposed inside a track under four minutes. The physical release came on June 23, 2021 as the double A-side 【♪Fushigi / Sozo♪】, his first physical single in about three years and four months, since ‘Doraemon.’ The full version of ‘Uchi de Odoro’ — his 2020 stay-home social post — was tucked in as a coupling track. People couldn’t gather, and the three songs sharing a jewel case were all about making and moving together. The MV, directed by Okuyama Yoshiyuki, was shot on 8mm film, iPhone and other cameras, then patchworked together.
It sharpens up when you pair it with ‘Uchi de Odoro.’ That one told people ‘let’s move anyway’ when nobody could be in the same room. ‘Sozo’ aims the same impulse inward: let’s make anyway. Around this stretch, Hoshino Gen narrowed his focus to ‘moving’ and ‘making.’ No live shows, collaborations only online. Borrowing a Nintendo tie-in matters more because so few outward-facing machines were still running. He grabbed one of the last still moving and slipped a personal theme inside it.
What changes after you’ve heard ‘Gen’
The biggest shift is that ‘Sozo’ stops looking like a one-off commission and starts looking like the first step in a six-and-a-half-year runway. After ‘POP VIRUS’ in December 2018, Hoshino Gen didn’t release another original album until ‘Gen’ in 2025. The gap filled with the pandemic, drama roles, film, Netflix’s ‘LIGHTHOUSE,’ essays. ‘Sozo’ sits at the mouth of that runway: a ‘song about making things,’ snuck out under a celebration banner, now on ‘Gen’ as the answer key.
When I first heard it on release day, I stopped at ‘nice Mario song.’ The SFX slotted in cleverly, it was singable on first pass, that was enough. Coming back four years later, after the ‘Gen’ interviews, the center isn’t Nintendo anymore. It’s Hoshino Gen quietly saying ‘I can still make things.’ Same song, subject swapped.
Iwata Satoru and Yokoi Gunpei — the reference layers
What makes ‘Sozo’ interesting is that it doesn’t just quote Nintendo’s sounds. It quotes their philosophy. From release, listeners noted lyrics that echo the late Yokoi Gunpei’s ‘lateral thinking with withered technology,’ and nod to something the late Iwata Satoru said at a 2008 corporate briefing about making proposals people would call unreasonable. The GameCube chime is a hardware sound; Iwata’s words are the company’s working philosophy. One tribute is gadget-level, the other a work ethic. That second layer is the one Hoshino Gen took on as his own, acting on it outside the drama-theme lane, in places like Netflix’s ‘LIGHTHOUSE’ and collaborations with Louis Cole and Sam Gendel. At ‘Sozo,’ he was still saying it through Nintendo’s mouth.
The sound — an experiment dressed as a party
Listen back and ‘Sozo’ is a genuinely strange record. The intro opens on a hardware startup chime. An odd way to begin a pop song. Then the verse pivots into a funk-and-soul groove. The gap between those zones is where the pleasure lives. Symbolic console sounds and physical live bass and drums fighting inside the same bar. Hoshino Gen had been leaning into Black music since ‘YELLOW DANCER,’ but ‘Sozo’ compresses his whole pop sensibility by welding 8-bit SFX onto that groove. The chorus phrasing is close to how game BGM works: short motif, repeated. Nintendo BGM has always prioritized memorability because it had to survive on limited chips and short loops. ‘Sozo’ translates that design into a vocal chorus, which is why you can hum it the first time. Three reference layers: sounds, philosophy, design logic. Overloaded, but light on its feet.
Three things to listen for
- The drop from hardware-chime intro into funk verse. Symbolic electronic tones giving way to physical band sound.
- SFX as accompaniment, not decoration. Fireball and enemy-stomp sounds sitting inside the beat itself.
- The short repeating motif in the chorus. Nintendo’s ‘memorability first’ game-BGM principle, translated into a vocal hook.
A pre-work song, and where it sits in his singles run
This one hits weirdly hard in the fifteen minutes before you start doing something. Morning, right before the desk. The BPM isn’t a runner’s tempo and it isn’t mellow. The temperature is set to ‘about to move.’ Probably not accidental, given that the theme is ‘making things.’ Breakup songs and driving songs attach to their scenes; ‘Sozo’ works in the scene of ‘before you make something.’ Does that line up for anyone else?
Lay his singles out in order and ‘Sozo’ snaps into focus. ‘Koi’ (2016) became a social phenomenon. ‘Family Song’ (2017) gave him his first Oricon weekly #1. ‘Idea’ (2018) was an NHK morning drama theme. ‘Doraemon’ (2018) put him on a national children’s franchise. That’s the climax of act one. After ‘POP VIRUS’ (December 2018), he didn’t rush to pile up more ‘big representative hits.’ Next: the pandemic, ‘Uchi de Odoro’ (2020), then ‘Sozo.’ From ‘Koi’ to ‘Sozo,’ the subject has moved from ‘you and me’ to ‘me, making,’ which lines up with the ‘let go of meaning and just make’ mode he talks about in the ‘Gen’ interviews. The rudder quietly turned in the middle of the Mario commercial noise.
Charts, splits, and where to go next
On peak chart velocity, ‘Sozo’ didn’t cause the society-wide moment ‘Koi’ did. But look at the timeline — 2021 digital, 2021 physical, 2025 inclusion on ‘Gen’ — and this isn’t a sprinter designed for one week at #1. Better measured by recurrence than by any weekly chart movement, TOKIO HOT 100 orbit included. The MV reportedly racked up several million views quickly after release, but the fact that it landed on an album four years later matters more than the view-count curve.
Whether you hear ‘Sozo’ as a tribute to Nintendo or as Hoshino Gen’s own creator manifesto is a clean split by listener. Both readings hold. Personally, after ‘Gen,’ the center feels less like Nintendo and more like Hoshino Gen himself. Switch to that reading and the whole category of ‘CM song’ suddenly looks like it has more range. Where are you hearing it from these days?
If you’re picking one song to play after ‘Sozo,’ go with its double A-side partner ‘Fushigi.’ It works as a drama theme and a fully-formed pop song at once. Widen the frame with the 2025 album 【♪Gen♪】. That’s where ‘Sozo’ finally reads as the entrance to a six-and-a-half-year runway. Not many tracks behave like that.
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