LogFAQs > #954203806

Stay Gold
Dreamy and Boisterous Holy Land
Neuchatel

Arknights - Triumphant Celtic-sounding march that somehow reminds me a lot of my days of Ragnarok Online back in ye olden times of phasing out dial-up Internet. Very good use of instrumentation. Arknights is an odd duck in that I have no desire to ever play it but I think I always comment that "huh, weird, it sounds familiar and I like it, but oops, wait, I never played it." Funny, that.
Wheels of Aurelia - I don't know what I was expecting, but this wasn't it. I tried both on speakers with a hearing aid and with my headset on to see if it was a problem with me, but while I'll applaud the lyrics attempt, I think it fought the instruments rather than complemented them, and the instruments won. Also, Italian sounds so similar to Spanish sometimes that I was more focused on THAT than the song, both times through.

Trails in the Sky 3 - That is a SLOW boil for the opening (props for that), and the payoff was great, but then it's a lot of organ-mashing and just constantly in your face. When it slows down the instruments in the forefront it does well, but I'm not a fan of the organ sections or the part right after it? I don't know my instruments well enough. Anyways, tl;DR: A lot of boisterous, not a whole lot of dreaminess. I like about 75% of it quite a bit.
The Sims - And now we have dreamy, but not boisterous. Hm. It's a piano piece, which gives it points, but it's not one that I can really get into, even though I can give it props for being technically sound. It just doesn't scream "vgm" to me at all, or really scream at all. Sorry to Sims fans, but I gotta go for boisterous here.

Mad Rat Dead - Starts with some neat piano, and then tries to Necrodancer, and then back to piano, and I have whiplash now, but then it tries to put instruments over the piano and turns into Castlevania, and oh no I've gone cross-eyed. I don't like the parts between the piano much, but the parts where it's layered in or taking center stage are just gravy. Moment of honesty here: Heartless Being was the first MRD song I'd heard, and it's another one where the first impression kinda skewed me on the rest of the soundtrack. Neuchatel is pretty good, more than my initial rating during pre-listens indicates.
Aurora Memoria - Perhaps I'm getting fatigued. I listened to this several times tonight and it just hasn't clicked for me at all. Also getting a weird sense of deja vu when I say that the heavy electronics throughout try to carry the song, but didn't quite capture it for me (a bit more of whatever plucked string near the end probably would've done it better.)

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[Brackets.] - Endless backlog. Presume I'm playing something MMO with some Indies on the side.