Board 8 > [VGMC] d29: Undersea Palace vs Move Me, Battle 2 (FF4) vs B.T. Dutch

(+) Yeah! (+)

Welcome to today's topic for Video Game Music Contest 14, a tournament of the best tracks from games, as decided upon by you, the voters.

Links:
Contest info - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VNrPnFRI7nJ4PqFiURBW0NWqxvXiuasoq8Sn_O169ss/edit#gid=320804650
Bracket - http://www.bracketmaker.com/tlist.cfm?tid=473292
Discussion and results thread - https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/78524521
Bracket playlist - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW9O9mntH1REnVI_W6yELaDP6Zac8b0Wq
ToC playlist - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW9O9mntH1RE-TQMj19D0k5nm-0zeH12J
VGMC compability sheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lpX4faqnn_geI0y4i6MrZ2AXpV6SWXoWrIA6_eyx-yM/edit

Rules:
- Listen to both of the songs. Links have conveniently been

Ridge Racer Type 4 - Move Me
Final Fantasy IV - Battle 2
Atelier Ayesha - Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Autumn is the best song from today, it's epic


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Undersea Palace
B.T. Dutch
Memories of You



Betraying one of my supports here, but i'm feeling the strangeness and intensity of Dutch more than Battle 2 tonight.
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Move Me
Battle 2
Memories of You

if the hidden truth had all of the trial theme in it it would be the best ct song

also sad about the lack of lavos theme

Ocean Palace (34th) vs Move Me (21st)
Battle 2 (40th) vs B.T. Dutch (22nd)
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn [36th//26th] vs Kimi no Kioku [31st//24th]

this match is a round 4 match fuck you
this match is a round 4 match fuck you
oh there we go a round 2 match

every song today is awesome i hate it this isn't supposed to happen this early grrrrr. no writeups cause i'm not feeling great at all but yeah i LOVE all of these songs a lot pretty much lol. oh yeah and i'm flipping on autumn flower even though i constantly YELL AT IT for KILLING THINGS I LIKE but yeah idk i'm feeling it more right now. would be happy even going 0/3 today.... but also sad going 0/3. but also sad going 3/3. fuck

B.T. Dutch > Move Me > Ocean Palace > Battle 2 > Kimi no Kioku >=< Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Move Me
B.T. Dutch
Memories of You

Undersea Palace
Battle 2
Memories of You

Feel like Boss Battle 2 should be on the poll. It's great.

Undersea Palace is pretty cool. There's a combination remix with an FFVII song called Cid Sends a Dream to the Undersea Palace that I like. Move Me's pretty nothing.

aww yeah Battle 2. Best FFIV song right here. Fell in love with it playing SMRPG back in the day. There are G Darius songs I like. This is definitely not one of them.

Battle 2 > Undersea Palace > Move Me > B.T. Dutch
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first for Magus

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Undersea Palace
B.T. Dutch
Memories of You

Move Me
Battle 2
Memories of You

Undersea Palace vs Move Me: Undersea Palace is ok. Its pleasant but I don't see myself really listening to this a lot or going crazy for. Move Me is also another song I don't see myself going crazy for, but I know quite a few people will. Move Me is alright, its fun and is honestly something I come back to every once in awhile. The best way I could describe this track is that it makes you feel like falling, which is a cool feeling.

Battle 2 vs B.T. Dutch: Battle 2 is a classic and a banger all the way. I like the track a lot and while it isn't my favorite FF its still very good. B.T. Dutch is weird but its the good kind of weird that I can vibe to a bit. The industrial feel to it is really cool as well as those ghostly wails that pop up every now and then. I like the track but aside from that vibe the rest of the song is very dry.

Invitation Flower ~ Autumn vs Memories of You: Xylophone Atelier returns again and that is still the only thing this track has going for it. It feels like your usual battle theme which is why it can't even compare to Memories of You. Memories of You has that chill flow to it that is something you can't really forget, and is just overall something really nice and fun to listen to.

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Undersea Palace
B.T. Dutch
Memories of You

slept a bit on move me till now but undersea palace is also strong. good match
battle 2 is a worthy song but bt dutch is too much for it
thought for sure i'd pick autumn here but i guess not. i shouldn't like memories of you as much as i do, i suppose this is just what happens when a song in a genre i like unrelated to vgm and also don't really listen to that often happens to be here. keep misreading my thoughts on it because it conflicts with my "vgm appreciation" mindframe or something

Chrono Trigger - Undersea Palace
Final Fantasy IV - Battle 2
Persona 3 - Memories of You
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Undersea Palace
BT Dutch
autumn

Easy selections in each, though I like all 6 tracks I think (battle 2 + BT Dutch are the weakest two though).

i dunno i'm in a mood for weird or something.
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Undersea Palace
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

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Undersea Palace
B.T. Dutch
Memories of You

Move Me
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Move Me
Battle 2
Memories of You
---

Me
Dutch
You
---

Move Me
B.T. Dutch
Memories of You

Match 1:
First Faint Dream and Sky Tower then Midnight Lady and Thermosphere and now this... Why are we getting so many difficult matches in round 1?
Aight, well I'd be lying if I said Move Me doesn't win by a huge margin for me but I'm sad Undersea Palace comes up so early because I really like that track too. I don't actually know the in-game context because I haven't played Chrono Trigger (yet, I own it though) but this song sounds incredibly accurate to what I'd imagine the music playing in an "Undersea Palace" would sound like. Those heavy serious piano and the synths gives of a very menacing feel to the track that sells the "Undersea" part while those majestic strings and trumpets make you feel the "Palace" part, as in a place that would be inhabited by a powerful ruler of some sort. Composer really nailed the atmosphere on that one.

Move Me is a goddamn banger though. I'm a sucker for both drumbeats and bass and this song has both LOL. What I really really like about this song is how it lets each of its assets breath one at a time, there's sections where the drums take the forefront, others where the synths do and other where the guitar do, etc. Each instrument has its moment and it really lets you experience the full timbre of the song.

Oh yeah I almost forgot, where the hell is Remains of the Factory for the poll @azuarc ? That song is great...

Match 2:
Battle 2 is great and all, it really is, but I also really like song with drilling noises and over saturated guitars that somehow manages to sounds groovy. I'm not sure if this is a novelty effect thing or something like that but I'll have to go with that lol, gotta follow trust gut feelings sometimes.

ToC Bonus Match:
Yeah, alright. No comment lol. To be fair I already kinda knew I was going with Kimi no Kioku even before getting into this match. It's just really good.
That Atelier track is pretty sweet though! I like that piano (WOW, really elaborate review right there, I know.).

Conclusion:
Yeah in conclusion every song today was really good. Shame how the songs I like seem to very often go against each other so early.

Memories of You > Move Me > Undersea Palace >> Invitation Flower ~ Autumn >> B.T. Dutch > Battle 2

Ridge Racer Type 4 - Move Me
G-Darius - B.T. Dutch
Atelier Ayesha - Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Match 1: Undersea Palace has really cool sounds, especially for a SNES soundchip, but musically it just sounds very simple. Jazzstep is a pretty cool/underrepresented genre, I like Move Me!

Match 2: Ugghhh cruel match. I really like Battle 2 (but less so than Final Fantasy VI - Battle which is what I'm always expecting it to turn into when I hear that intro), and B.T. Dutch is also great. I'd take Battle 2 over any of the other songs today, but B.T. Dutch is so absolutely crazy and I love it so much!! YOU YOU YOU YOU

ToC: IF~A is decent, still feel like Memories of You is one of the worst retirees.

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Move Me
Battle 2
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn
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Undersea Palace
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Undersea Palace starts out with a real nice dark+mysterious vibe, but I get a bit less interested when the flute starts at :30. But as it takes a turn to the darker it gets better again, and 1:05 is nice. But it's not "play it 4 times in a row" nice. That's like a pet peeve in music for me, I don't like it when songs repeat sections more than twice with 0 changes, if you're going to repeat something that many times it better really really impress me! I just hate it when songs overly rely on the "play something a multiple of 4 times" thing it feels so lazy to me. This song ultimately doesn't overly rely on it but it did rely on it once so...! Well I say that but it's still a pretty nice dark+mysterious song.
Wow for some reason all of a sudden I really don't feel like continuing write ups today but we will see. "Move Me" is a fun little jazzy-atmosphere track. Except, well, halfway through it does that "repeat a section 4 times doing nothing else" thing I was just complaining about! The rest of the song is just okay though, other than the breakdown part near the end which is real nice, and nothing else to really complain about. But really this becomes a difficult match to vote on! These are both okay songs that make use of my 4x repetitions pet peeve! Ehh, right now I'm leaning more towards the distinct dark+mysterious vibes that Undersea Palace gives off.

Battle 2 is a good active battle song. A pretty famous tune. No complaints here though. B.T.Dutch has oh no a crowd! BTDutch is wild, it takes over 40 seconds to get to something I could consider a "note" beyond sound effects. This is such a weird experimental piece! I love weird! it's bold and daring. why is there a guy saying YOU you (u) what is it about me that this song is about I'm not dutch. yeah its OH NO VOCALES but I'll give it an aside this time because it's just so strange and kind of makes me laugh and also not terribly focused upon. I like how there's like a little musical tone behind the "You" sample too. This song makes good usage of mechanical sounds & percussion and is decent machinery tense atmosphere stuff, and explores a variety of different moodsets of that theme, BT Dutch can get my vote here because I appreciate weird experimental stuff! Really though good stuff in the main matches today, any 2 of the 4 advancing would be decent advancers.

so I didn't even realize we had entered toc Round 2 last match because I mostly skipped the first day's match so they were both technically sort of new songs to me. Memories of You sounds like it could be pretty good stuff to me if it didn't have vocal focus but it does so Invitation Flower becomes an easy choice. It feels like the song gets a lot slower with the piano stuff it does when there are no vocals but I'm also not really sure if that's really the case but eh

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Move Me
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

undersea palace is pretty good but it can't beat my all time favorite ridge racist song

is darius music just all like this or something

i listened to ayesha back in like december i thought it was pretty good

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Chrono Trigger - Undersea Palace
G-Darius - B.T. Dutch
Atelier Ayesha - Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Hm. Move Me is definitely not my first choice for a RRT4 nom. Would have handily picked something like Urban Fragments or Pearl Blue Soul over CT.

Much respect for FFIV, but it's been totally schooled here by one of my favorite tracks in the whole bracket. At some point, I want to do a VGM ranking thread--any takers for that might be interested to know that music that sounds like this is what I vibe with best.

Yeah alright, I like the dang Ayesha song. In this specific case, it's a really 'natural' palette cleanser after the mechanical madness of B.T. Dutch. Shoji Meguro continues to be Shoji Meguro.

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ZelRaat posted...

Oh yeah I almost forgot, where the hell is Remains of the Factory for the poll @azuarc ? That song is great...

@ZelRaat I included the options I thought were mostly likely to be requested. There's only like 3 songs that absolutely must be in that poll, and then the rest are like throwing darts at the OST because everybody loves Chrono Trigger music -- and often different Chrono Trigger music. Tyrano Lair, for instance, is a real reach, but I know at least a couple people have mentioned it as their favorite, so I tossed it on there. (Apparently those people aren't around any more.)

Remains of the Factory is certainly a song that I've heard praised by a select few and would make a more extended list, but the reality is I probably had at least 5 other tracks I would have added before even thinking about RotF.

Other snubs, roughly in order:
Chrono Trigger (main theme)
The Brink of Time
Peaceful Days
Battle 1
Black Dream
Silent Light
Robo's Theme
Remains of the Factory
Kingdom Trial
At the Bottom of the Night
Boss Battle 1
Guardia Millenial Fair

and that's just songs I've heard other people speak highly of. Two of my favorites aren't even listed here. There are 64 tracks on the OST and about 2/3 of them could find their way onto a poll like this.

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Undersea Palace
Battle 2
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

with apologies to Move Me

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Move Me
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Move Me's really got style, I'm impressed! This could get me into the cool kids with baggy t-shirts listening to breakbeat-side of vgm
BT Dutch is being very accusatory, someone needs to teach it proper manners
If Memories kills both Black Song and Autumn I will cry

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Undersea Palace
B.T. Dutch
Memories of You

Move Me
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

With apologies to Undersea Palace.

Move Me
B.T. Dutch
Memories of You

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Ridge Racer Type 4 - Move Me
Final Fantasy IV - Battle 2
Persona 3 - Memories of You

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Move Me
Battle 2
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Can't really enjoy B.T. Dutch's collection of sound effects, though it is certainly interesting.

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Chrono Trigger - Undersea Palace
G-Darius - B.T. Dutch

Persona 3 - Memories of You
---

nothing here this is just for filler so that the black
Memories of You alternate link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-CSZDbKuL4
bars call greater attention to this part of the post

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Move Me
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Really wanted to vote for one of the SNES themes but their opponents are just too good.

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Move Me
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

---

Move Me
Battle 2
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

---

move me
bt dutch
alluring flower

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Undersea Palace
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Undersea Palace is my 58th favorite in the contest! I never owned an SNES actually, but i'm still nostalgic for CT music in general. Close friend of mine in High School was obsessed with the soundtrack and I got very into listening to ocremix remixes of it / vgmusic.com midis / actual soundtrack / etc. Played the DS version later and it's a cool game (i actually technically never beat it shhhhhhh, though i know how the game goes i've watched enough playthroughs at this point haha). I should probably play more RPGs, especially with how many i like the soundtracks to! This song touches a lot of things I love about Mitsuda's style and used to be one of my favorites from the ost (now it's not, but I do still love it). In the past the appeal to me came from that starting ostinato, delay echo-y saw-ish synth, also the fact that it's in 6/4-12/8 or however you wanna count it is something I always found cool. Now I'd say those aspects have little to do with my fondness for this. The reason I'm so into this NOW is mostly the part without the synth ostinato, and unrelated to the rhythms the song's doing. :50 - 1:25 is one of my favorite bits of the soundtrack! Mitsuda's one of the most well-known examples of a composer with the exact tonality sense i like most, tonal center changes like every chord change in a row and melody makes what would be jarring flow beautifully instead (and contrasted with actual tense transposition part for the last bit of that section). Very PMD-adjacent style~! That exact way creating emotional intensity (:50-1:05), unpredictability of the next chord but making it still make sense through the other layers, that's what i want to feel. Somehow more viscerally emotionally powerful to me than any other way of making notes be in a song, and CT pretty consistently nails that for me! but that moment in this song is just one of my favorite examples of that compositional trait in the soundtrack. oh and i always loved pitched down reverby/echoy metallic clanking sounds in music of this era, one of my favorite 90s music tropes and this is full of that sound!!

Move Me is my 104th favorite in the contest! y2k era breakbeat in a way i like, but there's tons of music with this aesthetic (that i love) that i love more than this. most things i have to praise about this could apply to other executions of them i'm more fond of than this example, i'm just listing what defines the style really: breakbeat, chill epiano modern jazz harmonies, slap bass, punchy electronic effects (reversed effects, sharp cutoff on samples, pitch shifting) and general focus on presenting interesting timbres. all great things to me! just wish this example of that stuff stood out to me more. I think the most relaxing music to me in the world is actually stuff like this, stuff with frantic elements (breakbeat/IDM (interesting drums music) drums especially) but the actual foreground is chill lounge chords and stuff

90s

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Battle 2 is my 175th favorite in the contest! I wish i liked nobou uematsu more...he's such a beloved composer with a really cool set of influences! Igor Stravinsky and 70s Prog rock!?! but even literally junichi masuda presents his intentions in a less straightforward way than uematsu. it's the lack of subtly, and overclarity, that bothers me about a good chunk of his stuff. I always know exactly what it's trying to do, and what it's going to do, and it will be presented in the most plain, unsubtle, toy keyboard educational object way possible. When he's flaunting his influences loudly though (OWA with stravinsky, Dancing Mad Part 4 with "prog") then i'm a huge fan, he takes the things he's influenced by in directions other people often restrain back from and i value that. this doesn't really exert the side of him i like though, and mostly it's that lack of subtlety (especially because of format/era) bleeding through too visibly for me to like it. i don't hate it, but in the end i just find it boring

B.T. Dutch is my 8th favorite in the contest! This was a 10/10 at one point. I'm only knocking it down because i feel the standards of mine that put it there are different now. This appeals to me less than many things i "only" give 9.9...but that's all just arbitrary rating number shit. I LOVE this song! YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU. Every time I hear crowd noises now even just being in a crowd in real life i just think "wow this is a nice cover of B.T. Dutch these guys are singing". The industrial and "reality has been distorted" aesthetic this soundtrack has is very deeply important to me, and I consider this one of the best examples of it of all time, one of the first examples of something I'd put in that category of weird i ever heard too. I value how it retains that sort of minimal atmospheric dark sensibility, while also still being musically interesting! Transposing chord stabs is one of my favorite things in music. I also love how much this compares constant 16ths and triplets within the same space, actually basically not ever at the same time, but the comparison felt is there and it just FEELS cool, GROOVY (groove coaster by zuntata) somehow. I LOVE REVERSED SOUNDS uooY. G-Darius was one of my first newfound soundtrack discoveries i made from board 8 (Kimera II became my "new favorite song" once i got into it from these contests), still about 20th place in my big personal ranking of fav game soundtracks! B.T. Dutch is my favorite after Kimera II, but it's close! G-Darius one of the only soundtracks with multiple 10/10s for me if i'm in a mood where i'm still calling this a 10/10!

B.T. Dutch more like B.T. DUTCH

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Invitation Flower ~ Autumn (8th) / Memories of You (46th). yeah those rankings still hold true. Very easy choice here. Other persona picks vs. other atelier picks might be harder decisions though.
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Undersea Palace
Battle 2
Memories of You

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Chrono Trigger - Undersea Palace
Final Fantasy IV - Battle 2
Atelier Ayesha - Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

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Move Me
Battle 2
Memories of You

There are several CT songs that would handily get my vote here - this one's okay but doesn't do much for me.
Oh yeah I remember B.T. Dutch from BOST. Not really my kind of weird. Battle 2 is very nostalgic but still holds up pretty well.

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Ridge Racer Type 4 - Move Me
Final Fantasy IV - Battle 2
Persona 3 - Memories of You

Pleasantly surprised to see a FFIV song in this contest, and the boss theme is great, but I don't know why a longer version wasn't selected

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Undersea Palace
Battle 2
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Undersea Palace (8.5) / Move Me (5.5)
Battle 2 (9.0) / B.T. Dutch (8.5)

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Move Me
B.T. Dutch
Memories of You
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KCF0107 posted...

Me
Dutch
You

(this is not Haste's votes)

How dare you Dutch me.

PIayer_0 posted...

BT Dutch is being very accusatory, someone needs to teach it proper manners

Made me laugh.

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Undersea Palace
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

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Undersea Palace
B.T. Dutch
Invitation Flower ~ Autumn

Ridge Racer Type 4 - Move Me
G-Darius - B.T. Dutch
Persona 3 - Memories of You

MATCH 1

I'm honestly pretty meh on Undersea Palace. A lot of it's not very outstanding. 0:50-1:05 is pretty much the one standout part of this song, which doubles as my favorite part of the song. Other than that, nothing really jumps out at me as being cool or interesting. Definitely much better Chrono Trigger songs out there like Secret of the Forest and To Far Away Times, neither of which have retired yet!

I don't remember a lot of the Ridge Racer songs I've listened to being very noteworthy, but Move Me is a big exception. I think this song is really cool! Love those chill chords in the intro. 7th chords are great and very pleasant to hear in music. The electric guitar over all the breakbeat stuff's a really neat sound when executed well like in this song. The softer synth and flute parts are also a neat contrast with the breakbeats. I've gone through some of Type 4's soundtrack and I only remember this and one other song being a standout song that I really enjoy, so I'd love to hear more stuff from this game that has those things that I like.

MATCH 2

Battle 2's a pretty groovy battle theme. Decent melody and a cool bassline from 0:43-0:48. Despite all that, though, it still gives me this feeling of "generic RPG battle music" that turns me away from the song a little. Not too much, though, and it's definitely better than most songs that give me this feeling.

Those of you who have been paying attention to my writeups may have noticed that on numerous occasions, I've said how I usually dislike weird atonal stuff. If you've been paying really close attention, you may remember that I've hinted at one song in this contest where that dislike gets thrown out the window. B.T. Dutch is that song. In fact, I actually like it quite a bit! Not even the reaction I expected to have when I got to this song in the nomination phase, especially since I have a bit of a track record with not liking the weirder Darius songs. For whatever reason, this song happens to hit a lot of sweet spots with its weirdness where I can appreciate it but it doesn't get to the point where I find it abrasive. I think with this song, it's the atmosphere that these industrial sounds create. It feels like you're in a sci-fi horror movie being chased by some rogue machine or cyborg that's gone haywire. I just imagine all these sounds in this song coming from this creature while shouting "YOUYOUYOUYOU" at you as it hunts you down. Yeah, in short, these sounds are really cool and so is the repeating electric guitar that shows up. I've also come to realize that Adam from G-Darius is another weird song that I enjoy, so there's another surprise on top of this one for those that know what my usual taste in music is like.

MATCH 3

Really strong ToC match! I really like both songs, but Memories of You has a stronger pull for me.

Memories of You > Invitation Flower ~ Autumn = Move Me > B.T. Dutch > Battle 2 > Undersea Palace