Board 8 > Mycro ranks the 278 VGM tracks nominated by BOARD EIGHT [rankings] 3 -(TOP_100)-

(+) Yeah! (+)

I don't recall how divergent our tastes are overall, but I know there were a number of songs I appreciated and used the uploads for that were on your taztastic channel series.

75rd
Game: Spyro the Dragon
Title: Artisan's Home
Composer: Stewart Copeland
Nominator: @Mr_Lasastryke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqzRrSaYBzs

i'm spyro the dragon

Spyro....the soundtrack is something that seems like I wouldn't like it and would find it boring, reuses the same very standard and simple progressions: ones I will regularly complain about in other contexts. And the emotional tone is usually a neutral-happy blues scale zone i tend to feel nothing from. While these things are actively detrimental to my interest in other contexts, in spyro music im just neutral to these factors

But there's a few things that make me instead VERY consistently VERy SPECIFICALLY like spyro music:

1. The instrumentation! Wow! Did you know I love synthesizers from the 80s and 90s? Well this game is pretty in your face about using those! Nice crystalline electric pianos and injections of just generally neat sounds I like (both lots of kurzweil k2000-2500 and spectrasonics distorted reality sounds. Both among my favorite sound sources from the period)

2. The rhythms. The soundtrack is by a drummer so maybe rhythmic focus isn't too surprising. Almost every track has something at least mildly interesting to me going on in that department, sometimes pretty subtle but other times very clear

Spyro is a game series i would say that half the reason I rank it as high as I do is because I like the "feel" and "atmosphere" of playing it. And the majority of what sets that tone in any game for me is the music.

Collectathon is a genre I love but I need to be invested in the mood the game presents to me to genuinely get into it. A much bigger factor than actual technical things about the game design.

In the past I said collectathons are the genre I'm into with the lowest correlation with my taste in vgm. While this is true--almost every other genre of game that I like has a higher % of soundtracks i love--collectathon is also the genre where the music that Is there seems to have the greatest impact on my enthusiasm for the game.

Part of this is probably because I tend to approach this type of game in almost like a casual relaxed like...cookie clicker type way. The feeling of getting higher % completion gradually by just wandering around and finding things is more about "feeling" i realize. I'm not as interested in the technical gameplay structure with this sorta thing as I am with other genres I like like metroidvanias or myst clones. The important factor is how it "feels" to wander around this particular world and stumble on ways to increase the count of whatever items are being collected.

I infamously can not stand banjo kazooie because of the music--a game that on paper lines up more with the sort of structure of gameplay I'm interested in (convoluted, basically). Spyro is so much simpler yet all it takes is me actually being immersed in the damp foggy ps1 mood of this ost, to make it jump 100 slots higher, somewhere into my list of favorite games to play or watch at any given time.

Another part of it is probably the odd mismatch between setting and music style. Its like...medival castle dragon land, and various "exotic world cultures being explored" but then you're hearing electric pianos and electronic loops over sorta funky drums or whatever. Yet this isn't unfitting at all. The music perfectly compliments the way the game looks and feels to me, even though it has very little to do with the themes the game portrays. . .the odd atmosphere created by this unexpected combo just keeps getting me coming back to this game and wanting more

It represents the world in a more abstract way. The timbres paint the colors and geometry that makes everything up, or how open or closed a space is. Its kinda like how super monkey ball music instantly evokes "floating platform in the sky" but if you didn't know what the music was you'd probably never guess the ost would have anything like the atmosphere it does

Its weird, I don't rank the spyro ost that high on its own, but as far as establishing the feeling of a game I love to play, the music is nearly the entire reason I love this entire game 100 slots more than many contemporaries in the style

Anyways, I would definitely not care about this game very much if the soundtrack was different from what it is. And i would be sad that I don't, because I like dragons and clearly seem to have almost as much of a thing for reptiles that are purple as I do weasels that are teal.....if It didn't have this soundtrack I would be sad that I want to like this game but couldn't get into it because the soundtrack did not sound like rotating polygonal gems. luckily it does sound like rotating polygonal gems so i am able to be a big fan of a game where i can play as a purple dragon that i love!

Artisan's home is difficult to talk about as an individual track since so much of why I'm into it is the abstract feeling it gives me that i mentioned above. But there's a few very specific bits that define this track to me.

Pretty much the whole track fixates on rhythms that aren't beat one. The melodic synth harp / synth bell layers are like entirely on the "and" beats and you almost have to work to not get turned around and think they're hitting on beats 1/2/3/4 instead. Gives me a feeling of lopsided but forward motion that perpetually pushes me forward thru the track.

The bits where you hear the full chords hits on 2 and 4 only further makes this lopsided and easy to lose beat 1, pretty much every beat has more emphasis than the first, yet it doesn't feel like it's this crazy at all with how smooth this relentless syncopation is presented

My favorite bit though is the groups of 3/16ths in the triangle at 1:00, it just floats over everything else unrelated to the motion of everything around it and if my vantage point shifts it can grasp my entire focus instead and like...become a new totally different tempo.

This song is honestly strangely virgil donati-ish rhythmically. They're both drummers-as-composers but the personalities of the two are pretty much complete opposites (iirc Stewart Copeland may have even specifically made fun of virgil at some point? Or at least he said he's skeptical of drummers that he sees as showing off technical complexity and sees the place of drumming as purely not that (which obviously i disagree with philosophically if forced to apply to other people, though I think it has interesting results as he applies it to his own style))

But 3ven with that in mind, Copeland is not simple. His complexity is just very subtle. He makes incredibly unusual grooves, but they still function as "grooves" rather than math puzzles. But you can still make them math puzzles if you want! I mean I already noted some of that above!

The donati version of this song would have every rhythmically odd thing in your face with perfectly synced-to-drums keyboard parts deliberately enforcing a spastic jaggedness that makes it clear whenever there's anything even slightly weird about these rhythms

But Copeland wants to create a groove while still doing the same sorts of multilayered mathematically tricky stuff donati would do, and the difference in terms of how it sounds between the approaches from these pretty opposite drummers is pretty striking to me!

I've realized how much I appreciate subtlety these past many years, so I have a respect for this approach I might not have had in the past too. Its...honestly my whole "what do I think makes a good dungeon theme" conversation again. Very non-distracting song to the point a lot of people find this ost totally unmemorable and dull; but at least to me, if I tune my focus into the music deliberately there's always enough going on for me to pick out something different each time and never get bored

[continued...]

[...continued]

It really helps to me that its very easy to get lost in focus on any given specific layer, with each of those specific layers making the whole song sound totally rhythmically different from each other:
1. Those chords on 2 and 4 making it feel like the pulse is in one place (starting on beat 2 rather than 1)
2. The groups of 3 in the triangle at 1:00 or in a few other places on other instruments just barely not jumping into the illusion of a totally different tempo
3. The melodic layers all on the "&" beats basically offsetting the whole song by an eighth note
4. Or taking it in all at once, and feeling beat 1 where it actually is, which id say is something you can only really naturally do if you're not thinking, and completely 'feeling' the groove instead

Maybe the fact that the music itself works this way, something focused much more on an abstract feel at the forefront. And can only be properly comprehended if you shift your perception that way, despite the fact that there Is an unusual intricacy beneath to explore if you wanted to//////....and the fact that that lines up exactly with the much more "the 'feel' is more important than anything else" way I approach this game genre. Maybe that alignment is why this game<->soundtrack combo clicks with me so much. The music is designed for the same mindset I want to put myself in when I am playing this type of game

I'll still never forgive stewart Copeland for his terrible comments about proggy/showy drummers though, even if i appreciate the way he applies that mindset to his own work

wait WHAT THE FUCK stewart copeland was in Curved Air? ? ? EDDIE JOBSON was in that band and i ALMOST linked this eddie jobson song as another example of a song that i like where it's easy to zone out and lose track of beat one because the whole melody is on all the off beats at so many of the parts
(eddie jobson - green face, i nominated this sonf for raetsel this year!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JE0g8sUPCQ

this was the writeup i was looking forward to reading the most because i was curious what bands/composeres/artists you would compare stewart copeland to, if any. i think he has an incredibly distinct style (for reasons you described) that i really love but i can't really think of other artists that sound like him and it seems like you agree that his music is pretty unique. yes, there's obviously elements that are reminiscent of virgil donati but if donati would make this song it would sound very different, as you pointed out.

my brother compared copeland's music to the obscure solo stuff by the keyboard player of a dutch progressive rock band - it's so obscure that it's not even on youtube (maybe i should try to upload it myself sometime) - but EVEN THEN i think he was just talking about his use of synthesizers and simple "happy blues scale" progressions because that guy's music is nowhere nearly as rhythmically complex as copeland's.

(also, i didn't know that copeland was being condescending about proggy/showy drummers. that's disappointing for sure though if you listen to his own drumming, it does make sense that he's not as much into that style of drumming, like you said.)

i will comment more later!

74nd
Game: La-Mulana
Title: Grand History
Composer: Takumi Naramura
Nominator: @pyresword
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTLjlUIDI_U

a big part of why i like this song is probably basically just because of associating it with my longest time internet friend (kopaz formerly known as "game bop" to many of those around here).

one of my more "embarrassing" moments looking back is this weird assertiveness that MSX's sound format was FM synth... and even arguing with people trying to tell me it wasn't fm. because it's not, it's wavetable (which is where all the sounds are made from very short tiny wave 'samples' that are so short that when looped they sound like buzzes and beeps) lol; which is like, i mean sometimes it can sound indistinguishable from fm but it's not the same thing (note: i STILL sometimes make this mistake, see the recent gradius writeup!!!). La-mulana is really good at handling that limitation set and making it sound way fuller than a lot of things in this style for sure; it feels like a lot of care went into defining a distinct sound pallete that sounds way different from other stuff made with the same limits

the composition of this song is super bouncy and fun; but pretty much immediately evokes the contrasting "grand" and "adventure" to me at the same time. i don't need to know what this game is to start to picture weathered bricks and fancy stone columns in an impressive ancient ruins scenery set in front of me. something about the melody line, and the triplet rhythms, both of those things kinda evoke specific instrumentation that feels like this song WOULD be on "ancient ruins instruments" instead of "wavetable synthesis" if it were not limited (i have no idea what the other version of this sounds like, lets find out if i'm right!!) ((what the fuck this barely even feels like the same song at all to me lol, this is like, rondo of blood 90s funk world, rather than the GRAND song this is. i'm ok with that but for entirely different reasons)) (((anyways there are definitely 'ethnic' instruments in here so i was right about at least that)))

anyway...i know what i picture when i hear these things and it works.

of course if you know me you know i like intricate rhythms usually, this has a lot of subtle instances of that. the whole thing toys with a mixture of some elements that are shuffle feel and others that are straight 16ths, and others that are triplets! :57 or so being a good example of some of rapid alternation between bouncy and rigid. this makes the whole thing a bit loose, but i like how it gives a more impactful significance to the more rigid layers when they come in, i think if the whole thing were as rigid as the triplets moments at like :50 and 1:00 or the stubborn hits on even quarter notes at the start, those parts wouldn't put ancient ruins pictures in my head and i'd instead just think of it as a computer song. it's ironic that, but you need the contrast of the more loose organic stuff for the heavier simple hits to actually "feel" simple. and the simplicity of the simple elements is what makes it feel like GRAND ANCIENT HISTORY; and i like the simple layers of this song (what?!)! but i definitely wouldn't like them if they were the only thing in the song, because then they wouldn't even feel as simple and primal as they feel in this song. they only feel as ANCIENTly simple if they're able to exist with the less simple elements as a backdrop for their comparison

the melody is catchy and sounds like a folk tune in some imaginary lost city some guy would make up and pretend is in africa, all the little trills and flourishes and slight pitch bends and all that make it feel like it's being played by an instrument too, which is very important for coming across as ancient history when the music is clearly computer generated.

that was our EIGHTH ELIMINATION

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125th)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221st)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5th)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625th)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266th)

you expected to go out very low, and weren't wrong. back in "the day" were were like ENEMIES but i think these days we're less opposed to each other. we won't vote particularly similarly but i wouldn't call us total opposites from each other, even in 2018 we were starting to see eye-to-eye at least sometimes. honestly the attitude of your noms was "right" but you just sorta got unlucky with stuff like, that gurumin song which was basically PERFECT except that one part i really didn't like (that you also didn't even like) that brought it down 200 slots, and stuff. i think if you took a similar approach but with different songs at another time, you'd wind up with a way higher placement and the darts just didnt hit quite right this time

guessing games and ranking topics get me thinking about what i do have in common with people, even those i think of as the least similar to me and i've pinpointed a few things with you. the biggest is definitely an attraction to percussive instrumentation. even the whole "banjo kazooie" clash it's like...i LOVE marimba/xylophone, i just dont like the way it's used in that game, and stuff (tho also i like that ost more than i used to; spoilers).

seeing you really excited about songs with tuned percussion, and as a result having your interest piqued at the same parts as me: that has been a neat realization because like that was always there, i just didn't realize it until recently. that gurumin song is actually a perfect example of that

oh and all the slow emotion vn songs that i didn't used to like are pretty great to me these days, so that's a thing too

also i started liking anime more. so there's that too haha. it's not just a mutual interest in 'world music' being recent, but even the tropes associated with that; melodic anime ops that sound like the anime composers we both like. but also the slower emotional new age-y stuff (a still world) I LOVE JOE HISAIASHI and all that. your anime guessing games were all-the-way-through stuff that exposed me to lots of fun new things i really liked! and these traits did show up in your noms

we're still definitely among more opposed tastes in this community, but your noms this year and just random other stuff sprinkled around shows me we have a lot more in common than we'd think at a glance! thanks for submitting what you did and i hope 2 see u around nexxt time i do something like this

73th
Game: Star Shooter
Title: Stage Extra Boss
Composer: Kamome sano
Nominator: @Prody_Parrot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ4J8fpmasQ

and following that, now this is one of the most anti-pyre songs nominated for me probably. anyways uhhh; i'm finding this one quite difficult to talk about. I think that''s basically because even back when this was nominated i would've probably said something like "this is more similar to my older taste in music than current but i still like it" but that's even MORE true now. the appeal of this song for me is largely "it reminds me of chaotic rhythm game music and i like chaotic rhythm game music" more than any specific thing it does

but even so, there's actually some ways i appreciate this a lot more than i would've even back then: it's only relatively recently that i started really liking things like "pitched up vocals" and "rap" and "excited vocal samples in songs(naganuma" or whatever. i can be vaguely picky about it, but :22 is exactly what i want things like that to be.

i love this osng
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrmHGCwCZaw

this star shooter song has very...Broken Breakbeats. it's like you take the concept of a breakbeat being chopped up and chop /that/ up. i love the mess it creates, and it definitely makes me call back to things i said about norio hanzawa and how important that sorta loose and messy desync can be to me. one thing i didn't addess when i was talking about it in earlier writeups though, was how much that feeling is made more powerful when the instruments displaying imperfect alignment are ones typically associated with griddedness. so breakbeats are absolutely that, i mean ANYTHING electronic is that, but especially "electronic drums" (of course a major element of classic jungle music is sorta the sloppiness of it; but also a lot of that is actually secretly tracker music written in the most gridded of ways! so both extremes exist: regardless, that's why i like jungle music in the first place and also this song. elements you'd expect to be mechanically precise actually being very definitely not that) ((OH and i LOVE the awkward pause at the loop point.........))

this song might be a pretty good showcase about where the looseness of breakbeat manipulation can surprisingly really make a song for me:
https://soundcloud.com/shnabubula/dial-it-up-a-notch

i think most of the things i get really excited about in this star shooter song happen for like a split second; i don't necessarily specifically find myself attracted to their spontaneity, just that the particular things this shoots at you "randomly" are THE things i find most musically or texturally cool:
-the fading in and cutting off choir-like pad toward the start
-the split second plasticky hit at :35
-those chill chord hits at :36
-another chill chord at :45
-piano fall down the stairs at :47
-and another echoy chill extended chord at :48
-the glitchy piano stab around 1:23
-the arpeggios in the pizz strings that sound like pokemon mystery dungeon (this is throughout the song but only for a second at a time usually)

there's a much bigger list that could be made, but honestly if anything i wish these things were longer and more the focus of the track. i suppose maybe i like them very specifically because they're the reprieve from something otherwise so goofy! and my mood is more like, all the other things, but the contrast and flipping between chill and manic is very important here.

Toxtricity posted...

back in "the day" were were like ENEMIES

Sometimes I think a lot of this is less difference in taste (though this was more true then also), but just that when I first started participating in VGMC I was kind of like the stereotypical annoying internet commenter who immediately got upset whenever someone made the grievous mistake of not liking something that I liked. I hope I wasn't too obnoxious, but I probably was >.>

Not gonna lie though I thought I was already eliminated before the hiatus and that you just hadn't been listing the full elimination ranking in your posts, so that's nice.

72th
Game: Perfect Collection Ys IV Dawn of Ys
Title: Romun Empire
Composer: Falcom Sound Team J.D.K. (Atsushi Shirakawa), Ryo Yonemitsu
Nominator: @JONALEON1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKSRF2AtdfQ

I think most people here probably know my opinion on Ryo yonemitsu / pc engine cd era falcom music. It is very positive. It was my introduction to the sound team back in '07-'08 or so. And I remember feeling nothing other than enthusiastically about it. Even trying to push it into people's minds and no one seemed to quite care / people actively dismissed it as Not Good. Later falcom music got quite regularly talked about on the board, but a totally different more modern era that I wasn't even familiar with.

I did not like the non-yonemitsu stuff that I kept being exposed to at the time. it fueled the fire that when I did try to get people into yonemitsu, it was met with a mocking dismissal and laughter "why would anyone want to listen to this cheeseball 80s shit"

Was like being repeatedly beaten in the head with a boring "healthy" "whole grain" version of a once tasty sugary cereal. the whole grain version that tastes like shit compared to the normal version and your parents trying to get you to eat it but you just can't seem to care because you liked the original so much more. no matter how hard they try can't understand that these aren't at all the same thing, they just have the same name

The stuff board 8 would push was overwhelmingly music I did not care for, and the misalignment got worse over time as my taste moved even further away from anything even close to what was being pushed

It put me off from "falcom" for a long time but I've since had that healed thanks to realizing that Wataru Ishibashi is one of the most me composers ever (which makes sense in a way...yonemitsu was his biggest inspiration within falcom), truly among my favorite musicians of all time.

But also lately I've become more tolerant of most of the styles I'd gotten tired of (i dislike very little music these days, for the first time in years, finally. This was not the case at the start of this topic---another reason for a reranking at the end. Tho I have some complexes that make it hard for me to handle certain styles but I'll get to that when I get to that)

S0rry for the derailing about nothing to do with the song. The POINT IS: to me the appeal of falcom has always been these incredibly shiny and lush Yonemitsu arrangements. Unlike many types of music, there hasn't ever been a time in my life where this style was anything other than near the top of what I look for. Even when gritty raw atonal edgy stuff was my mood I was like "I wonder which "rock in opposition" artist has the most shiny 80s-90s synths in it(frank zappa jazz from hell)

Anyways this song is pretty straightforward funk/fusion and honestly its just FUN! THATS all there is to it. It's colorful and vibrant. There's "music theory" reasons behind why: extended harmony feels fuller and brighter...Basically. But all that I have to say is its a CD ROM SYSTEM mood that I love

Actually usually when I think of Yonemitsu I think of more "serious" stuff. Whether that means dark new age-y area themes, or 80s rock minor key battle themes. So this is a bit of a contrast actually. This is more like...well i guess its more like tower and the shadow of death, which used to be my favorite one, but its even more in the sunshine purely than that one. This could have like BEACH footage alongside it. It fits with the shiny gold color scheme of this album art well.

Like if I didn't know what this was and had to guess, I'd probably picture footage of an imaginary sitcom that takes place in a big city and seeing degraded vhs artifacts over sky scrapers and occasional zoom-ins to actors' faces that have "funny" expressions and a goofy font saying names of actor's i don't know with a drop shadow behind them

71th
Game: Super Paper Mario
Title: World of Nothing
Composer: Naoko Mitome, Chika Sekigawa, Yasuhisa Baba
Nominator: @Shonen_Bat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e50wQj4aeuQ

Here you are again. Up much more toward the top finally. This is the way to sell a bleak world to me!

I started to get obsessed with music that evoked "a destroyed reality" ever since sometime in 2009 when I had a really crazy dream about exploring a decaying universal collapse, with "g-darius - invivo" as the background music. Metallic chain linked platforms struggled to connect broken floating chunks of ground together above an infinite void of stars, navigation was non-euclidian. Things were fading in and out of existence. Reality was /broken/, reality was _dead_

The world of that dream (nightmare) was legitimately dark and unpleasant, but it was also COOL. it was such a cool feeling to be inside of this warped destroyed universe, i somehow felt like i belonged there. once i woke up i felt like i /needed to be there/, and i still feel that way. it was such a vivid and fascinating experience that ever since it i was always desperate to go back there. An insatiable CRAVING to return to that bizarre place. The closest I could ever get was immersing myself in music that painted that picture to me, thus a whole new category of my taste in music was born.

I think unlike other categories in my music taste, this one is very "emotion" based. The ideal is music that makes me feel a specific way (or maybe better worded: takes me to a specific place), and as a result there's a diverse amount of routes one could take to reach that point.

This song is obviously just from the name meant to represent a reality wiped out to near nothingness. Its a pretty unsettling moment to exist within what's largely a bright and colorful game otherwise. (Actually that's not true lol there's stuff this dark all over the place in this game)

I like this soundtrack a ton as a whole, has a profoundly unique instrumentation and well defined signature aesthetic to the sound. The composition is in basically every song pretty interesting. This game and ttyd are both games with their osts in my top 20 still too this day. I never actually fixated on this song particularly, but its obvious why I would enjoy it, and it still ranks pretty high clearly.

The vibraphone(i love that instrument!) chords strike fear further in every time they descend. And these bouncy analog synths----elsewhere in the ost those bouncy synths define a funny cartoon jumping man. In this song, instead those same rubbery synths now define the alien incomprehensibility of an infinite abyss of white emptiness instead, it's just so perfect...

I remember when younger being weirdly disturbed by this part in "chalk zone" where everything gets erased and then one of the characters says "its an infinite abyss!" And it implies that everyone in their world will be falling into an infinite white nothingness void forever. This white emptiness being the way spm defines a similar idea definitely gives me chills related to that memory. An existentially scary moment in a cartoon! that's EXACTLY what this song is!

Back on the topic of emotion (and i alluded to this earlier): there's an unreleased song I recently heard from a private album screening (so i unfortunately can't share it yet) that represents the destruction of something beautiful. It is the only time I can remember a piece of music actually moving me to tears for real and its got me thinking about why. I think "loss" as a topic hurts me a lot more deeply as a form of cutting than most dark topics. Something being gone "forever" is a really scary concept to me: maybe especially as someone so nostalgia-centric and obsessed with media archival and seeing so many of my favorite memories gone forever. So when music can somehow find a way to convey that to me even just by the way the music sounds: the loss of an entire reality, potentially forever. It hits hard if it succeeds in that. That's what this one makes me feel and as a result its probably on the list of noms this topic to most powerfully impact me in purely an emotional sense

I like when media can successfully make me cry or feel genuine fear. This doesnt quite to that but it gets pretty close, and its literally fucking mario. Actually, the world of mario being so colorful and cute typically makes the feeling far more intense than if the world were something less friendly from the start. it's like the feeling of seeing a cute plushie that normally says a cute phrase when you pull its string, but when you pull it now, it makes horrific garbled glitching sounds. way more stinging of a feeling than just looking at a burnt down lifeless office building: this was a colorful playful world with vibrant characters with all sorts of personality. now it is just a white void.

World of Nothing has this recurring motif of "life support noises," and then at the end of the loop it flatlines. Very effective.

I love these writeups

70st
Game: Celeste
Title: Forsaken City (Sever the Skyline Mix)
Composer: Lena Raine, Maxo
Nominator: @AndywoodCubeGmr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LbXujfutWk

I've always liked maxo. And the first lena raine song I heard (confronting myself) was an instant favorite too. I've not played this game and I'm not sure I ever will get to it despite liking earlier games by the developer. But I've watched enough people play it to at least understand the context. This song honestly is fairly out of place but not in a bad way. More like a "this is a special version of this thing in this game" way.

Maxo turned into one of the densest and brightest arrangers to have come from the chiptune scene. Its really strange what a contrast this is from his earlier stuff. It compliments Lena's composition well though

Certain types of analog-inspired/aligned synths always sounded HOT PINK to me, and those are all over Celeste. But this takes a lot of those same colors and turns them into actual glowing neon

I find this song difficult to talk about and took a while to figure out why. I think its because my main reason for fondness for it is because it reminds me of other music I already like (other maxo music) . This is like "maxo zone act 2" I've already heard act 1 and know I love it, so what do I say about this one that's new to it!?

Well anyways why I even like his style in the first place I guess is a good place to start. Bright extended harmonies and relentlessly full and futuristic production. Maxo goes the whole spectrum from gritty raw punk-like approaches, to the most "overproduced" electronic landscape. I like both extremes for very different reasons, most people seem familiar with the maxo songs that are more like this, maybe unsurprisingly as they're essentially his version of pop. Unreasonably complex and dense pop ("unreasonably" used facetiously here: i think this element is good)

this song is very Pointy, almost every element is thin, sharp, only lasts a fraction of a fraction of a second. it kinda reminds me of the common artifact of midi sound replacements, where the samples instruments are replaced with are all too short for how long they were meant to be played (think Sonic Chronicles). except deliberately using that very tiny, microscopic sound for effect. and applying the cleanest and most colorful production to it to make it so you'd never guess that without all that processing it was actually just Sonic Chronicles The Dark Brotherhood - Nocturne

i was saying maxo's arrangement style compliments lena's composition style well, i think the above paragraph is exactly what i meant by that. lena's naturally full of long, stretchy, soupy sounds. maxo's the exact opposite and when you layer these together, they sorta fill the voids of each other, especially when within the same ost and switching between each other, but still clearly the same song being referenced

on a related note here's one of my favorite maxo songs to have ever been made and it is more recent than this topic!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-EtVZditFM

that was our NINTH ELIMINATION

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
...
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266)

you honestly didn't do too bad for someone who didn't really know me at all before this topic! i'm not sure how much your avg ranking will jump upon a rerank but i made it clear that the SSBU main theme grew on me a ton way back however many years ago i had that nom of yours drop, and i still feel it's quality these days. so because of that song alone, you definitely will be higher by the re-rank at the end

you reminded me how much i appreciate a lot of things: including everything from the lowest ranked ssbu main theme to the highest ranked maxo remix

thanks for submitting! and for being patient with my absurdly slow topic!

69rd
Game: Pokmon Sun / Moon
Title: Battle! Ultra Beast
Composer: Go Ichinose
Nominator: @DoctorJimmy133
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4qdUsfuhh0

Ok first off its funny this comes right after maxo because go Ichinose has stated that he's inspired heavily by maxo (this song is so wonderfully painfully bluntly ichinose's style haha)

I suppose me liking this one isn't a surprise. There's some comparisons on my mind at the moment that make this tighter to my tastes than you'd ever think though, even more than I originally thought the first many times i heard it (this is the sort of song that i think benefits a lot from attention to detail; which is naturally how i percieve music, but with this song i think i tended to zone out, maybe even specifically because it sorta represents a similar thing in my mind to the broken realities of World of Nothing that i talked about lengthily how much that's more a "zone out" type of music than anything i ever try to analyze---even though this song is in that category, i get FAR more out of it when i attune to small details which i'm not as inclined to do with stuff representing this setting)

but Ok for one I mentioned hayato matsuo recently, one reason I'm often fond of him is his strange and alien morphing lazer cutting synth leads. Check out the sounds of the lead at :23 here
https://youtu.be/1_GMoXmIre8

Something that sounds like exactly that is pretty rare to find, pretty much every factor of that distinctive crazy synth lead sound hayato matsuo used all over his stuff in the 90s is here. the vibrato when sustained, every disgusting bubbly layer and morph to it

And this pokemon song has not just that, but the bouncy rubbery fake analog synth bass type sounds everywhere too. A more "manic" incarnation of matsuo's style is here:
https://youtu.be/2wnCuHLvlkE

the manic depressive overall is more similar to the mood of the ultra beast track, especially in relation to all the rapid 16ths synths going crazy and stuff

Now I don't actually think it's likely go ichinose was influenced by hayato matsuo at all...I mean it's possible, but this early period of matsuo's style isn't at all what he's most known for. But regardless, I consider it rare to find a song I can actually say genuinely /sounds/ like him. I compare music to him all the time because he's one of my favorite musicians, but its usually a more passive "ah yeah its like that one matsuo song sorta" way. This ultra beast song Actually Sounds Like This Very Specific Style that has barely had a representative since matsuo moved away from this sound after the 90s

Anyways. Beyond just comparison stuff, this also has some cool rhythmically-related tempo changes ("metric modulation") that makes me think of Virgil d(NO COMPARISONS PLEASE) [[O NO I CANR STOP MYSELF]]VIRTIL DOBATI
Yeah sure I will just link this song for no reason
https://youtu.be/xfl2CeQNlNg

(Imo this comparison is a lot more shallow than the matsuo one. But given that hayato matsuo and virgil donati are two of the most influential and important musicians to me, both with the most distinct traits of their style being kinda rare to find, its a big deal when I can find a song that actually seems to call back to elements of BOTH of the two of them at once!)

i really liked the idea of the Ultra Beasts in this game so much, just designs that extremely didn't feel like pokemon, to make it clear that they were from another totally foreign and unsettling world (similar instinctual unnerving feelings that i mentioned in my metroid prime writeup). this music sets their tone pretty well; i think ultrasun/ultramoon does an even better job with some of the new music for that, given that it has a lot more focus on the ultra beasts. and although i haven't gotten there yet, from what i've seen, i'm very fond of the way the arceus game signifies [incomprehensible monster] in a number of ways thru its music. DPP did a good job too with giratina....basically gamefreak is good at this topic. they should make missingno a real pokemon, it would almost certainly have amazing music...

Toxtricity posted...

that was our NINTH ELIMINATION

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
...
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266)

you honestly didn't do too bad for someone who didn't really know me at all before this topic! i'm not sure how much your avg ranking will jump upon a rerank but i made it clear that the SSBU main theme grew on me a ton way back however many years ago i had that nom of yours drop, and i still feel it's quality these days. so because of that song alone, you definitely will be higher by the re-rank at the end

you reminded me how much i appreciate a lot of things: including everything from the lowest ranked ssbu main theme to the highest ranked maxo remix

thanks for submitting! and for being patient with my absurdly slow topic!

Thanks for your hard work on the rankings, I just stumbled on this topic with no idea about you or anyone else involved and I've enjoyed keeping an eye on it for all this time.

Glad you enjoyed some of my picks and I'm looking forward to seeing how the rest of the countdown plays out!

Man, now that we're actually ranking stuff again, people are dropping like flies. Feels funny considering how long the topic was on hiatus.

68rd
Game: Cytus
Title: Zauberkugel
Composer: xi
Nominator: @NFUN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t52EibB5aE

What the fuck now THIS song sounds like Go Ichinose. Can't you hear that this is just like vs gladion or something?? All these loosely related songs in a row for totally different reasons

I think if I hadn't just been listening to go ichinose for purposes of the previous writeup, I might not have made this comparison. But almost immediately im hearing this as pokemon music and I can not unhear this parallel, it's so distinct that i am certain i am going to mistake this song for a pokemon song in the near future now (maybe i already have?)

Well anyways this song is sexual and Monday North. Which is what is about right

Honestly the main reason I even can make the go ichin0se comparison is because both of them sound like chick corea though; they're both like the fast piano doing the progressions with a lot of chromatic movement that makes it sound like you're at a very fancy mexican restaurant, or ridley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqIxf5Hh8oc

one of ken nakagawa's only comments on soundcloud is on "got a match?" by chick corea and his site says he's very influenced by fusion but i've never heard him sound even close to this in anything. i have now DECIDEd that the reason for this is because Go Ichinose is Ken Nakagawa's secret identity. when he's not working on gust music(when he was still in gust) or working on his stock music libraries or "ethnic winds" VSTs, he transforms into a Charizard named Go Ichinose and goes flying to the gamefreak towers but because he is a charizard he is way less good at using Cubase because of not having fingers so then the mixing is really weird and tinny in pokemon games, but it sounds like got a match by chick corea because chick corea's name sounds like a pokemon (chikorita)

god i can NOT GET OVER How much Zauberkugel sounds lijke pokemon it's almost silly

this is common in rhythm games, but i really appreciate when i hear edm songs where the timesig isn't 4/4. 3/4 isn't "weird" in normal music, but it is definitely not common to hear something with this sorta pulsing dance beat in it (and there's definitely mixed meter bits, like the random 2/4 bar right before :56 in the middle of all those 3/4s). but there's something better than just number games to me here; there's AMBIGUITY, and i think that is one of the things i seek out most when it comes to odd time stuff. it's not clear exactly where you place barlines, divide phrases, easy to get lost. that stuff is far more interesting to me than cleanly gridded odd time examples. sometimes the numbers on paper will be simpler, but the puzzle of trying to grasp the scenario is a lot more of an intriguing adventure. and most importantly, ambiguity just feels very cool! you often 'float' entirely over the actual rhythmic divisions, because the melodies take you outside of the ability to even percieve a structure. a CRAZY Water Slide, but you wind up in the same place the people who just walked down the stairs did after the same length of time, and it's so much funner to take this crazy water slide

my current interpretation:
(0:00 - 0:21) 16 bars of 3/4
(0:21 - 0:43) 14 bars of 4/4
(0:43 - 1:02) 11 bars of 3/4, 1 bar of 2/4, 3 bars of 3/4, 1 bar of 4/4
(1:02 - end) all 4/4

now honestly; "all 4/4 and 3/4 but sounding WAY more complex and confusing than that" is an extremely, extremely Go Ichinose trope (i noted, i think the first time i have ever heard him do actual full-length explicit odd time is the crazy trainer battle theme in the new arceus game (assuming that's him because who else even sounds like exactly that)). but despite him having no odd time songs over the course of the multiple decades he's been in gamefreak, i still think of him as one of the most rhythmically complex composers doing music to well known games. and that's...kinda astounding? like, he gets /a lot/ out of like "pushing normal time signatures to their rhythmic limits" all just through absurd syncopation. absurd funk and insane alternate unvierse latin overdose

i was typing the above paragraph forgetting that this song isn't actually by go ichinose....; i still can't believe that it's not!! what the fuck?! even intentional pastiches of his style don't get this accurate to his style, it's crazy (well; this could be an intentional pastiche of his style, i guess...).

67nd
Game: Arcaea
Title: Dropdead
Composer: Frums
Nominator: @DireKrow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow4eYirS-2A

OOPS i almost skipped over this song and writeup because it was another rhythm game song in a row and so my brain just went "rhythm game, oh i already did that, time to move to the next one!" haha

i said the same thing about the feryquitous thing dire also nominated for me, but this song was responsible for me really getting into frums, so a HUGE thank you for that. I'd known about frums before but hearing this song come up when i was listening to the submissions for this topic [on the speakers in the car with my visiting boomer parents while driving to a fancy restaurant next to a historical 1800s train station on vacation (very distinct memory filled with contrasts so i feel very compelled to mention it)] really signaled to me "i need to check out this artist" and i DID and now Frums is one of my favorite musicians! thank you for catalyzing that discovery for me!

this song is pretty overwhelming, it's the kinda thing that i think is very unlikely to naturally come to exist other than because of rhythm games too. back when DDR was popular i was always annoyed that the more difficult rhythm game charts were more about speed than they were about being actually musically challenging. but i was very thankful when i discovered the stuff that actually did go that far. and the limits keep being pushed! I think frums is one of the artists who challenges musical conventions (or even "rhythm game conventions") the most of anyone writing for this stuff and i have a huge amount of respect for that. because i don't just like it because it's "different", it's different in a way that's distinctly meaningful, a deconstruction of rhythm game tropes, pushing the limits of what's difficult to musically comprehend and creating the challenge through that. and it creates a style that just wouldn't have incentive to exist anywhere but here

oh yeah odd time sure so OK: the in-game chart writes most of the barlines as if this is "15/4", but that's really not practical for sheet music in typical settings, a conductor or other people are going to want to know how to break that up/etc. so it's probably more 'practically' interpreted as mostly looping "4/4, 4/4, 4/4, 3/4". However there's a lot of sections outside of those that are more just like, ambiguous crazy tempo change stuff. that seems more for effect of the rhythm game chart being interesting than a practical way to feel the song, but it is also probably how it was written, knowing the way frums does things.

despite what i just said: the "15" container is played around with in many quite varied ways. there's the 4+4+4+3 broader beat container, but the synths are just going in looping groups of 3, which ALSO line up with 15. This may not be obvious given that i make my identity "11/16" (mostly because 11 is an "important number" to me), but when people ask my favorite time signature, my answer is usually 15/8 or 15/16, and part of the reason is because it's a container that allows for both even and smooth feeling groupings (3+3+3+3+3) and very jagged jumpy groupings (especially if 15/16, you get "4/4 but cut off", potentially in the same space as what'll feel like the more bouncy groups of 3s!). This song plays with that status that only a few timesigs even have (basically 9, 15, 21, the ones divisible by 3 but still "weird" and able to be read as a jumpy cut-off version of something more normal). in fact the way it plays with the even-ness of 15 made it so on first listen i didn't even notice it was in odd time! that's a status i appreciate with this song. it's absolutely not "subtle" at all..not in the slightest, but while it's very in-your-face and aggressive timbrally, the musical intricacy in itself is actually very subtle. that seems very rare for rhythm game music! usually when something's an odd timesig it wants to call attention to the fact that it is, but this sorta tricks me into thinking it's simpler than it is, which makes it even more "difficult" than if it was clear.

THE SOUND DTESIGN IS SO GOOD; i love those sine wave chords around :35 they're so beautiful and it makes the contrast of the aggressive perc really fun. I love the split seconds of being slammed with breakbeats, drilling percussion, etc i LOVE that sound at the very end, at 2:07, turning that buzzing associated with the drilling percussion into almost like a temporary echoy pad. frums is good at making tons of cool sounds

66nd
Game: Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards
Title: Ripple Star
Composer: Jun Ishikawa
Nominator: @DoctorJimmy133
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtlAGw0wWKI

since the original video was taken down and this is a "sample-based chiptune" i took the liberty of uploading a visualizer as the yt vid link here!

kirby : ) this song is so happy!!!!!!!!!! I told you that kirby is an example of a rare exception of where i actually like happy music~! (this song is not happy)

i actually find this song very difficult to position (this could've easily wound up as low as 200 if in a different mood than i was when i made this topic, you're lucky that it got this high in my initial ranking and i'm not sure it'd stay this high when i re-rank)

it's because it's a type of "dissonant jazz" that i associate less with the type of "dissonant jazz" that i really like (and associate actually more with more traditional older jazz that i have a lot of bad memories of involvement with from when being a live jazz musician was more of a part of my life)...like the sorta dissonant jazz i'm most into is more like modern fusion bands like chick corea elektric band or tribal tech. this sounds like legit could be '40s rapidly swung stuff, just one of the more crazy incarnations of it. and like, i DO like that type of music, but i think pre-1970 i'm more inclined to pick avant-garde classical than avant-garde jazz as far as what i'm excited about in terms of developments. the other part of that is also i do feel like some elements here feel a bit stilted BUT

i "say" that, but that's mostly because of like...dumb association, "oh no, swing is the type of jazz i dont like as much as funky fusion, and the people who like it don't like funky modern fusion so they HATE me", but like honestly? this is one of my favorite songs from the 60s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiOf7oZnlP4

so yeaah, i like this style, i may have awkward associations with the older and more traditional side of jazz from when i was a "jazz", but when i divorce myself from that negative associative context, this style is good. especially when it shows what makes this style FUN, just like, the freedom to descend into total insanity. there's nothing "restrained" about this song, which is what ironically bothered me about the way uptight older people approached older jazz (to quote shnabubula: "managed to turn the musical expression of freedom into a prison elaborately disguised as a luxury spa"). this does NOT have that problem, but there's a lot of similar stuff that would. but this song doesn't feel like it has any limits. i mean it has the limits of n64 sound limitations, it sounds fake, but there's plenty of vgm jazz that Actually Sounds Fake with no care made to make it feel as alive with ghost notes and stuff. this sounds like it's at least trying as hard as it can to imitate the feeling of real musicians playing instruments and that's something i respect whenever i see it. it sounds like everyone playing is HAVING FUN in the CRAZY PINK SCENARIO

the channel visualizer reveals some interesting things to me; i used to assume that the synth chord at :43 was like a dance music chord sample, but it's actually all written out every note there. you can see it's even cooler than that, i love being able to see the manual panning in 3 positions too: all notes in the chord to left, all notes in chord to the right, and the mixture of both. also it's not often that a jazz solo is something you just get to very clearly see a transcription right in front of you like that as it's playing, and i have a lot of fun watching exactly what notes are being played and how they relate to each other and everything else around. unlike watson's stuff, i don't get the sense these are actually live though, it sounds more like a manually typed out imitation of "what a solo might sound like"

strangely the most "obviously not supposed to be a live improvised solo" line (1:26) is the one that feels the most similar to something i'd expect to hear in a live solo, but it's obviously NOT something that would be if this were performed, because it's a flute synchronized to the acoustic bass! that's probably my favorite part of the song, it works great as a climax to the insanity, earlier parts are very dissonant but in more familiar ways or ways that are easier to pick apart (or at least, parts of the song that have other layers that are more graspable as an alternate position to place your focus), but that part just blasts you with incomprehensibility and i love that, and the position in the song it places itself in with it as the climax

and like, this fits PERFECTLY with the image of the insanity of Kirby's World. i dont actually know the context of this song but i assume it's like, very fast paced movement across a chaotic cartoon landscape. it reminds me a lot of CARTOON music too, again, an older image but one i've been less personally burned by. instead i get the crazy chaos of a rube golberg machine of slapstick surrealism visualized in my head

65st
Game: Doki Doki Literature Club
Title: Just Monika
Composer: Dan Salvato
Nominator: @NowItsAngeTime
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC0mFHN7r2c

only adding to the "majority of the music i've been listening to lately is dark ambient[and/or]glitchy stuff by someone who is named 'dan'" trend of 2022...

it's kinda funny that i associate doki doki literature club with that one iconic happy song i /really/ did not like, but also i think something like that cute simplicity needs to exist, so that the subversion when tracks like this show up is that much more striking! those detuned background pads on their own would be enough to instantly sell me on something dark; but the distortion effects in the background make this even more instinctually frightening (they're sharp and piercing, and you never know exactly when they're going to happen! instilling the BIOLOGICAL reflects to assume a tense, cautious state of being to make sure you are not pierced by SHARP OBJECTS that might STAB you). the particular way those piercing sounds are sharp is really effective too, since they completely cut their sound out at times, temporarily. It's a lot stronger a feeling than if it was just random very loud sounds that were the same loudness the whole time. it simulates things you're trained to be afraid of too: power going out, a speaker being blown out, or even the sharp dissolving of sound from your consciousness when you're knocked out. but temporarily, a flicker. it keeps you on the edge into thinking that these things could happen at any time, but they don't, but they bring you all the tension of as if you're in the middle of those experiences.

the occasional hints of something normal (i believe it's referencing the main theme at :50?) are a good contrast too. something that happy in the middle of something so dark could destroy the mood or become a contrast that becomes too cartoonish to take seriously, but this hid it well enough (while still clearly referencing it) that i actually didn't even notice it until some very recent listens. Instead it made it like a subconscious background feeling, that i'm experiencing a dark version of something once presenting itself as cute. I think because of that; even if i did not know what this game was, i would /know/ it's to something with a misleadingly colorful exterior. i said something similar on place's powerpuff girls nom. this isn't unfitting or jarring from the thing this game misleads you into thinking it is, i can tell it's to SOMETHIng pink and with a heart on it and smiling anime girls. but i don't even "notice" that i can tell, it just subtly hints at the feeling in the background and i feel it instinctively. this is a broken version of pink anime girl world, i know that without "knowing" what this game is. GOOD JOB

of course: this takes me to the same world i described i crave to be taken to on the "Super Paper Mario - World of Nothing" writeup. a dark and broken distorted reality. it's a rare thing for music to truly to successfully evoke to me, so i have a strong appreciation for whenever it can do that! thank you for this one!

i'm not sure this song makes me want to play this game, but it definitely lets me know it's the category of thing i like. i'm big into things that are unexpectedly dark for what they're initially presented as. anything from the subtle level of something like pmd to the extreme level of something more like this. and i love the feeling of when something once presenting itself as cute descends to this level of unease

that was our TENTH ELIMINATION

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
26) NowItsAngeTime (Average placement: 157.4)
...
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266)

back in the vgmc3-10 days or whatever, we definitely were pretty off from each other (but everyone was far off from me, at that time), but i'm very thankful you still presented me with the sorts of strange things you remembered that i like!

i will say: my tastes have changed a lot since you interacted with me back then, and that actually shows in how you did. 2009-11 version of me would have had your picks score unilaterally way higher, but in a way, your nomset being this time capsule for "old mycroprocessor taste" is actually kinda admirable haha. you did a good job understanding what you knew me for liking, and picking stuff that makes me nostalgic for the sorts of things i fixated on most back then (i STILL like these things of course, just less my focus now)

also i was really impressed how much "Brightening Way" sounded like Yasuhisa Watanabe, puchi carat, particularly. like /literally/ the sort of thing i'd nominate in 2009 or whatever, and not easy for someone to nail as a sound. so good job with that pick haha

Toxtricity posted...

i dont actually know the context of this song but i assume it's like, very fast paced movement across a chaotic cartoon landscape.

The world where this plays (set of 3 levels, in which this is level 3) is pretty much the manifestation of what you talked about before, with a bright cartoony world crumbling away to reveal lurking darkness.

64rd
Game: GUNBRICK
Title: Convention 3
Composer: Eirik Suhrke
Nominator: @Flamander
https://phlogiston.bandcamp.com/track/convention-3

I'm a big fan of Eirik suhrke! I can tell that in many ways what he looks for in vgm is very similar to what I look for and it certainly shows in his work. Often i find comfort in knowing that. Knowing that even when i may feel alienated at times for having such weird preferences, that a musician like him exists who continues chugging away with his strange style in every work he touches. Even his most conventional music is usually at least slightly off kilter ("convention" being in the track title here is a pretty amusing irony)

The most in-your-face break from convention is that detuning ascending repeating note at the start, but there's some subtler strange things later too. My favorite part is actually the section with actual chord changes, because it gives the illusion of being something a lot more commonly heard at first, but that chord change at :25/:39/1:07/1:20 is out of nowhere and instantly gets me excited, every time it shows up

I've probably touched on it before but whenever there's a chord movement that's like "the root is suddenly one note chromatically above the home note for the first time" it is always so emotionally powerful to me for some reason. It just creates a punch with this opening of possible melodic and harmonic options that the song closed itself off from until that point. The recurring shifting between one set of limits and another more open set of limits never really gets old. Sooooo many big favorites of mine do it. the first one to come to mind for me is Gauntlet IV - Transparent Obstacle:
https://youtu.be/67fZSJKQfkQ?t=130

the fourth chord in the loop starting at 2:10 (at 2:16/2:24) it just hits me SO Hard i dont know why....it's a perfect climax.

Convention 3 is almost the opposite level of "epic" from transparent obstacle, it's much more bouncy, blocky and quirky, but that chord at :25/etc still has just as much powerful serious punch and climactic feel, even with that "climax" being like literally only 25 seconds in, it feels like i instantly imagine the first 25 seconds of the song as having actually lasted for 2 minutes and this is like the BIG MOMENT

and that brings me to just...this tune says a lot in its very short runtime. Theres so much more information in the song than its short loop length would imply! it's not even moving between sections that fast, it just "feels" so much longer than it is, in a good way! it's not tedious at all, i think it's basically because "i like the song" that it feels that way but maybe also because of how contrasting the two main sections are from each other. one sounds like it is a broken dream and the other sounds like it is an action video game song

this tune reminds me a lot of zan-zan-zawa-veia, partly because of the weird chord changes, partly just because of the instrumentation, especially the "dissonant funky synth" mood (especially that cool thing where the drums are like, a harsh tone, that you could pin to a specific note, rather than just being not tuned to anything. that's a very ROUGH janky vgm sound that is rare to see done on purpose, but both zan and eirik do it just for the sake of it feeling cool)

this song is the musical equivalent of round organic goo blobs being transformed into rigid cubes at a frantic tense rapid pace inside of a grid. these warpy "bouba" sounds contrasting against the very hard bumpy "kiki" gridded backing, all in the bouncy funk that merges the two together. it's a pretty perfect balance of timbral and compositional distinction. every element of this stands out against the others with a sharp drop shadow

63st
Game: Ar tonelico III
Title: METHOD_HYMMELI/.
Composer: HIR
Nominator: @xp1337
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8a4xBISGVQ

I still can't believe there was ever a time where I /wasnt/ a fan of these hymnos gust tracks. Tho that was more just a past sorta accidentally forced fake aversion to vocals based on "most of my favorite music is instrumental so that must mean that i HATE ALL songs with vocals" which was some weird nonsense i had accidentally cornered myself into (i didn't (still don't) know how to enjoy anything without making my entire identity said thing, and 'hating' everything except for that thing, which is why i eventually split into being 11 pokemon so that i could actually like opposing things at the same time for once).

anyways the aversion to vocals at the time was that rather than actually being weirded out by the style specifically. I actually remember thinking it was "cool" even when I didn't like it yet!

Tho I liked instrumental gust as a whole from the beginning

This is a track where the vocals are easily the most interesting element though, so in very glad I can appreciate this now

The drums feel so primal and tribal. The odd time section here is a pretty good showcase on how odd time isn't even "weird", I barely even tell it shifted because I'm just seeing synchronized giant drums being hit in time with them. The 5/8 is a rhythm simple enough to feel more like an elongated or variation of a 6/8 pattern to me, with the way the drums are. It doesn't feel like "6/8 but cut off" it feels like "imaginary culture that sings ancient magic songs in programming languages being /traditional/". And I guess it makes sense with how hymnos is almost certainly Bulgarian influenced
https://youtu.be/hVqrW-fPOQ0

(Insert my often talked about fact that in traditional Bulgarian music odd timesigs are so normal that no one even thinks of them as "odd time". Their version of music workings is just groups of "long" and "short" beat lengths: long being what we'd see as "3" eighths or 16ths, short being interpretable by western theory as "2" eighths or 16ths long. And any combo of 2 and 3 can sound natural, and regularly adding up to things that are not "4/4" )

Anyways . Yeah I like that sound ok. Not just because of liking to analyze (in this song it isn't even particularly stimulating to pick apart), but because the almost percussive vocal sound you get in this brand of gust (or certain types of traditional Bulgarian/etc) just feels so cool and mystical

Even before I knew what ar tonelico was about, when I heard these sorts of sounds i would picture glowing runes making patterns similar to the cool circuit-like hymnnos symbols. It depicts ancient circuitry to me. Or like Unown (pokemon)

Now that I think about it I kinda inverted with my brother. When we were kids HE was the "i am the psychic type gym leader and I know all the secrets of the ancient ruins" and had abra and unown (and 13 mews) and could make objects float in the air with his brain and they would have text that looks like circuit boards glowing around them. These days that aesthetic aligns with my identity way more than his, but I remember when that was his thing and we didn't know as much stuff like this and I think he was really obsessed with like..."the box" by "orbital" to establish such an identity:

https://youtu.be/HhGLWSNlhqQ

He did naturally get into ar tonelico when I introduced it to him after i discovered it on b8 thanks to ALL OF YOU (thank you) back in 2009. But these days this stuff describes my interests more than his now. Not sure why I'm going on this tangent...but I guess mentioning the Orbital - The Box thing is a good way to indicate the tracks that I focused on in the past for painting equivalent imagery. The one thing both have in common: sublte electronic elements piercing through the dominantly natural sound. That's necessary, because those electronic elements mixed with the natural is what represents the "magic". Without the synthetic effects, you are just looking at normal rocks instead

i'm usually impressed by ar tonelico series' music having such a consistent and distinct sound direction that, no matter which outside guest composer they get to write for it, it'll sound undeniably like "ar tonelico" no question, not enough game series have such a tightly defined sound

62st
Game: Full Tilt! Pinball: Space Cadet *Remix
Title: Track 3 (Meteor Storm) (OPL3 and MSGS MIDI sounds simultaneously)
Composer: Matt Ridgeway
Nominator: @GameBopAdv
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2tXvZX9tCM

I may have told this story before, but I have a VERY strong memory of my first time using a computer with the more fancy looking version of windows media player (i suppose this would've been windows media player 7.0 on windows me). My parents had to drag me to some boring event with a bunch of adults doing boring adult work things or whatever at someone's nice fancy giant house. i wouldn't have anything to do for hours and i think i was the only kid there, so no one to talk to. BUT they let me wander around and knew I liked computers so told me I could use the computer there. This was a computer with Windows ME, a NEW operating system I had never seen (i would've still been on windows 95 at the time) and also I was stubbornly obsessed with "midi files" so the very first thing I did was do a search for "*.mid" to look up all the midis on that computer and one of the only ones was the main 3d space cadet pinball theme (I am unsure if I actually played the game. Knowing myself I probably just listened to the thing on loop for hours, which is more what I remember). despite how seemingly mind-numbingly boring the scenario i was stuck in was (especially as their computer was so new it had literally nothing on it other than what was pre-installed, and no internet), listening to that midi alone gave me entertainment for hours. the memory stuck with me strong because i was having so much fun listening to that midi over and over!!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/8/2/AAefu7AAC942.png

The sound card was one I was unfamiliar with at the time too, if I remember correctly I didn't like it as much as opl3 or Soundblaster Live's 8mbgmsfx.sf2...and I still don't know what it was (but it was /probably/ the first time I heard MSGS technically, almost certainly, which is weird to think about given how well-known those sounds are to most people now, erroneously even as "THE thing midi sounds like"). but I was simply happy with the fascination of this NEW operating system with a media player setup I'd never seen before and midis playing on sounds I'd never heard before! Who cares about computer games when i just want to listen to the cool midi file it has like this!

i miss when new operating systems and software updates felt /exciting/ and /new/. everything to me now is so uninspiring and whenever i learn about anything new i'm freaking out "can i still use a version of sony vegas from 2004 on it?" as my first thoughts, which i'm sure you're all too aware of the feeling of. (at least virtual machines and dosbox and things like that are a lot more accessible and maintained these days). space cadet pinball takes me back to a time when new technology actually excited me, made me happy. being able to see "2000" as "a new thing to look forward to" as opposed to as "an old thing i want to go back to". space cadet pinball midi is probably THE most symbolic thing to me of the "NEW computer technology!! COOL!" feeling i had a lot more pre-2005

i have so many other memories entangled with listening to that midi on that day, the shiny way the media player loading symbols felt and looked (it fit so well with this shiny new unfamiliar "MSGS Muted Guitar" sound too. that cool sphere thing especially); so fancy...and unrelated things from the same day like a barbecue emitting heat that warped the way the rest of the outside looked. what would've otherwise been an incredibly boring day of being a kid dragged to adults' work event, instead turned out to be honestly one of THE most vivid memories i have of anything that old. maybe this mundane seeming memory of mine is boring to hear me ramble about, but it's significant to me maybe even just simply because i inexplicably remember it so much better than basically any other thing that happened around ~2000 for some reason, can still see the images in my head. i really do think excitement over seeing this new technology at the time has something to do with it, just entangling what'd otherwise be a mundane event with powerful emotional highs for me. windows me is a big step up from 95, and windows media player 7.0...there wasn't even anything LIKE that in my version of windows. classic media player was just like...a scrollbar. so it was a big deal, especially when i already really liked 'computers' and 'music' and 'midi files' a lot to begin with.

Unrelatedly to the above: I had the actual 3d pinball cd, like not bundled with windows, but the separately sold game that came with multiple tables (and ability to hear this more obscure song you nominated). But I think I wasn't even aware that I had that at the time somehow? But that was my primary experience with this game---the real non windows bundled version. Like I said I'm not even sure I played the game during that old memory of listening to the midi. So it was a cool feeling to later realize I have the actual game it was made for, and hear the song in a new context, alongside many other great tracks like this one!

OK SO on to actually tlaking about this specific song:

also VISUALIZER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rqFeE9qlXQ

one thing that's very obviously something i have to mention is how i like the "slightly complex chord progression" and things like that chiffer lead intersecting with individual notes in that chord progression to enhance it being cool. a lot of movements are chromatic and have to be because it's the only way this stuff even works. I definitely had a fascination with this song when i learned about it simply because of it being not the 'standard' one, and was a neat uplifting subversion of the darker main theme. but it's also just a decent deal more musically challenging! goes and moves a lot more places because it's based around more unusual chords/chord changes, which makes the melody/bass/etc all have to do lots more unusual things to be able to fit with them!

something that always stood out to me about these songs, and you can see in the visual there, is how unsynchronized these constant 16ths layers are. This is clearly being played live on a midi keyboard into the midi file. the actual composition is incredibly gridded obviously, and that fits the scenario perfect, but it's funny to me to imagine some guy playing every individual 16th note on a keyboard and all the slight imprecisions that come with that. like...i always thought this video was kind of funny:
https://youtu.be/QmFUMmgF3z4?t=30

but also that is probably literally how this song was made! not sequenced with a mouse in piano roll or whatever, but every one of those 16th notes liveplayed and that liveplayed data recorded into the file. I think this stands out a lot more in Meteor Storm than it does in the normal space cadet song, because there's just more parts of the song where you hear multiple constant-16ths layers at the same time.

[continued...]

[...continued]

OH right also i have to mention the vibraphone, i can't not mention that. Vibraphone is my favorite 'real' non-synth instrument, so unsurprisingly i really love hearing synth versions of it too! the vibraphone layer feels so satisfying to me when it comes in, just the perfect texture to sprinkle on top of these computery 16th notes. all the space cadet pinball songs have really great instrumentation to me. I love the muted guitar and synth bass 1 choice too---this brings me to that old memory again. when i first heard the space cadet track 1 on that mysterious computer...i had NO idea which instruments were "supposed" to be which, i was too used to opl3 and soundblaster live to have any idea which patch numbers they'd have! for me midi patch numbers are like synesthesia-level tight to my memory, i see the number 29 and a opl3 fm muted guitar starts playing my head and i see a red-pink gradient. This is probably very uncommon but: i learned to count through general midi sequencers on an old computer, so i just...am like this. but this made it a crazy experience to hear a midi on a new soundset i'd never heard before! it was pretty exciting to later on finally learn what the midi sounded like on the older soundcards i was more familiar with, and be like "ok YEAH of course that was that computer's version of synth bass 1!" and stuff

Its so nice seeing you get back into the rankings and working through the writeups. It's always a nice read

Toxtricity posted...

63st
Game: Ar tonelico III
Title: METHOD_HYMMELI/.

Huh, I thought HYMMELI would outlast Qualia. oh no my best hope for MAGENTA TIER gone

Anyway, if I vaguely remember my thinking in selecting it for this topic back then, it was that it always came off (to me at least) as a different kind of hymnos song compared to the ones that tended to make the rounds in VGMC - kinda like DESPEDIA in that sense. In retrospect, if I had been selecting songs say in the past few months I likely wouldn't have picked it because I'd figure that you'd probably listened to all the Ar tonelico OSTs so of course you'd know it. But the me back then was probably dumb and thought there was a non-zero chance it was new to you somehow. idk.

Well, either way, I'm glad you liked it!

Toxtricity posted...

64rd
Game: GUNBRICK
Title: Convention 3

haha im glad you liked it! i'm honestly surprised i've got as many songs as i have at this stage. i was expecting one of my songs to make it to magenta [edit: this is a preemptive assumption], but to have 2 still in the contest nearing the 50s is surprising to me and i don't know why. of my remaining songs... one was a song i figured i was going to be this high in the list, but the other is really shocking me that it's making it this far? like in a good way, because its a special song to me

you know, i'd probably pick completely different songs for like. half my nominations nowadays because it's been a few years since this started [wow. its amazing to think you started this in what. mid-late 2018? and youve been slowly progressing it this whole time.] its like a milestone of my life and now its suddenly coming to an end, all the rankings are going by super fast now! wow! :) i'm glad to have participated

anyways i was going somewhere with this. right - as time goes by, music tastes change and schtuff. like... i would have replaced life is a bore with slammasters 2 sydney, i would have replaced the siivagunner pick with a time tripper pick [probably the opnmidi version of the binding], and i would have replaced international superstar soccer 64 training with a gunstar heroes pick [either good night, baby or dancing-smash-hero].

while im at it about hypothetical time travel cathode picks, id probably replace cerebrawl rush the front with either katamari damacy roll me in or mega man perfect blue intro stage... not sure about that though. but there's a few songs i wouldnt have ended up replacing i think. the two you haven't ranked yet, and... potentially this song - but similarly to rush the front its something im not sure about! if i was to do this hypothetical time travel replacement of my songs, i would probably pick convention 2 instead.

because like, it's been 3 and a half?? years since this happened and my taste has developed to be a lot glitchier [this happened when i listened to light industry for the first time], and ive realized i like music that focuses a lot on fuller complex chords now because it provides a lot of EMOTION and ENERGY [thank you sin and punishment] so i tend to seek those out.

on the other hand, my overfocusing on spanish-flavoured vgm has simmered with time. its a similar kind of change to the sort i went through when i first came into board 8, when i went from mainly liking fm music to mainly liking sampled music.

despite all that im saying about theoretical time travel vgm experiments, i wouldn't take any of it back. everybody who took part in this ranking, whether it be you as the ranker or anyone who nominated, has had their tastes change over time i'd imagine. submitting music for this ranking played a part in developing my own music tastes, and im highly curious to see where the other two songs i submitted placed as we head into the MAGENTA ZONE [spooky]!

Toxtricity posted...

i miss when new operating systems and software updates felt /exciting/ and /new/. everything to me now is so uninspiring and whenever i learn about anything new i'm freaking out "can i still use a version of sony vegas from 2004 on it?" as my first thoughts, which i'm sure you're all too aware of the feeling of.

i very much relate to this. i've been using windows since 3.0 and i vividly remember how epic and significant the startup sounds for each new windows sounded to me as a kid. it evoked very strong feelings of "fasten your seatbelts, we're going to a wonderful and beautiful world of new technology and inventiveness." judging by the comment sections of those "evolution of windows startup sounds" videos on youtube, a lot of other people also have very fond memories of these startup sounds, which makes me happy.

(95 still the best one)

speaking of strong memories, 3d space cadet pinball!! i played the crap out of the bundled with windows version of that game as a kid, to the point that it's hard for me to think of the song as "video game music." to me, it's "an elemental part of that part of my childhood," as much as the school i went to at the time is.

the three foundations of my childhood and computing are 3D Space Cadet Pinball, the Youtube video "Muffins", and writing gibberish in Wingdings and giggling about it

3D Pinball Space Cadet is a certified hood classic

I didn't spend much time on the computers at my school back in primary school, but I'm confident more than half of it was spent in 3D Pinball Space Cadet lol

... and most of the rest was spent on some edutainment games that had been installed on them. I remember one of them was like a single-player mario party clone with math minigames, I was super into that when I was young.

61th
Game: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker *Remix
Title: Dragon Roost Island
Composer: Kenta Nagata, Tetrimino
Nominator: @jcgamer107
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdudAZ2Cm34

I actually have really mixed and fluctuating feelings on the original. Its a great tune, I love the instrumentation and it's very iconic and catchy and memorable---thats exactly my hangup. If you know me well, well...often that's something I DONT want a song to be. Its a factor that makes it very easy for a song to wear out its welcome for me, i often /really/ don't want songs to stick in my head. and this factor even makes me feel quite alienated and isolated by other vgm fans for specifically gravitating toward vgm for it being those things (especially lately, i've been really down because of how uncomfortably out of place i feel in most vgm fan communities for this clash). I'm into Zelda music for atonal proggy boss themes or trippy atmospheric dungeon themes (it's even a contender for my favorite game series "for music" overall!). dragon roost island stands in opposition to what i'm into zelda music for, and is infinitely more popular so sometimes I get in this mindset that its an "enemy" too.

and while I loved the original when I first heard it, fairly quickly it regressed to a 4.0-6.0 because I got the song in my head too often and I didn't want that. i could get into more lengthy detail multiple paragraph detail about exactly why i have problems with this particular melodic line especially, but i think negativity is a bit tedious so i don't wanna drag my frustrations out (especially not on a nom i'm obviously ranking pretty high)

But it fluctuates, sometimes it'll jump back up to 8.9!!!! I think whenever Dragon Roost Island is "new", i want to very specifically hear it again. And ALSO when I approach it from more of an aesthetic vantage point rather than melodic (ie "comfy folk tune played on acoustic instruments" [imagery I like]), I get WAAAY more into it because its establishing a world i want to be in (to be clear: wind waker is a top 10 video game for me, i love anything that helps take me to that specific watery open and empty world i love; and dragon roost island does do very well to convey that!). I also love things that just "feel like they'd have folky lyrics", like there'd be a bard singing a story along with the song, and i imagine that very easy with both the original and this arrangement!

Anyway both right now and at the time I made this topic, the original dragon Roost was somewhere in the 8.x range. Like, right here. But I would not expect that to always be the case, depending on mood the original could actually rank very low as i said. but make no mistake from that early negative disclaimer, at least in my current mood; i DO love the original!

On the contrary though, if there was a fresh jazzy and proggy take on the familiar theme, doing something new and playful with it, I think I'd always be in the mood for that! That'd make it /always/ feel "new", especially if there were a lot going on. I could have the mood and imagery established but a take that gives me more options to latch onto, and prevents the issues i otherwise have

Oh wait!!! That's what this is!

I think the fact that it turns a melody i have mixed feelings about, into something I consistently like, also proves the staying power of the arrangement decisions

The piano is the strongest layer here, the little jumps where it starts playing chords higher up, and general focusing on extended harmonies being clear, really makes this always have something pretty neat for me to be able to fixate on

And oh my god the#times that the bass dips up a little higher it suddenly makes me realize that this song can feel like "chrono cross", that "highish fretless bass flourish in a [world music] song" is one of my favorite tropes (also I just realized thats Anthony Morgan! Someone im familiar with in other contexts. Crazy surreal to suddenly just now while typing this writeup to realize its the same musician I've loved elsewhere). that high bass dip feels just so much like "the cool part" in Dream of the Shore Bordering Another World

I'm not letting this affect my placement, but I love how this cover has a video too with all 4 players constantly visible. A lot of the time when I look at vgm cover videos with performers, I'm disappointed that I can't see every layer all the time. There's so often one layer i wanna see how its being performed at a given time but the video is enforcing a focus on something specific. (Maybe part of my feelin on this is my obsession with watching and making indiv channel visualizers for midi/chiptune I've had since i was literally 3. And being spoiled by the ability to always see exactly which thing is making which sound when I'm watching a visual to accompany the music in that way). So I strongly appreciate this approach!

This video works like an "organic" midi channel visualizer...each channel is a separate real living person playing a real instrument and that is really cool to see for real! Not often does one have that luxury of seeing in that much clarity or detail exactly what process is behind every note in the song all at once all the time.

I do like tetrimino in general, I've been a fan for a while but I actually can't remember now if I was introduced to it by you with this nom, or earlier haha

Maybe unsurprisingly, this is my favorite i am familiar with by them:
https://youtu.be/1qpvyhN8rqo

Oh wait actually no I changed my mind now. THIS one is my favorite from them
https://youtu.be/JjnB5NuH63M

back to this specific dragon roost remix: I really appreciate that this song has the cool 5/8 section. Often when I hear the original I think "this song sounds like its supposed to be in 5/8 instead of 6/8". Just something about that 6th beat strangely feels forced in to make something more mathematically normal in the original, even if the phrases and rhythms in every other way to me imply that something less than that length would be the more natural feeling container (at least by my perception). This might just be me being insane and having listened to too much odd time stuff but I think I sorta felt this even before I got really into odd time. I think that amazing piano layer being so smooth in this remix really helps with smoothing things out during the odd time portion as well

While I love this cover compositionally, I do prefer the instrumentation of the original

Honestly I think something as simple as putting the original in 5 all the way through would immediately curb a lot of my mixed feelings on it, since itd make the melody more flowy, have more asymmetrical space to weave around alternating patterns. it would still feel like "world folk music on imaginary dragon fantasy land with pan flute" but with less of the stilted and harmonically recursive feeling that bothers me about the original. and less of the feeling that I'm being battered with only being allowed to fixate on a melodic line. this remix mitigates ALL those issues in its own way, but i really do think "the original dragoon roost island but with one 8th beat removed" would have the same effect on creating a big jump in my consistent ability to enjoy it

too bad there's not a version of the original dragon roost island thats in 5/8 all the way through...

60rd
Game: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker *Remix
Title: dragn roost islnd
Composer: Kenta Nagata, CHz
Nominator: @NFUN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfwWyPjmUD0

Oh wait never mind

that was our ELEVENTH ELIMINATION

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
26) NowItsAngeTime (Average placement: 157.4)
27) jcgamer107 (Average placement: 159.125)
...
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266)

your avg rank was particularly hurt by the one pick i rated very near the bottom, but overall i could tell that you definitely understand my taste well. i've always been happy with our conversations on here since about as early as i can remember of board 8, about odd rhythm stuff in music and all sorts of other odd things!

thank you for sharing everything you did! Technically you do have one "selection" left as...you rescinded noms to make room for the ones you finalized on, but then raetsel re-nommed things other people dropped out of not wanting those selections to go to waste. so you'll still get to see at least one thing you picked for me be talked about coming up later!

59nd
Game: Dujanah
Title: Art Gallery
Composer: Jack King-Spooner
Nominator: @Simoun
https://jackking-spooner.bandcamp.com/track/art-gallery

most of the time, for this topic, i listened to the songs without a visual to accompany, just put the songs on my phone/etc and would only be seeing the file names. somehow, i don't remember this album art looking at all like this, but this is EXACTLY what the track makes me picture. these stretched pixels; deliberate artful re-positioning of errors into something that feels cool...and abandoned machinery?

this is very minimal, and the harsh sounds panning hard between the speakers are jarring and unpleasant and i am GLAD. oh man that high resonant frequency at 1:57 is legit painful, and these timestretched samples. it really REALLY feels like the musical version of this album art. portions stretched out to generate a sharp, colorful and noisy missingno edge out of something that might otherwise be a subdued atmosphere without those. nothing conveys this song better than exactly these bright spider-like missingno pixel garbage shapes piercing out over that black background

i have literally no idea what this experience was (there might be some psychological name for this very specific effect, but i never found a name for it); but for some reason when i was younger, i had a strange issue where when i'd hear certain sounds or look at certain images (high pitch sounds particularly), it would actually alter my vision (or the other way around, i'd have auditory hallucinations of certain sounds if i looked at images associated with them). I would see sharp edges as very highlighted particularly, sharp edges would SHARPEN and get SHARPEr when i'd hear a high pitch sound. this actually very occasionally still happened as an adult but i haven't experienced anything similar in a very long time. i suspect this is some strange antiquated primitive instinctual response to threats of danger in general, something about maybe these sounds being correlated with actual dangerous things (lightning, sharp objects, trees falling). it /does/ make sense that something unsettling would cause the brain to be shifted to a state that heightens an alert to danger, with things like knives or really any sort of sharp edge being an obvious thing to instinctively fear. i also do experience synesthesia, so it could be related to that as well. WHO KNOWS but anyway this was a thing, meaning high pitch sounds are pretty permanently entangled with "sharp edges" and an instinctual feeling of "danger" in my mind. seeing tree branches morph into sharp insect legs upon hearing something high-pitched was a thing that happened to me when younger.

nowadays the image on this album art might still look exactly the same in terms of actual pixel positions, but once i hear these sharp bursts of painful spears in audio form: the exact same shape "feels", different. now those angular branches on the left i interpret more like spider legs or dangerous brambles. even the Arabic text starts to feel more like the shapes of a foreign insect that's potentially poisonous, the sharp ends of the text instantly start to feel threatening in the same way a pincer feels threatening. even now in 2022 when i'm not hallucinating this weird shit anymore, i still /feel/ this sharp difference in how i percieve the exact same objects once those startling sounds hit. the song activates these primal responses to danger and that's GOOD i mean this song is very obviously supposed to be scary...i assume...it woudl be weird if it was not...

the sound design in this track is pretty fascinating in general, the whole track is clearly fixated on that element. the 'composition' is mostly just that repeating rhythm on that one note, one that feels like a tribal drum pattern but it's on a specific tuned note, and the timbre warps between wildly different things as it goes. reality is morphing around this sound, with that being the sole thing tethering me to something familiar or comprehensible. i love how bubbly the sound of this whole track is.

this track reminds me of the mood of especially the beginning of one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists: Oneohtrix Point Never - Mutant Standard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr5xAppRgpU

oh my GOD i can NOT look at that opn album cover when i am in this specific state of being hahaha, i even have a shirt with that album cover on it because i like it...but it instantly starts to represent all the same things i said above about this instinctual "it's a dangerous insect that is poisounous " response, the moment i look at it while simultaneously hearing that high pitch sound at the start (i don't know how i never experienced this exact same thing before with this song? I guess the heightened state the dujanah song put me in has something to do with it, but also i probably just don't usually listen to mutant standard while directly looking at the album cover)

anyway mutant standard reminds me a lot of art gallery, they both have long portions of a pulsing /tonal/ sound that still acts like a non-tuned drum in terms of how it functions. you can simply relate the sound to a drum, in both cases, even if it is playing an actual note. and generally they're just very sound design focused tunes that do lots of very cool and strange things and activate instinctual reflexes because they are so scary....mutant standard gets a lot less scary though that one is actually very pretty at times. i would highly reccomend that song (And oneohtrix point never as an artist in general probably) based on the sorts of things you nommed for me! ((actually a fun fact that'd interest you specifically given that i know you like Rhem: i recently sorta made a fake personal ost for Rhem 2, since obviously that doesn't have music. but it was largely sourced from altered versions or portions of songs from oneohtrix point never's Garden of Delete album, and i managed to make it surprisingly fit well in certain instances. i had a slowed down version of Mutant Standard play after a certain puzzle was solved and it felt really cool in that context. works well for Post-Industrial Abandoned Cave Labyrinth environment for sure))

oh and this probably doesn't need to be said but this is absolutely a _Houndoom yt playlist category song; in the whole "evokes a destroyed reality" category i mentioned that i crave in the world of nothing writeup

art gallery is definitely something. i feel physically uncomfortable listening to it. which is probably the goal? but i don't think i could play a game with this in the background for any length of time.

58nd
Game: The Evil Within
Title: Towering Terror
Composer: Masafumi Takada
Nominator: @Snake5555555555
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEk1xmAlVe8

Masafumi Takada isn't known for this style at all, but a while back I listened to every available Masafumi Takada ost I could with a friend (we wanted to know if he had anything like his couple of trippy contributions to kid icarus uprising). Remember loving this one the day we got to it, which happened to line up with when I was visiting my parents' house. I think it was like 2am and everyone was away from the house but me at that time for some reason or something, so I just blared this on their giant flat TV screen hanging above the fireplace with most of the lights off. this was significant because at that time their house was very much in this middle-of-nowhere sorta forested area, and like i said, at night. the mood out the windows, of the few lights i'd kept on in the house, no one else being there. it made the power of this ost quite extreme for me!

That was pretty memorable an experience! was not at all what i expected from masafumi takada, but i was enthusiastic to learn he'd approached something in this style in his own unique way. that was the perfect setting to experience this music in too

I mentioned in an earlier writeup wishing snake went for this style more with his noms for me, since out of everyone who does these sorta ranking topic, I'm probably the most likely to actually rate this kind of atmospheric horror game music quite highly---almost everyone else who does these topics would not. but for me they're among my favorites typically! well, at least you hit exactly on the mark with this one!

One thing I like about this is just...well. in general I react to music very "mathematically" whether not it actually is. This does some very appealing things on that front. It starts out very rigidly in a conventional 4/4 container, but later on in the track it is muuuuch harder to follow the rhythm imo

Starting at 1:49, if you keep counting as if it's been the same tempo as before, nothing really lines up at all anymore. It's "approximately" 13/16 bars, if you're interpreting at the previous tempo, but really you need to interpret it as a tempo change. the couple of drum hits at like 1:52 / 2:01 are my favorite part here. They reaaaly trip me up. These hits and their pulsating reverb trail kinda create the illusion of various different rhythmic spaces (sometimes i hear closer to 7/8ish at one tempo, other times something totally different), but none of the things i hear will line up with those drums, which makes this 2nd half of the track put me in multiple temporal locations at once. It's the audio equivalent of the existential torture of the separation of instinct from thought, when you are in danger............! one interpretation is "reality", but you are not allowed to perceive that because you are going to be killed so you have to interpret "approximation of reality", instead. this doesn't change what reality is, but you're feeling both at once all the same with different parts of your mind...at least, i am

now...honestly, if you just stretch a 4/4 click to line up with the space each of those hits starting at 1:49 is (bumping it up to ~130bpm), it lines up nicely, including those weird drum bits each just being normal 16th notes, but i find it almost impossible to naturally hear it that way! the change in tempo is so sudden it's impossible to escape the ~108bpm feeling from earlier, so into this rhythmically ambiguous hellscape of uncertain anxiety we go. and honestly, that's the perfect zone for a piece of music like this

i don't just like that sorta mathy thing because i like numbers, even if i self-reductively act like i do, and speak from the vantage point as if timesig stuff or whatever is all i care about a lot. but in the context of horror game, those sorta effects are the exact things that generate even the exact instinctual forms of uncertainty that you absolutely need to convey the scenario. not knowing exactly what the tempo or bar length is, even if there is clearly some sort of pulse, and multiple things pulling me in different directions---that's harder to process, in the same way being chased down corridors of an unfamiliar abandoned building you dont know how to navigate is harder to process. i like that!

all that rhythmic stuff i actually doubt was even that intentional, but it works for me!

there's lots i could praise about the sound design here, these reversed sounds are so cool. i love the way the electronic drum loops have this instant-on vs intstant-off thing going. the abrupt abscence creates SHAR{P EDGES and i talked plenty in my previous writeup about how much a primally scary thing that is. it's perfect! Masafumi Takada is extremely good at sound design but i'm used to experiencing that in a context that's more electronic/dance/jazz fusion aligned or whatever. i would never guess in a million years this was him if i didn't know, but given that i do know, i will say i think it does make sense. it's just crazy to see these same electronic techniques represent survival horror instead of "goofy dialogue in digimon rpg" or whatever

TWELFTH ELIMINATION ~ ON THE GROUND

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
26) NowItsAngeTime (Average placement: 157.4)
27) jcgamer107 (Average placement: 159.125)
...
30) Snake5555555555 (Average placement: 167)
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266)

your avg rank is pretty misleading here since you just had stuff like the bad luck of like somehow picking eizo's family (which i was sorta well known to not like). if it weren't for that misfire you'd have ranked quite a bit higher!!! i loved your picks

as has been said by me and others a number of times: you honestly align with my vgm taste a lot more than you probably would most others here. i'm a huge fan of dark atmospheres in anything, and you're kinda infamous for placing low in others' topics for nominating things like "The Evil Within - Towering Terror", which isn't really a popular type of vgm out-of-context. but in my case, that was the thing i loved most that you nommed! stuff in that vein is one of the top things i look for (and obviously, we've learned by now we're mutually a fan of a lot of the same soundtracks: haunting ground's music comes to mind, and all sorts of other similar things---but also things totally not-horror related at all like ecco the dolphin!)

I actually do not play horror games very much, but i absolutely should. your set of noms very much makes me want to do so even more! it's clearly the mood i look for, i love the atmosphere almost any time i watch (the horror block of gdq is almost always my personal highlight even if i'm rarely familiar with the games; and even in that setting very distant from the direct experience, i'm taking the fragments of the atmosphere that i can in). i love darkness, i love being scared, i want fiction to bring out intense emotions, but /especially/ "fear", that's one of my top favorite emotions,,,probably my favorite one besides "confusion" (which regularly coincides with fear). my backlog is too big to get to any of this stuff any time soon, but i have a few things in the category on my list for eventually.

Your analysis of the music theory with the horror meaning was so incredible and spot on! Takada's done a couple of horror games, which you probably know, like Michigan: Report From Hell, Moonlight Syndrome, and even co-wrote the Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles OST which is a super underrated score in my book, lots of great remixes of classic RE tracks and bangin' original tracks too. His style constantly weaves between whimsically creepy and classically chill in these games.

Well if you ever get a hankering for horror games, you know your man to call up!

57nd
Game: Steins;Gate 0
Title: Messenger
Composer: Takeshi Abo
Nominator: @OrangeCrush980
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u1137bco5c

when this topic had started i wasn't into steins;gate (actual series) yet, at this point i am, and...i don't think i would be even close to as into it if the music weren't this good! the music is a core component to the really distinct mood it has. Takeshi Abo's someone i always sorta liked but the more time goes on, the more i realize he's among my favorites somewhere.

I love time travel stories, very consistently get excited about them. I just wasted a half hour dazing off into half-asleep daydreams about the topic. Takeshi Abo has a PERFECT style for this. I'd say even outside of science;adventure his music feels so much like "clockwork". I haven't watched/read 0 yet tho and from my understanding its far less time travel centric. Still it feels fitting even just for "science" so it works pretty well

Takeshi abo just has this wonderful taste in synth sounds. In this case you mostly hear it as those cool analog plucks. but also the higher constant 8th plinks. Their very short prickly feeling just screams SCIENCE to me. And maybe a particularly "traumatized by events of previous steins;gate" angle of that. Takeshi Abo's early music days consist of a lot of exquisite fm synth sound design in PC98 games. And to this day, he still shows a maintained interest in such a thing. Maintaining his site with custom FM patches he designed for use with old game soundchips, and often posting pictures on social media of his old hardware synths (some he may even be buying newly? really clearly passionate about a cool era of this stuff, and embraces the "synthesizer sound design" element of his work more than most composers who use synthesizer). His synth sound design style is often incredibly plucky and percussive. Short or fast attacks and just a generally cool choice in timbre on any sound he goes for. This tune certainly exudes all this I love about him, even if the mood might be a slower melancholic emotional thing with orchestra layers: i love that element too and it works great mixed with the computer sounds. . . . !

I'm known maybe for an incessant constant talking about odd time signatures---automatically liking songs for even the slightest edge-case off odd time. This is less of a factor in my taste these days, tho it very much was still a centerpiece of it in 2018 when I ranked these.

The way this is in odd time is mostly stubborn 7/4 all the way thru, this is a type of odd time I liked in 2018 but these days might react that it actually feels too rigid and almost more mechanical and simple than if it was a more normal timesig. songs "in 7/4 all the way thru" these days don't tend to get the automatic 8.x status for me they used to. ...except this song today in 2022 I'd still rate pretty much where I placed it in 2018! What makes it work for me in this track?.

I think some of it is literally just the context, not even the context I have from actually knowing more about steins;gate than I used to, I just mean ...the imagery the piece evokes to me. It evokes numbers, machines, calculator LED patterns, flasks with bubbling liquid and connecting tubes, wires and circuit boards. It is SCIENCE MUSIC.

I think the unbalanced nature of this incarnation of 7/4, calls a lot more attention the the barlines dividing it. This is something I might actually often complain about these days--the irony of odd time actually making something easier to follow rather than harder, but what i like about it here is that it just...amplifies everything about the imagery I like about this song. Other (4/4) versions in the same game don't do anything for me and I think that's a big part of why. The melancholic depressing computer scientist theme song needs to have an in-your-face mathematical element to feel as much like 1s and 0s as this does. i LOVE this song and composer i can't wait to eventually experience steins;gate 0 with how much i loved steins;gate (normal)

THIRTEENTH ELIMINATION

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
26) NowItsAngeTime (Average placement: 157.4)
27) jcgamer107 (Average placement: 159.125)
...
30) Snake5555555555 (Average placement: 167)
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
33) OrangeCrush980 (Average placement: 190.5)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266)

oh i forgot to mention in the actual writeup how much i love 1:34-1:44 dramatic set of chord changes aaaah that bit is SO GOOD i want to explode whenever it happens, there's some similar emotions in like 2:25-ish, basically when the chord changes enforce key changes it's great for lifting me into its depressing and dramatic world

anyways; your noms were largely things that are fairly 'dark' and i think that is the element of them that connected with me the most. even if they might not have performed well as specific examples for their own reasons, i do generally prefer darker over lighter, so when that element hit well, it /hit/ WELL, as was the case with this particular pick. one of my favorite songs to listen to when i want to feel so sad and epic

thank you for contributing years ago! actually getting into steins;gate not long after starting this topic---you picking messenger in particular (even if it's from something i haven't gotten to yet) definitely informed my enthusiasm for it as i was exploring it for the first time, just reminding me how cool and distinctive the mood the whole thing exudes is. i kept thinking about messenger and why i like the song as i was hearing ALL these songs for the first time.

56st
Game: Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon
Title: The Fairy of Love and Dreams D'ETOILE
Composer: Shigeru Araki, Kato Yusuke, Saiko Miki, Yasumasa Kitagawa
Nominator: @Janus5k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncmOly5_iPY

i don't know how but this intro of total dissonance and incomprehensible "orchestra warming up and all doing different things at the same time" has always been somehow so "catchy" to me. the reversed cymbals feel so cool too...i know i said a few writeups ago that i often don't like when things get in my head but i don't mind this case of that! also there's something admirable about the fact that this managed to be such a memorable cacophony somehow. it's the same as remembering the exact random seed of crazy bus that we all know...except less about having had something that became a meme battered in my face, and more just i dunno something about this insanity is like stimulating in a very specific way that sticks in my head somehow. it's structured in a way that gives it a touch of familiarity that a similar explosion of dissonant noise wouldn't, something about the just barely slightly off overlapping timings of the multiple layers of rapid winds i think is exactly what does it.

it's like knowing the exact cue of rube goldberg bouncing chaos sound effects in a movie you watched 400 times as a kid, or something like that. and then getting the audio of that scene 'in your head' as if it's a song. or like knowing the exact rhythms and cadence of some guy's voice. not melodic or even musical, but a difficult pattern that i can still latch onto. this is probably very subjective and not a shared reaction i'd expect others to have tho

i don't think i've ever listened to this ost in full but i know it's full of plenty of quirky proggy stuff, and this is certainly an example. at a glance it might sound like stereotypical stravinsky rite of string pastiche (a style i love to begin with. that brass part especially nails the stravinsky feel) but this adds a light cartoony flair with stuff like the sporadic vibraslap hits. making it feel more like Pokemon Anime music that sounds sorta like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1__IpPla9c

still feels like a formidable foe, but you can tell it's taking place in a universe with a more 'fun' animated aura about its world. i've sporadically mentioned how i love when i can feel that. it's hard to get the exact balance right of serious and cartoony, where one of the two doesn't overwrite the other into oblivion, but this has it balanced perfect for me

so it took quite a while to get it, but this song is...completely normal 4/4 i think?! in every way, but the track is clearly extremely averse to repetition. or even when it does repeat, not making it clear where the loop point of a given layer is. it's actually very fascinating composition to finally pick apart, but not in the sorta way i was expecting going in. i don't really have a use for typing in a bunch of numbers (i was expecting to have to make some actual visual chart of layered rhythms based on how it sounds), but i can just be like "whoa....it's normal, but it does everything possible to make me think that it is not". there's not really any layers asserting the 4/4 at all, it just...is.

I think what makes it feel so weird is that the /drums/ have no involvement in asserting 4-bar-phrased-4/4 or anything, the only thing really truly consistently tethered to where barlines would be is the constant atonal string notes...and even those, often ascend in ways that aren't quite what they did the first time. and it's harder to keep track multiple bar long passages of sequences of even-spaced notes unless you're doing it deliberately. Drums are the most typical timekeeper in music, so what's really cool here is the drums exist for more 'punctuation' purposes, they don't keep a groove or beat, they accent or intensify the texture at any given time.

oh and of course this is a "sample-based chiptune" so here is a visual, it got a little messed up synchronization-wise; also i misunderstood how extracting the sequences worked so a couple of the instruments are missing in the visual--if there's something you hear that you can't see displayed, that's why (most obvious with the wacky fluttery winds at the beginning). sorry about that! if anyone actually cares about these i can make a better one for this later but it'd actually be a lot of work in this case because of how this extraction seems to work
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbhHYp9nZy8

Toxtricity posted...

so it took quite a while to get it, but this song is...completely normal 4/4 i think?!

This is kind of amazing because one of the reasons I nominated it was because I had no idea what the time signature was at all LOL

Glad that was a hit - very much not my usual fare for VGM, but the song had always stood out to me as a kid for being so unnerving. (Though I also remember you've expressed liking that soundtrack a lot.)

yeah, I had familiarity with the ost but it was pretty peripheral. just a couple odds-and-ends here and there that i'd always liked when i heard them. The track you picked for me was completely new to me, so thank you for that! and I had a lot of fun realizing it was fake odd time and actually secretly just bizarre 4/4, "feels like it would be odd time but i can't actually figure out what's going on" is a pretty good reason to nom that's probably higher priority for my tastes than things where even the most odd timesig is clearly comprehensible haha

55rd
Game: Occultic;Nine
Title: BEGINNING
Composer: Takeshi Abo
Nominator: @kaonashi1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIlnR30ttvM

More work from Takeshi Abo for science;adventure!!! very different mood from the steins;gate 0 pick. This one's a lot more the energetic side and also a lot more dissonant and chaotic. It has an initially conventional exterior but it ramps up its energetic intensity pretty quickly into mind bending insanity!

one thing i like about this is how even though the timesig is all 4/4, there's lots of over-the-barline layers, something i've noticed about my [very top favorite] music (examples "coming soon"), is that unlike songs that instantly scream "mycro" to most people, what i actually get most instantly excited about rhythmically is subversions of common time that take place within a common time container. most of my favorite stuff is 4/4, and not even necessarily syncopated (in fact, a very common theme in my absolute favorites is looping streams of constant 8th or 16th notes, or even very rigid all on beats 1/2/3/4 type elements). the factor making the rhythmic challenge in the stuff i like most: instead just being that it is full of stretched polyrhythms streching things outside a 16th grid into the container, or polymeter or anything really that has elements that escape the barline divisions. THis song is the latter, it excels at being COMPUTER SONG because of the insistent 16ths feeling of it all, but those 16ths don't feel restricted to barlines (even when they actually Are, the feeling is more important than the technicality behind what's happening). here that 16ths in that analog-ish bouncy synth are going mostly in groups of 3, only resetting to align with the barlines after a 4 bar phrase. Although that is pretty 'normal', it's hard for me to actually hear the loop resetting without going my way to actually look for the polymeter reset point, so it does a great job creating a variety in possible grids to latch onto, which i appreciate!

the Real Instrument layers i'm suddenly realizing are actually kinda like Umineko Spooky Mansion which, unlike when i started this topic, is something i actually like! so i'm glad to hear that element here actually, it's a good emotional counterpart to the pretty much opposite cyberspace world that the rest of the song lives in. in a way actually feels like it could be an umineko song i'm nostalgaic for liking in 2009 from board 8 but forgot about until now and suddenly i appreciate it more than i did then

the dissonances in this song fascinate me but i don't think it's just because the chords or scales used are ones are unfamiliar, but it actually has to do with the interaction of timbre with the composition itself. those dissonant bell clusters: i think it's something about how i associate tuned percussion with overtones. a steel drum or gong or chime is going to produce "extra notes" quietly on top of a given hit in real life. So when Takeshi Abo takes out (some old 80s fm synth sound module probably like a "yamaha tg33" or whatever) and starts making wacky fm bell sounds: these dissonant clusters actually feel natural! when the strings do it it doesn't feel like this, but that feels almost like a compliment to the "real" overtones, like it's imitating them. It reminds me of how much I liked the interplay between the piano in Tin Soldiers immitating the 'notes' of the glitchy synths that were obviously not supposed to be exactly musical or tonal. this song has the cool transformation of [knowing what real tuned percussion overtones in real life sound like] -> [intentional dissonance notes on the fake bells here that feel sorta like real often-dissonant overtones] -> [strings playing those exact dissonant notes]. It opens this track up in a way i didn't expect. it feels like the clarity of seafoam green water i associate with "bermuda", or even the image of shiny tuned perc instruments like a gold vibraphone or steel steel drum, which is much more colorful and shiny than if the same notes were played by any other timbre

basically once again, takeshi abo has one of the best senses of which timbres sound so cool...

oh man fake rhythm game piano that cuts its release off immediately to make it sound even more fake doing atonal stuff...so good. i love this song : )

54nd
Game: Front Mission 3
Title: Attack
Composer: Hayato Matsuo
Nominator: @Haunter12O
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWOYPClbRgg

i've already spoiled that Hayato Matsuo is one of my favorite composers, and i especially like his sound during the 90s, which this technically is! (just barely). so maybe it's unsurprising this one performs well, but yeah OH MY GOD I LOVE HAYATO MATSUO and it represents him quite well!

the thing i like most about matsuo is his tonal (atonal) sense, he's openly said a lot of his biggest influences are some of the things i like most (the specific song "Tarkus" by Emerson Lake and Palmer, especially). but i think what i like about matsuo that other composers with similar influences don't quite attain, he knows how to approach that sorta atonal and crunchy style in a way that is FUN And VERY FUNKY. there's lots of stuff in his work that if given a more serious and grand aesthetic to it, would wind up coming across more like "boring tension song in an AAA film score-esque ost that no one likes except for me", but Matsuo will take that same category of composition and find ways to make it feel like you are at a disco party---without even upsetting the mood that those dark traits are designed to convey.

It's just this really precise balance that very few others i know of have ever been able to convey. "post-tonal" music traits are often dismissed as "too academic" or "pretentious". as if their form of avant-garde weirdness has no practical purpose; but to those people...well, i think the people who deride that type of composition just have not heard examples like this. There's no reason that type of music has to only be allowed to exist in a void of serious and cold academia or even with an asserted dark atmosphere (even if i still like it when it is those things. This punches the "atonal music can never be conventionally palatalbe arnold is so full of nonsense" nay-sayers in the balls)

oh my god the SOUND CHOICES in this song; i love breakbeats and rubbery synths typically, but i mean. this is breakbeats and rubbery synths WITH "hitoshi sakimoto strings and choir on top". and the pan flute out of nowhere? this is trying it's hardest to be exactly the timbres i'm most excited about haha.

this song has a whopping 27 channels, even though the ps1's limitations only have a limit of 24 notes playing at once. i'm not an expert on ps1 sequenced music, but I guess what you get when extracting the music is a bit different than "1 track in the midi" = "1 of the 24 channels". anyways, much like the breath of fire 4 tune, i almost totally forgot this was a "sample-based chiptune", it sounds so full and nice and CD audio quality! they really did a great job making it feel like it isn't totally tethered to this system's limitations (which, granted, are relatively free. but it's still a surprise!). honestly they didn't do much other than pick really nice sounding samples and apply the built-in reverb, but the end result just sounds so nice!!

I did a bunch of research recently actually about which synths Hayato Matsuo uses; and found out that his primary thing in this period (earlier on, the sole thing he used) was a synth called the Ensoniq SD-1. I then looked at some of its on-board demos and...well, the track at :59 here--this is just fucking Matsuo!!! WAT. I definitely suspect his sound design and composition sense both stemmed from imitating this demo, there's no way he didn't hear it (and it makes sense that when you get a synth, you'd learn how to use the synth by imitating what it has built in)
https://youtu.be/RHWUN0gp7wA?t=59

i actually haven't confirmed that any of the sounds in front mission 3 are from the ensoniq sd-1, but it would not surprise me!

i'm using Auido Overload to mute individual channels in the PSF file, and it's kinda hilarious: with only one channel selected, and you'll hear basically random elements of the song flicker in and out. It's because whatever engine they're using, dynamically allocates the 27 "channels in the midi file" across the 24 channels the playstation format actually has as an upper limit. prioritizing whatever empty space is availible. This isn't that uncommon, but it can be funny to listen to!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIsbV4eOEec

24 things like THAT all on top of each other, layered, make the full song you hear in the end. but...in reality, the files in the system are actually quite normal. just basically a midi file with 27 tracks, but they're being dynamically allocated to the playstation's 24 channels the best whatever tools they used can i guess. and that's why soloing any one of them gives ridiculous results like the video i posted above.

for an indiv channel visualizer, there were two main ways to look at it: [a] what the playstation is actually playing back (waveforms jumbled across 24 channels), or [b] what the sequence file the playstation is reading from looks like (essentially a midi file with 27 tracks). since 27 is a lot (and if going the straight ps1 audio: the methods for 17+ channel songs i've used before wouldn't really look interesting here since the audio is so dynamically allocated (it would also take hours upon hours to actually make through any methods i know)) so i'm just opting for a fun piano roll this time. this also helps you see the types of chords being used better, makes the tight crunchy harmonies (or even the very open chromatically-even-spaced harmonies) ((things i love about matsuo's harmonic style so much . . )) very apparent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKlMtkrwuFE

oh, one other thing this illustrates is that the drums are actually sequenced individually, note by note. until i checked the sequence file i interpreted it as pre-defined loops because it sounds like examples of those that i know, but i guess it's just, i mean, well, sequenced electronic music! Cool!

sorry this w riteup is all over the place. i REALLY LIKE hayato matsuo and this song I LOVE THIS SONG but i'm well aware this is just a mess even more than usual for my thoughts haha. i have a lot to say about any given song of his in general, but this instance of typing turned out to be a lot of words with little substance so i apologize....next time i talk about hayato matsuo i promise i will make very elaborate incomprehensible power point flow charts about quartals

FOURTHEENTH ELIMINATION

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
26) NowItsAngeTime (Average placement: 157.4)
27) jcgamer107 (Average placement: 159.125)
28) Haunter12O (Average placement: 161.375)
...
30) Snake5555555555 (Average placement: 167)
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
33) OrangeCrush980 (Average placement: 190.5)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266)

it's already been said, but, you definitely had one of the most bizarre runs of anyone in this topic. first four going all out in the 200s, top four all in the top 84. literal four year gap between talking about the two halves of your noms given the slow pace of this topic haha

honestly, i would not have guessed you have an avg rank this low if 2018 me told 2022 me what you'd nominated and i didn't remember. part of it's my taste has changed to be EVEN MORE FAVORABLE toward the stuff you nommed that got in the top half of your set! This means that in a rerank you'll definitely jump, though the bottom stuff would probably remain about where it is, so i'm not sure how substantial your jump will be, but needless to say: when you hit my tastes, you REALLY hit my tastes. i'm actually pretty astounded how perfectly you nailed it with the [metal shark / matsuo / sakimoto / bof4] set of 4. all 4 illustrate basically the same thing though, how much i like...things that 'sound like they're probably inspired by hitoshi sakimoto or something maybe i guess';;;;;;;;;;;;(i mean matsuo and sakimoto were friends, so this isn't a hollow statement...there's no question that they influenced each other both ways) yeah, sure. i don't know how to word it concisely, but i think even an outsider to my head would be able to say those 4 songs all sorta go together. they're clustered close together within where your noms placed of course. just in 2022 version of the ranking, those 4 would rate even higher!

well THANK YOU so much; it's pretty much exactly what i was looking for (and am continuing to be looking for) tbh. i listened to all of bof4 recently because of this (and LOVED it), and eager to jump more into valkyria chronicles music (which i'm more unfamiliar with than i should be despite that i claim to be a very large sakimoto fan). I've listened to all of front mission 3 before, but didn't really remember this song until you nommed it (and now i consider it a matsuo highlight!) ((so thank you for re-awakening me to its coolness!)). I also haven't listened to all of mmx6 since probably like 2007, but from what i remember metal shark's a bit of an outlier in terms of sound there.

even if you might not perceive it yourself: to me, you were actually one of the most distinct nominators. maybe it's just because i'm so attracted to the sakimoto-esque sound, but no one else nominated that many things that sounded all exactly what i wanted in this exact way. i'd go back to those 4 picks particularly a lot, and usually all in a row since they fit together so well. very thankful you showed up to my topic 5 years ago!