Lurker > -hotdogturtle--

Stop nominating Game Boy Color games.

Also for consideration: Pokemon Pinball is eligible.

(I think it's the only GB-compatible rumble pak game that I know of)

Crystal is Color-exclusive but GS are playable on the brick so that would be a valid vote.

(This isn't my vote)

I also agree that Pokemon Yellow should be counted separately than RB.

COURT CHANGE
+3 Vanilluxe
+2 Toedscruel
+1 Solgaleo
-1 Boldore
-2 Glaceon
-3 Electivire

TECTONIC RAGE
+3 Gigalith
+2 Muk
+1 Avalugg
-1 Melmetal
-2 Popplio
-3 Flabebe

Would have also -d Gallade and maybe Raichu if I had more room.

I don't think that it's "the hardest level in the game". It just got overblown due to the circumstances about being the last level. If it got even a single clear in its first year then it would have been treated like a more "usual" hard level of its era among dozens of other comparable ones.

G-MAX VOLCALITH
+3 Vespiquen
+2 Wishiwashi
+1 Mesprit
-1 Tranquill
-2 Combusken
-3 Tyrogue

G-MAX SWEETNESS
+3 Feraligatr
+2 Stoutland
+1 Greninja
-1 Stunky
-2 Fomantis
-3 Dartrix

Vespiquen my beloved.

Taggg

What cultural impact did San Andreas have?

GTA3
Final Fantasy X
Katamari Damacy
Um... Metal Gear Solid 2 I guess (as much as I don't want to)

Despite how many copies Gran Turismo has sold, it still feels niche to me.

SIMPLE BEAM
+3 Araquanid
+2 Galvantula
+1 Suicune
-1 Bellsprout
-2 Mudkip
-3 Nickit

STEEL BEAM
+3 Lunala
+2 Ursaluna
+1 Staraptor
-1 Shelgon
-2 Pancham
-3 Shroodle

I'm pre-emptively calling "giant spider SFF" if either of them don't win.

They've made is explicitly clear for over a year of repeated announcements that Pokemon Bank is remaining open even after the general service closes and I don't understand how people are still confused about it.

Hbthebattle posted...

Sawsbuck winning that division is also fucking absurd, jesus christ

Agreed, it's very rare for this board to actually give proper credit to a good Pokemon.

TECHNO BLAST
+3 Diggersby
+2 Sharpedo
+1 Toxtricity
-1 Sylveon
-2 Wormadam
-3 Noibat

BESTOW
+3 Haxorus
+2 Carracosta
+1 Arctozolt
-1 Dolliv
-2 Scorbunny
-3 Luxio

Bonus post: ~Honorable mentions~

Touch My Katamari - Cosmomule Cosmopolitan
Touch My Katamari - Jupiter Dub No.404
Touch My Katamari - ACID EUTRON #007 (Baraduke Remix)

These songs were all in consideration (to varying degrees) for the #15 spot before I locked in Hello World.

Beautiful Katamari - Sayonara Rolling Star

As I mentioned, there are parts of this song that I like better than the remix. But I eventually realized that I was conflating both versions together in my mind, and the whole of this song isn't as good as the whole of the remix, so I wasn't going to rank it.

We Love Katamari (demo disc) - La Morena Kumonai

It would have been funny to include an unreleased demo song on this list, but it didn't make the top 15 (although maybe it should have...).

Katamari Forever - Campus DAYDREAMER

Basically snubbed for the reason stated in my Be Gorgeous writeup. I couldn't justify listing it.

Katamari Forever - Katamari on the Swing (SEXY-SYNTHESIZER ALL ABOUT namco Mix)
Touch My Katamari - Katamari of Love (SEXY-SYNTHESIZER Remix)
Touch My Katamari - Katamari On Namco

When I was trying to figure out which one of these I liked the best, I realized that it wasn't the songs themselves that I was attracted to, but the sound of SEXY-SYNTHESIZER. In the case of the first two songs, the remix is like a "candy shell" on top of the original songs. You could put that "shell" on top of any song and I'd say that I liked it regardless of my feelings on the original. So there's no point in trying to compare any of these songs to each other. They all sound the same (I am saying that in a positive way).

POWER-UP PUNCH
+3 Sawsbuck
+2 Bouffalant
+1 Celebi
-1 Vibrava
-2 Metapod
-3 Espurr

ACUPRESSURE
+3 Tyrantrum
+2 Darmanitan
+1 Venusaur
-1 Thievul
-2 Helioptile
-3 Quilladin

47 Zebstrika
23 Reuniclus
Star of the Day: Reuniclus
I'm bored by today's winners so instead I'll highlight a surprising second place finisher even though he didn't have an overwhelming score. I didn't take Reuniclus for being this popular!

I expected Reuniclus to take an undisputed 1st place.

#1. Katamari Forever - Everlasting Love + You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0KzYztRZiw

This is... one of the happiest songs ever. This is the absolute cliche of when you're having a bad day and you listen to this song and you can forget about the things bothering you for the next 10 minutes because you're still riding the high from the song. This is literally one of my favorite songs ever, not restricted to video games. I love every single aspect about this song. I love the new arrangement. I love the new instrumentation. I love the new stuff added to it. Whoever thought of mixing You Are Smart into this song is a genius. Take a thin song that's made up of a bunch of beep boops and turn it into a backing track for a larger song. I'm also glad that this song is in English. Now I'm not normally a lyrics person at all, I rarely pay attention to the words that people sing even when they're in my own language. I usually treat singing like an extra instrument and just hear it as more sounds among all the other sounds. (That's why I don't have trouble listening to non-English music, I mean look right here, nearly this whole list is Japanese songs). I fully believe that this song would still be my #1 even if it had the original Japanese vocals from WLK. But there's something about this song, just due to the sheer number of times that I've listened to it, that being in English allows me to create an extra bond with it, by allowing me to fully follow along with it in a way that I wouldn't be able to otherwise. So this may have been a risky decision for them and possibly turned some people off from it, but for me it only helped. The part at 4:12, where it hits a climax and repeats the chorus with more instruments than earlier, still gives me chills every time even after hearing this song hundreds of times. I would say that this song is primarily responsible for me calling Katamari Forever my #1 favorite game soundtrack for many years, enough so that when a challenger approached, I started questioning whether I was actually overrating it due to the influence of one song rather than the whole thing. But I think I've settled it and ranked it fairly now (it remains in my top 3).

#2. We Love Katamari - DISCOPRINCE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7vxowpoPaM

I was not a music listener growing up. I only knew songs that played on TV/movies/commercials or in public spaces, and didn't really know anything about them. It's possible that I may have had preferences about things that I liked more than others, maybe subconsciously, but it wasn't something that I thought about, even for songs that I recognized. Disco Prince is one of the first songs that I can ever remember that made me think "I want to hear more songs that sound like this". Of course being oblivious to music culture back then I had no idea how to actually go about doing that. So it wasn't until even later when I started getting into music and getting in touch with my own tastes that it finally caught up to me. At this point in my life I'd say that I do listen to other music that sounds "like this", which theoretically should be evident from the previous 13 songs on this list. So yeah, this possibly might have been one of the first songs that I ever actually "liked" (for context, this game came out when I was in high school). It's all great but I want to give a special shoutout to the percussion which really lives up to its "disco" name by doing that thing that it does.

Side note: This is one of the few songs in WLK which has an instrumental version, which automatically plays after the song loops once, assuming that you're playing a stage that's more than 7 minutes long. While you may think that the intrumental would be good to listen to, with its interesting synth and percussion parts, it's actually very painful hearing the intro without that strong first line at 0:31. The vocals are essential too.

#3. Touch My Katamari - Alien
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdM2BbPpPPc

For being such a high ranking song, I don't really have anything to say about this one (see: 1st bullet point in my intro post). It has a very, very distinctive sound to it, and I really, really like what that sound is. I can listen to this song multiple times in a row without losing interest. This is the part of the list where I start feeling more confident about my rankings, where I can say that I like this song better than any song below it without second guessing myself.

#4. Beautiful Katamari - Guru Guru Gravity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itenyJoEkH8

Back when Beautiful Katamari first came out, I found the soundtrack to sound like it didn't really fit with the other games, like the whole thing had a different style to it. At the time I attributed this to the game being on Xbox for the first time so that's why everything was "different". In retrospect this makes no sense and would have no bearing on the types of music made for the game. This song was one of the few (if not the only) that I thought sounded like the old games. Over time I gradually warmed up to the rest of BK's soundtrack, but it didn't change the fact that this was my favorite song in the game, and it still is. I love the main melody that's played in the intro and in between the verses. The vocals are very catchy and make you want to sing along even though I don't know the words (although this Youtube upload has a comment with a transcription of all the lyrics so I can follow along). I will also note that this song's title has a great alliteration that would definitely be ruined if it weren't written exactly as is.

PSYBEAM
+3 Zebstrika
+2 Reuniclus
+1 Glastrier
-1 Chinchou
-2 Pineco
-3 Morgrem

COMEUPPANCE
+3 Dudunsparce
+2 Hydreigon
+1 Gouging Fire
-1 Rookidee
-2 Poochyena
-3 Spearow

Comeuppance is one of the weakest divisions ever.

rwlh posted...

But when I do listen to it, its so evocative

Wanted to wait to post an update in my topic before commenting on this, heh.

On your list of "things that you like" one of them was "emptiness". And to me the obvious song with that quality is Blue Orb. But I got thinking that maybe it was too obvious. I didn't want to feel like I was just filling out a checklist slotting all of my favorite songs into your list, so I decided to gamble on a different song. Nobody ever talks about Beautiful Star in the context of Katamari music anyway so I wanted to see what someone would say. I've noticed that a lot of your top songs seems to have a "harsher" sound but you have occasional soft ones mixed in, so I was hoping that this soft song would get a specific reaction from you, and your writeup is exactly what I was aiming for.

rwlh posted...

Brief stutters like in this song are really cool, particularly when they create a glitchy effect.

Splattack Octo was my pick for "unusual percussion" or however you worded it in your nom topic. I thought about submitting an entire set of "glitch" styled songs like this, but I realized that I wouldn't be able to do that without double dipping into Splatoon or Hypnospace so I didn't do it.

rwlh posted...

Your lucky song: The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - Twilit Battle

This song really made me laugh because this is definitely a rwlh topic.

#5. We Love Katamari - Blue Orb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YnwAWbeIbY

Out of the entire series, this is the song which I MOST strongly associate with the stage on which it plays (Roll Up The Sun, not to be confused with the Save Earth stage which also plays this song). I would never play any other song on this stage, and I dislike playing this song on other stages (when I played WLKR with random music selected, I'd usually restart the stage if this song played unless I was really in a certain headspace). I don't think that anything else in any video game does as good of a job at representing outer space as this stage. It's large, it's empty, it's minimalist, it's quiet, everything is all far apart from each other, there's a ton of stuff there but it's all tiny compared to the size of the stage and you're even smaller. All of that is represented in this song. It's not "happy" music like a lot of Katamari music, but it's not sad either. It's just nothing. The notes are sparse and there aren't a lot of sounds or instruments. The vocals are really light and airy. This song does for your ears what looking at the stage's layout does for your eyes; it creates very strong mental imagery. And again that's why I say that they're so good at what they do. It sets a mood that's entirely unmatched by anything in this series or outside of it.

I have looked up Kahimi Karie's other work because I enjoyed this song so much. I came across this quotation from some interview when she was talking about her first album from 1997: "I wanted to make really, really melancholic music, to be alone." Now I will fully admit to taking this quote entirely out of context here, as it pre-dates this game by nearly a decade, but I honestly feel like this description can be applied to Blue Orb as well. "Alone" is one of the best words to describe the song. You feel alone when you're a tiny speck out there in space watching all of these planets orbit around the sun. (Incidentally, not all of her albums sound like this, which is why the fittingness of the quote struck me considering the amount of time between them.)

I've also heard detractors of this song claim that it's "just random noises" or "isn't even a real song" or something (paraphrasing comments that I seem to remember reading back when this song was in VGMC). That makes me wonder if they only listened to the first 13 seconds before the main part kicked in. Or if they somehow didn't notice that the song had lyrics. I get that not everyone is looking for "mood music", but those particular criticisms seemed out of place to me.

#6. Me & My Katamari - Jesus Island
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-bYvrAj-q4

Me & My Katamari doesn't have that much original music in the game, with most of it being recycled from KD and WLK. This is one of the few original songs in the game, being the results screen. And they sure made it count. The previous results screens start big in the beginning and then don't really do anything else, because that's what you're most likely to hear while playing the game when you get your score and then mash through the dialogue. This one distinguishes itself by doing the reverse, starting small and building up over several minutes. It almost makes you wonder if they wrote this song for something else first and then threw it on the results screen later. Interestingly this song is available in WLK Reroll as a stage theme (since MMK didn't have enough original stage themes to contribute) and it works really well there. MMK has another track called "Katamari on the Moog" so that kind of tells you what they were into when they were making this game's music and it shows in this song too.

I have played and owned Katamari Damacy and We Love Katamari.
I have played without owning Me & My Katamari and Beautiful Katamari.
I have not played Katamari Forever, Touch My Katamari, or any of the spinoffs.

#7. Touch My Katamari - Don't Give Up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WorW7R0xHGk

This song starts off pretty slow and basic, and gradually starts adding stuff that you can barely notice. Then suddenly you're 2 minutes in and it starts blowing up and you're thinking "wait, when did it get like this?" Very cool buildup, and then it maintains it for the remainder of the song. Although it kind of starts unraveling itself by the end, which is also kind of funny, and then it concludes almost sounding like how it started. But when it's going, it's going hard and I love it.

Okay I wrote this paragraph like 2 weeks ago and I have to wonder why I called the ending "funny" before. It's actually kind of disappointing, I wish that it kept going for longer like the middle part.

#8. Katamari Forever - The Moon and The Prince (and LEOPALDON MIX)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65SZjEh4ofw

This song perfectly encapsulates the manic energy that people often falsely associate the entire Katamari series as having. They may not all be like that, but this song surely is. This song is all over the place all the time, both the vocals and the instrumentals. I don't speak Japanese, but I get the impression that they're singing with a silly tone, like goofing around while delivering the lyrics. (And if I'm wrong, then they still did a good job of making it sound like that was what they were going for.) Very insane, high action, high energy song.

NEEDLE ARM
+3 Rillaboom
+2 Flutter Mane
+1 Meganium
-1 Hattrem
-2 Tsareena
-3 Gulpin

FROST BREATH
+3 Minccino
+2 Cofagrigus
+1 Celesteela
-1 Tarountula
-2 Cranidos
-3 Naclstack

Needle Arm is STACKED wtf.

#9. Touch My Katamari - Katamari on the Funk (Takeshi Nakatsuka edit)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R909_fJhbJY

When I was brainstorming songs for this ranking, the original Katamari on the Funk was in consideration. I had actually forgotten about this version until I relistened to it. And I realized that this version is a direct upgrade over the original. If I were commenting on the original, I would have mentioned something about its length. Not even in a negative or detracting way, just a statement of fact because it is one of the song's most distinctive qualities. This version is 4.5 minutes shorter but feels like the same length. It doesn't feel like they condensed anything or left any parts out of it, it's like they managed to fit the entire essence of a 10 minute song into 6 minutes while keeping it exactly the same. The changes in this song compared to the original aren't too major like you'd expect from Katamari variations, they're smaller flairs and additions scattered throughout that serve to spice up the song a bit (I suppose that's why they called it an "edit" and not a "remix"). Overall this song is a purely better version of an already good song.

#10. Katamari Forever - You are Smart (RAAGINIA SOFT MIX)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usCM05yt5xA

This song actually has very little to do with You Are Smart. It has a few samples and maybe a few sequences of notes every once in a while, but otherwise it's all 9+ minutes of... whatever genre you want to call this. As with much of this series' music, the composers had free rein to do whatever they want. I'm told that the band who did this song has a bunch of albums out and this song sounds just like their usual style. So if you like this, there's plenty more where it came from. I like the existence of this song because even in a series known for not sticking to any conventions, this song still feels like it's breaking them.

SNORE
+3 Musharna
+2 Copperajah
+1 Walrein
-1 Nidoran
-2 Chesnaught
-3 Tinkatink

G-Max Tartness
+3 Lugia
+2 Skeledirge
+1 Mienshao
-1 Golduck
-2 Bonsly
-3 Toxel

It's funny, I usually consider this one of my more liked types when generalizing, but when it's laid out like this, every gen has something that I don't like counterbalancing the good ones. Not immediately sure which one to vote for.

#11. Katamari Forever - Sayonara Rolling Star (Yuri's Mixx)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WXsGDSRT3k

One of the harder things about this list was deciding how to rank the two versions of this song. I actually like both of them for different reasons, and each version has certain parts of the song that I like better than the other version. I considered ranking them both separately, ranking just one or just the other, cheating and ranking them together, or even dropping both of them. But ultimately I stuck with this version because on the whole, it's more like my usual style, definitely in the instrumentation if nothing else. And I guess that's all you need sometimes. Just sounding like something that I would like is enough to make me like it.

I guess what I can do is post 1 in the morning and 2 at night after I come home, and that will get us through the weekend.

#12. Katamari Forever - Galactic S-O-U-L
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gcv4vdzriI

This was one of the earlier songs from KF that I liked since the beginning, when I just thought it was a slow, almost psychedelic song about space or whatever. But everything that I thought I knew about this song changed in February 2024 when I learned that this was actually a remix of Katamari Dancing (main theme from Beautiful Katamari). Wow. It's actually so obvious, the lyrics are right there, you can literally hear them, but it's SO different. 15 years of listening to this song and I never even knew. Everything is changed now. To clarify, this song was already on the list before I made this discovery, but now I hear it in a COMPLETELY different light than I ever did before. I don't even remember what I was previously gonna say about it, because it's basically a new song now.

ATHF
Robot Chicken
Rick and Morty
Space Ghost

I didn't know that R&M was an adult swim show. I've never actually thought about where it aired, but I probably would have assumed that AS picked it up later like Family Guy and the others. And as much as I don't want to include it over some of their older shows, I think it's fairly non-debatable that it's their most culturally relevant show in a long time.

Did you notice how one of the instruments is a backwards piano sound?

STUN SPORE
+3 Barraskewda
+2 Gurdurr
+1 Kilowattrel
-1 Seedot
-2 Nidorino
-3 Nidoran

CORE ENFORCER
+3 Sandaconda
+2 Magikarp
+1 Spritzee
-1 Snom
-2 Kricketot
-3 Mr. Rime

Oh, well of course it was only streaming. They don't want to accidentally let you buy a format which they won't have the power to revoke later.

#13. Beautiful Katamari - Bless My Stars
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWC7PXHh7G0

This is a song that I always thought that I didn't like, except for the times when I listened to it and remembered that it was actually okay (but those times were infrequent, because why would I listen to a song that I didn't like?). Doing this ranking has finally helped me remember that I do in fact like it. This song has a weird aura, it's like the vocals don't match the instrumental or something. There's probably a musical explanation for why it evokes that kind of mental emotion but I have no idea. My favorite parts of this song are the verses (1:06 and 3:06) rather than the chorus. I never noticed until this project that there's this short 4 note piano loop repeating throughout the whole thing. For some reason that's like the coolest part of the song for me. It would sound so different without that, and I don't know if this song would even make the list if I never noticed that part.

#14. Katamari Forever - Be Gorgeous
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YzMDaGTsZ0

Katamari Forever's soundtrack has a lot of short(ish) songs that are used for cutscenes, the overworld, or other non-gameplay things. I debated on including any of them here because they might be "wasting" a slot due to their length when I could be listening to a longer song that I like just as much. But this one has always been one of my favorites and it earned its spot here even after scrutiny. This is the song from the present screen, where you spend 5-10 seconds adding accessories to your cousin, maybe 30 seconds if you're indecisive and testing out different ones. It's weird that they even made a full song for this in the first place (you could probably use the forbidden meme for this song (actually don't look at the Youtube comments)). I like how it has the persistent beat throughout the whole thing, and the robotic voice which is a recurring theme in KF songs.

Boomer Dad

#15. Touch My Katamari - Hello World
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIgQCcGtdjk

This is one of the songs which gained a more favorable opinion from me after it was included in WLKR (it probably would have ranked around the mid 20s before). I don't really have too much specific to say about it, it's more just the general vibe of the song that makes it good background music. Actually, that's what it is, I like this song better as ingame BGM better than listening to it standalone. When I played WLK with random music enabled, I was surprised to find that I always enjoyed when this song came up because I never cared about it beforehand. I never played TMK so I never got to experience it ingame before. So it really surpassed my expectations hearing it in context.

Also, unrelated to that, this song stylistically reminds me of Pokemon BW2 music.

I've been procrastinating on this project since before We Love Katamari Reroll was announced and I'm finally finished. I have combed through all of the soundtracks and attempted to narrow it down to my top 15 favorite songs and arranged them in something resembling an ordered list.

• If you're accustomed to reading a lot of B8 ranking topics, expect my commentary to be on the lower end of the spectrum. I don't have a lot of musical knowledge or technical vocabulary and I often struggle to articulate why I like a song beyond "it sounds cool". I'm also not great at identifying instruments or genres. But I tried sometimes.
• Since I started this list before WLK Reroll came out, I will be using the song titles from their original releases rather than the re-localized titles when applicable.
• I'm literally telling you up front that Katamari on the Rocks is not on this list. If you consider that to be a "glaring omission" or whatever, then this is your forewarning that you probably won't like anything on my list.

First entry will be posted after this topic reaches 4 posts in order to fake engagement. Also, vote on whether you want to see 2 songs per day (3 today, 7 days) or 3 per day (5 days) (or if it's not worth dragging out such a short ranking and you'd prefer 5 per day).

Closer
Ruiner
Heresy
Reptile
I Do Not Want This
The Becoming
Hurt
Mr. Self Destruct
March of the Pigs
A Warm Place
Eraser
Big Man with a Gun
The Downward Spiral
Piggy

Kinda wish that I didn't previously know 2 songs here so their bias wouldn't impact my ranking.

DIAMOND STORM
+3 Dracozolt
+2 Ursaring
+1 Iron Moth
-1 Gabite
-2 Meowth
-3 Pawmo

TACHYON CUTTER
+3 Regirock
+2 Ducklett
+1 Latios
-1 Fennekin
-2 Capsakid
-3 Wynaut

Maybe Pawmo wouldn't have gotten last place if I didn't have to constantly look up which stage in its evo it was.

GeneralKenobi85 posted...

You can really see when Ghost started to become more interesting of a type.

Yes, starting in gen 2.

Anyway, this type is stacked overall.

FOCUS ENERGY
+3 Krookodile
+2 Basculin
+1 Cryogonal
-1 Marill
-2 Chimchar
-3 Pikachu

ASTRAL BARRAGE
+3 Conkeldurr
+2 Murkrow
+1 Mewtwo
-1 Grumpig
-2 Floatzel
-3 Spinarak

RIP Murkrow (one of the best birds) but it's going against my #1 Fighting type.

I would say that the 2 locks are:
Bob-omb Battlefield
Rainbow Ride

Then some choice of 2 of these:
Whomp's Fortress
One of the water levels (I suppose JRB would get the nom for being the "first" so it gets the nostalgia vote, but DDD gets the name of the song for some reason)
Bowser in the Sky (I see the arguments for Dark World but this one seems more prominent)

For the purposes of putting an official submission to this topic, I'm gonna snub the water level and go with:
Bob
Rainbow
Whomp
Sky

UshiromiyaEva posted...

https://youtu.be/KP0-Aaj95CU?si=CKVX7h8jouT9SSHK

Is Lego Island still playable in any format on a modern computer?

FLAME WHEEL
+3 Misdreavus
+2 Politoed
+1 Bidoof
-1 Ekans
-2 Silvally
-3 Riolu

BELCH
+3 Inkay
+2 Drifblim
+1 Dhelmise
-1 Charmeleon
-2 Magby
-3 Swirlix