Kimi ga Tame Re:boot We All Lift Together Space Mode
First two matches are solid.
Incoming toxic rant regarding the third one, spoilered so people don't have to read it if they care about their blood pressure. It's about what you probably think it would be about.
I'd stopped doing match-by-match reviews for a bit, but I'll say this: Maybe it works in context, but on its own, MARIA is a joke. It's a meme. It's a laughingstock of VGMC. It encapsulates one of two reasons a significant part of the board doesn't bother with us. As NFUN put it, it's literally three chords, over and over, in a way that would put me to sleep if it weren't for perhaps the most phoned-in wannabe choir vocals. I think seeing this take matches was the last straw that led me to throw up my hands and ditch VGMC for a while because "VGMC would put the sound of someone gargling for three minutes into retirement contention so long as it was in a 69/420 key signature and was from a Gust game." Thankfully, this criticism doesn't apply that much in this contest, but seeing this drivel take significant numbers of votes still makes me weep.
This might seem too passionate for a song so mediocre. Perhaps it would be better reserved for something more akin to Crazybus if it ever got in even though we've had things I'd call almost the same quality take matches. MARIA pisses me off because it's musical sophistry. It uses surface-level distractions to make it so that loop point is at 5:47 when it should really be at 1:33. It's the Kingdom Hearts of tracks: throw enough pseudo-deep takes in the listener's face so they don't realize that the entire foundation of the song is a heap of dirt.
Its contender isn't even that good, but god, please punt MARIA out of the contest.
Reach for the Moon is my favorite Touhou song and legit one of my favorite songs in the contest in any given year, but if I had to drag it behind the metaphorical woodshed in order to do the same to MARIA in VGMC, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Stop nominating this garbage. Please.