LogFAQs > #963625097

[MAGENTA ZONE]

43th
Game: Mega Man 5
Title: Gravity Man
Composer: Mari Yamaguchi
Nominator: @Haste_2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPiKZ4AZR8A

Now I understand what para meant by some of these amazing mm songs being intimidating to talk about. They're so perfect and just leave me almost speechless because I don't even know where to start. So I've been sorta dreading figuring out how to talk about this one for a long time now

Well ill start with this. Here's a upload with a visualizer for this one (it's useful for making the harmony and stuff easier to understand and point to too):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9kHQtGfutE

This track largely defined and messed with the boundaries and definitions of my rating system. the fact that i define 9.x tier as "songs i consider favorites". I have always thought of this soundtrack as a "favorite" (my favorite nes megaman soundtrack AND favorite 2a03-only nes soundtrack overall), with this being my favorite song from it! In fact i consider this my very favorite track in the classic megaman series, and favorite 2a03-only nes song!? Originally the 9.x magenta tier was only the top 15-ish of this topic, what happened?! I realized i had to extend the tier all the way down to this song and redefine what 9.x meant, just because of it! I now think of the 9.x tier as "songs I think of as favorites---OR songs that I clearly like more than songs I happen to think of as favorites". a lot of stuff that i don't think of as "favorites" definitely felt fitting to rank above this song when i ranked these all, but if i'm just listing songs that have a very serious, deep impact and meaning to me? This is on the same level as the stuff i gave to the top 10 slots to, so it's a weird situation

That said in my current state of being this one would be legit just higher regardless of all this talk. But putting it higher than this didn't make sense with my 2018 taste

A lot of why my response to this track might be so weird is also probably because the original time I heard it was this cover of it by teckworks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggwPXW29o3M

Those pitch bends at the start!~ All these cool full echoes reverberating throughout my skull...just such a perfect set of sounds chosen to represent each element. i could go on about all the amazing things i think this arrangement does but then i would be talking about the wrong song here. It's one of the nicest sounding midis on msgs without really doing anything gimmicky (though it was almost definitely meant for yamaha syxg50; knowing teck...tho this is from 2004, i do not know if he actually used that in 2004)

At the time i made this topic i would have said something like "THAT version would be 39 slots higher!!!" or whatever. THAT version, both then and now, is unquestionably a top 10 by this topic's standards. but now...? well this will jump in the rerank for sure, even if that cover is my favorite version of the song, i'm not sure i consider the original far behind at all anymore (not sure how much exactly, we'll have to see! but the teck remix, both then and now, is top-10-of-this-topic level of good for me, and i consider the original to be a lot closer to it now)

This cover by teck sorta spoiled me in terms of like...how much information is given directly to me, rather than being implied...but ironically one of the original's greatest strengths is how much information is implied despite the soundchip limits! you get ALL these cool chord chords and chord changes and the melodic line weaving these unexpected patterns between each other into something cohesive. you get THAT, something that's hard to comprehend, all given to you on a soundchip that can only play 5 notes at a time?! (and is actually only using 4 of them? only 3 tonal ones?!) Yeah! THat's so cool!

i'll go into some of that. one of my favorite parts of gravity man is :39-1:00 or so; a big part of that is ironically because the melody line there is SO simple it's just like...one note, held out lengthily and repeated. It's the same reason Kimera II spoke to me a bunch i think. When a repeating, very simple layer, changes meaning /significantly/ because of the surrounding material changing around. The chords/chord changes there are pretty weird tensions in context of the rest, and also emotionally profound! but that melody is mostly just playing one note with a few hiccups in a saori kobayashi "holding one note down and then jumping up and down sporadically with one hand on the pitch wheel" way (she does this a lot). this one single consistent note threads these opposing odd chords together in the simplest way...all while feeling super organic and ALIVE...on a NES!? Those subtle fades and aaaaah it's so nice!!!! I also like the fact that the arpeggios to make up the chords somehow feel more like an ethereal spacey (gravity anomaly?!) sound design choice, rather than like "THIS IS A VIDEO GAME SONG"-styled nes arps that i'm more used to. These arpeggios feel natural, and not like you can feel the seams of compensation for limitation. Really i would not even /think/ this song was limited to only 5 polyphony if i didn't know it was nes. because that layer especially just (without even doing anything particularly fancy) feels like it's part of the song! and nothing more, it's beautiful, honestly! One of the most beautiful sections of any nes song

by contrast, the other major section of this song (:12-:40) is actually quite 'smooth' in terms of the way the chords jump between each other, a bit more conventional (even if still 'complex') a progression, but the melody line is moving around quite a bit more! in this case the chords are implied by funky beeps and alternate with longer harmonies for just split seconds and aaagh. beyond how much i love this song compositionally, it's a masterpiece at just sounding like there's way more going on than there actually is, how does mari yamaguchi fit all of this information into 3 notes?! HOOW MUCH JUICE IS IN HER BRAIN i mean, nothing i'm saying here is stuff para didn't already say in their topic where gravity man was spoken as if it was the genius song that was so cool.

the intro? well that certainly sets the tone, i mean i could just list every individual element of the song. every chord, every note, every time something cool happens. I didn't even talk about the crazy chromatic prog stuff from 1:07 until the loop, that's probably the obvious part that sounds like a thing i'd like but i don't know what my favorite part of the song is (it's probably :39-1:00, i mean look at how long that paragraph is compared to the other ones!) but sometimes 1:07 is my favorite part because it's like a computer, and the short plucky notes in triplets is such a cool feeling. how is this in a megaman song?! I don't know!?

It's cool to me that this set the tone for future "gravity" songs in the series i feel. which are consistently among my favorites, some examples:

MegaMan X8 - Gravity Antonion (this might be my favorite megaman x series song? saying this is informed by gravity man might be a stretch but i don't think it's a coincidence entirely. there's some really cool harmonies here and weird dives into the same sorta short jagged triplet elements gravity man has in the 'weird section', and those 16th arpeggios? hmmmm....):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy8g6h3Iwaw

MegaMan Network Transmission - Abnormal Gravity Area (GravityMan's Stage) ((QUARTAL SONG!!!))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_ij1jJGSJ8

[continued...]