LogFAQs > #936693986

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Battle! (Colress) is my 13th favorite in the contest!! If he says "5, 4" at the beginning why isn't this song in 5/4 huh?!?! you FOoLISH man giving my the false hope. This is one of my favorite tracks in the pokemon series and one of the many tracks ascertaining Hitomi Sato's position as my favorite gamefreak composer. has a lot of my favorite traits pretty distinct to her, the futuristic crystalline chill(tense) synth chords permeating the atmosphere at every corner, and all these over-the-barline rhythms, strangely long phrases. I have a huge thing for transposing chord stabs and this track is littered with them beating you up every 1 second(s). One thing i think is kind of neat is the chords being transposed around are actually literally Major triads. That's a chord that's supposed to be like "The happy normal chord" but the way they're spammed at you here is ridiculously dark and artificial in its feel, maybe that SYMBOLIZES some...thing. 1:09-1:15's my favorite bit, 3+3+3+3+3.../16 over 4/4 polymeter in that low weird synth sound, one of my favorite feelings. :51 - :57 is a similar feeling. Whole thing is a pretty good example of like...a song that would absolutely not exist outside of gamefreak, it's literally...go ichinose arranging a hitomi sato composition that's clearly imitating junichi masuda battle themes. you can not get any more "this is what gamefreak sounds like and no other music in the world sounds like this" than that. This track is absolutely crazy to look at the sequence data of, it's all crammed into 12 channels somehow and all are constantly working themselves to death. What a soundtrack to be one of the last sequenced-by-necessity video game osts ever. There's so many little details in this one that it'd be impossible to satisfy myself and list them all. In summary it's a combination of a bunch of disparate contradicting elements I love (chill chords, tense chords, dark, beautiful, crazy sound design, proggy rhythmic complexity, dance music-adjacency) and it's wonderful to hear a rare example of them all in combination.

King Noah is my 95th favorite in the contest! This is a pretty unique style at so many parts, and mix of elements is really to my liking. Guitar loop at the start's pretty cool and I love the rate changing between slow<->fast oscillating in the other layer in the background there. The drum&bass breakbeat explosion wow crazy fake machine drums stuff is great. The production is nice and keeps this feeling full and effective. One cool feeling is how that lead that starts to be present around 1:05ish starts off very distorted & weak, almost not a thing you'd even notice. but as the track goes it gets more powerful and becomes the centerpiece. I feel like if I liked the actual composition of this more it'd be a tougher match here, but it's sold itself to me pretty strongly just through it's sound design/instrumentation choices.

I think King Noah is extremely cool but this isn't really a close match. Two really unique tracks and it's going to be sad to have to see either of them go really even if I have a clear preference.

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Preserved Valkyria (7/10) this is pretty stereotypical rhythm game music, and I usually like that! My favorite part when this was in the real contest was always :23-29 for its insistence of difficulty to memorize its pattern, at this point that's still definitely my favorite part I guess. I was hoping I'd randomly like the other parts more this time around because I've often felt significant changes in opinion from the past in these ToC songs but I guess that's not the case here, well other than that I like the parts that aren't that part much less. Very intense fake piano O_o CRAZY. that imaginary person can move their fingers so fast it's just like a butter fly. I guess there's other random little moments like :10 - :13 that stick out to me. just random tiny fragments of this like that are significantly more interesting than the rest to me even if i like the "dramatic rhythm game song" aesthetic it exudes regardless of my actual interest in this particular example.

Starry Heavens (5/10) man I actually like the Tales of Symphonia ost no matter what the h8aters on boa8rd 8 (more like "board hate") say... but this...doiesn't actually sound like "tales of symphonia ost" at all so itdoesn't really count.... it just sounds like an anime song. and that's ok, sometimes I like that and i don't dislike this at all, it's just disappointing to see "tales of symphonia" and to realize what is being judged is not really "tales of symphonia"I guess the part around 2:12 actually kinda sounds like "tales of symphonia" in feeling but mostly not really. whoa 3:19 sounds like CLASSICAL music, it's the kind of thing i might think is cheesy sometimes (especially with guitars in the instrumentation) but in this case it's actually a very VERY welcome dip into variety, cool choice in the music. Also big fan of the 90s fake synth bell "fantasia / new age" sounds sprinkled through the whole piece of music in the background just like snow flakes (or more appropriately STARS) because i always like those : ) basically i just like the instrumentation and its adjacency to period-specific stuff i love. Immediately NOSTALGAIC. there's lots of background layers here that are really cool if i turn up the volume really loud but you can not hear them otherwise, wish they were mixed louder.

i don't know what i think of these scores i was way more positive about starry heavens than 5/10 implies but i also like it less than the persona thing i said was 5, oh well.
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