LogFAQs > #952667343

95. Mars (Mega Man V)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Ze9Apt1rQ

The weirdest thing about Mars is that it's not weird. In a soundtrack that is replete with really odd, funky rhythm and musical choices, Mars is much more standard - a steady, slow pace with little in the way of real experimentation. That's not to say it's bad - I have a soft spot for this piece, possibly BECAUSE it's the most normal song in the soundtrack. It has that standard "cool" sound that you expect from a Mega Man song and when you've played MMII enough as a kid, this stands in stark contrast as a GB song that doesn't sound like a bootleg or some weird shit. I think the 'solo' section at :38 is pretty inspired, but I think the song would really benefit from more adventurous percussion - the 'galloping' hi-hats makes this sound more plodding than it really is.

94. Dr. Wily 3 (Mega Man 3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZ7CyMYDLM

A Mega Man 3 track, out this early? Sacrilege! But eh, it had to go out somewhere. I actually don't consider this one to be too forgettable or anything, despite the fact that it only plays in basically two hallways before bosses - I always found this theme particularly creepy as a child (I mean I was like, literally 5 years old) so it's always kinda stuck out in my head - it makes the coming battles sound a lot more dire than they actually are, since they're pretty damn easy. So I guess it does its job! Other than that, it's got all that nice MM3 sound to it so it couldn't fall out of the top 100 really. "MM3 sound" is hard to beat - everything just sounds so well mixed and like it has such a nice sense of space which is remarkable for an NES chip.

93. Pump Man (Mega Man 10)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iNWjEFtXv8

This was one of the two tracks I got wrong when guessing the composers - I guessed MM1's Manami Matsumae for this one, figuring that the simple, relatively unadorned melody and the literalness of the theme-matching here had a very MM1 style to it, and that Nitro Man had that Yuko Takehara style harmonization and vibrato to it all over, but it was the other way around so go figure. Anyway, like I said, this one is very on the nose for a theme about dredging around in a sewer - it works! Appropriately dark and moody, and that little bass hook in the beginning I find immediately infectious. Hearing arpeggios in a Mega Man theme is really weird, even when only used for effect - I can't think of another theme that has them, since that's typically a hallmark of western composers and not japanese ones. Anyway, the outro's a little lacking but I like this one otherwise.

92. Dr. Cossack 2 (Mega Man 4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9zoPeH-Ly0

Rrk. People are gonna give me flack for this one, aren't they? Probably one of the most popular tracks from not-MM2 and I don't know what to say about it other than that I like it! I don't even really think it's spectacularly overrated or anything, I just have other favorites - 91 of them to be exact. It's a pleasant theme with a very 'smooth' sound to it, which is almost a little bit of a breath of fresh air given all the weird, jarring edges in the rest of this soundtrack (not even a bad thing, but it's not easy listening), and maybe the only reason I find it on the less exciting side is because the stage it belongs to is a notoriously dull autoscroller (the first of its kind in the series, fun fact), but yeah, it's just fine. I'd like it to change a little bit more throughout - the outro doesn't really feel like much of a destination.

91. Tengu Man (Mega Man & Bass)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLGUPZC2tD8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyremKX57fQ

Okay, here's where I can talk about something that I've wanted to talk about for a while with regards to Mega Man & Bass, which is the SNES vs the GBA versions of the soundtrack. I'm actually going to start listing both of them for comparison purposes because I think it's appropriate - each version of the game offers a very different take. (I'm not going to include the Wonderswan version, because come on, no.) So, on paper, the SNES (well, SFC, but who's counting) version should be the superior version. It's rather high quality for an SNES game (I would hope so, since it came out in 1998), it's got a pretty nice patchset and it sounds a lot cleaner than the GBA version, which is very messily compressed (by necessity) and mostly falls back on these 'preset' kind of GBA synths. But... I vastly prefer the GBA version, for two reasons. One, the GBA version of nearly every track has this beefy snare that just REALLY drives the rhythm of each theme - the percussion makes every GBA track sound a lot more exciting, while the percussion in the SNES tracks is very passive and laid back. And two, I actually like the GBA synths! I think they give it kind of a cohesive, faux-NES sound that I find appealing and pretty unique to this game, whereas the SNES version of the game doesn't particularly have a distinct sound to it. The bass is a LOT crisper, too - it's very in the background of the SNES track but in the GBA, it's right there in your face. This track is probably the starkest example of all of these factors - the SNES track wouldn't have ranked above like #150 on account of sounding like the video game version of ambien, but the GBA track just brings a completely new level of energy to the whole thing and makes me rediscover a love for this song that I didn't really know I had.

...Okay, but like, you want to hear the Wonderswan version of it now, right? I know I do. Let's listen to it together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGdA39W6S6Y

HAHA IT SUCKS. It sounds like a bootleg game, right? Can you believe that it's actually NOT a bootleg game? It's an official game. It's CANON.