LogFAQs > #952684482

98st
Game: Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
Title: Doopliss Battle
Composer: Yoshito Hirano, Yuka Tsujiyoko, Saki Haruyama
Nominator: @NFUN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvug9_xljlY

TTYD is a top 20 game ost for me, i would say this is cheating for that reason, but it actually does very little of what i look for from this soundtrack. I'm mostly here for the trippy electronic elements (the reason i'm here for almost any ttyd song).

one thing this DOES do is one of the very reasons i repeatedly cite for how much i like TTYD so much, and that's how it's using what are typically samples/sound sources meant for EDM, but using those sounds in contexts that aren't EDM at all. this was a philosiphy that i know the soundtrack to a game called ""charge cycles"" delibarately took to heart, if you've heard of that. i...appreciate both Charge Cycles and TTYD sound tracks for that same reason. they're like ""What if dance music made in 1999 was actually weird cartoony prog instead and sounded absolutely nothing like dance music from 1999 other than the timbres it sources, which are used in ways totally incongruous with intent"" and that intersection is one of the most important music categories to me.

it's basically the definition of _Quilava at some level. most stuff in there has that mixture. Yasuhisa Watanabe and PSO are like the ethereal heavenly spacey future version of it; TTYD and SPM are the cartoony shitpost version of it. i just live for things that take the timbres of edm and use them in totally ""wrong"" ways that sound nothing like how they're traditionally supposed to be used. it instead creates a Whole New World (Full), a totally new world where there's no longer this stylistic divorce where jazz or prog or whatever have to be played by guitars or saxophones, they can be played by Best Service XX-Large Club Edition 4 chord stabs instead! it creates a world that evokes bizarre/surreal/cartoony/futuristic/fantastical/[insert adjective] atmospheres that just can't come to exist without this style-instrumentation 'mismatch', a 'mismatch' that seems to only be allowed in video game music and never outside of it for some reason. thank you video game music.

so like ok you have that sample that sounds like a rave stab at :06, but it's not really used as an energetic rave stab, it's just there to be fucking weird and it's so good. the weird zippery acid-like synth bass :34 sounds a bit more like actual dance music, but it's still doing all these things that evoke more ""some obscure latvian cartoon from the 80s that gamebop would watch"" than edm. i love the end of that synth bass phrase every time it goes rapidly up it's so COMP""UTER

REVERSED spooky chords that fade in and then instantly disappear as a swell before the next section [CHECK{} (checking off the list of things i list as things i like in songs). that actually happens a weirdly high number of times and i think i filter it out because i like the feeling of the punch that sort of anticipatory reverse gives things SO MUCH

this is definitely a bit more straight up CHROMATIC CARNIVAL and [halloween] with cliche tropes used to enforce your intepretation of this song as such; and i think that's why it doesn't speak to me as much as other songs in the game. BUT at the same time that sorta fits totally perfectly with Doopliss's personality? like he's so childish and phony and hokey and fake himself, if he was good enough at music to make a song, it would sound exactly like this. he would just slam you with artificially spooky cliches and it's honestly actually pretty perfect at hamming up that vibe in for the character. so i respect it all anyway. i probably wouldn't if it didn't fit TTYD's super specific aesthetic mold, but it actually does fit itself into that synthetic made-by-aliens hole pretty perfectly so i can appreciate everything it does tbh

i am GLAD that I like AUGMENTED CHORDS more than I used to, thank you Zan-zan-zawa-veia for making me decide that i actually like augmented chords a lot instead of thinking that they are "cheesy". This song would have been composed by Zan-zan-zawa-veia in the alternate universe where the composers that composed these songs were Cryptovolans, Chimeratio, Zan-zan-zawa-veia, nys, jangler, gotoandplay, sleeparrow and Savestate. a window into that alternate universe is listed here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qIWq94v8guvHt8Dt5zkk-7xtNb1WoKF2qcyvz9OdkKo/edit#gid=0
(shooting through the stars is supposed to be "Cryptovolans" but it is blank in the spreadsheet by accident)

there is definitely a reason this is one that out of that list of artists zzzv is the most likely to have written tho, and it's basically the spooky minor functional harmony faux-classical nature of it, which zan actually thoroughly explores even if in typically weirder ways than this song.

also as you can see from that spread sheet..... nys wrote the original super mario bros ost except for the castle theme which is zanzan; for similar reasons
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