LogFAQs > #955446606

One game - and only one game - is going to be eliminated in this set of writeups! Is it MM7? MMV? MM&B? Or could it be... Soccer? Read on to find out!

25. Sheep Man (Mega Man 10)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZGZeUpSM1I

As SOON as I heard this track, I knew it was from my fave, Mari Yamaguchi. I'm not sure what made me so certain, but I can definitely tease apart some elements of this that are highly reminiscent of her work on Mega Man 5 - I think what stood out to me most was Yamaguchi's 'sleight of hand', as I like to call it, where she's really effective at making it seem like there's more instruments than there really are by quietly having the second square wave drop in and out of doing different jobs - in particular, she drops it in and out of harmonizing with the main lead, since both square waves are needed to produce a chord, as they're monophonic. This is all over the place in MM5 and it's here too (MM9 and MM10 both obey NES rules; two square waves [leads], one triangle wave [bass], one noise channel [percussion]). Listen for it at the start of the A section; there's that high pitched run playing at the start, establishing the idea of activity there, then like a magician's sleight of hand, what do you know, it's suddenly in the other palm, harmonizing the main lead. That run is no longer there but it sort of doesn't matter - you're tricked into thinking that there's more going on than there really is. It's accomplished again at :15 as the harmony drifts away from the lead to start its own idea before snapping back. It's a masterful little use of the limited available musical space that the NES's soundchip has to offer, and while it might seem like an overly pedantic and esoteric thing to get hung up on, tiny little tricks like these are always something that keeps me coming back - it's like Yamaguchi's playing peek-a-boo with my ears. I've always tried to use this little composing tactic in my own works in Famitracker and it's why I've always considered Yamaguchi an inspiration, and this theme demonstrates her craft really well.

24. Magnet Man (Mega Man 3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOy9xQ7gOQs

(I literally could not use my first youtube link for this because it contained 'an obfuscated instance of the word fuck. please just use the word fuck.' thanks gamefaqs, you dipshits, for having some of the stupidest censorship possible)

Magnet Man's theme is an understated little work of genius, and why exactly that is wasn't pointed out to me until just recently, but it's worth looking at for yourself. This theme performs a rather impressive feat - aside from one bar at the very beginning (:03) and one bar at the very end (:36), this song never repeats a single line of music. It's true! There are motifs here that are repeated, but never exactly the same way twice - each bar is unique. It's really difficult to overstate how hard this is to do while still creating a theme that is perfectly coherent, with each successive idea built properly on the previous one. Repetition is a pretty core idea in music, or at least certainly in western music (gamelan ensembles in Indonesia have their own thing going on), and if you're ever written a song you'll find that it's pretty hard to get by without hitting ctrl + C and ctrl + V a few times. There are a couple other tracks in the series that pull this off. I know Dust Man is one of them - not a single repeated bar until :34! Check it out! But Magnet Man really excels at doing it without the song seeming the least bit hectic or chaotic. A deeply underrated theme.

23. Bright Man (Mega Man 4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf4zUAKB08g

Bright Man's theme is excellent with tons of good craft and interesting melodies, but I have to give it one very big demerit that frustrates me. It never returns home! Oh god, it's infuriating! It starts in one key, which is fine, and then on the reprise of the A section, it raises in key, which is actually pretty cool - normally just raising the chorus a key or two is the last bastion of an uncreative writer who just wants to make the song sound bigger and more exciting (I'm staring directly at you, Bon Jovi, you fucking HACK) but no actually it works really well here. But then it stays in that raised key forever! It never comes home - every reiteration of the A section from then on remains in this raised key. It just feels like it's sort of stuck and permanently frustrated - it constantly feels like it's trying to raise the tension, but it can't, becasue it's just on a loop. That said, as much as that bit annoys me, there's a lot of things I could point out in this theme that I love. Like some MM4 themes it's a bit overwhelming to the senses, but if you listen to it long enough you can start to pick out some of the really nice instrumentation; I love what the bass does at :16 switching between playing the bassline but going up an octave to provide these little electric bleeps, and I really like how the lead instruments are shaped here. And there's just kinda always something going on; MM4 tends to be the most complicatedly written of the soundtracks so there's a lot of meat to chew on here on repeated listens.

22. Drill Man (Mega Man 4)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tud96HogGbo

As complicated a theme as Bright Man's is, I think Drill Man has it outdone. This theme's a fucking ride; I have absolutely no idea how Minae Fujii managed to cram this many ideas into one theme, and I can't even absolutely guarantee that it was advisable, but if it's a mess then I think it's an absolutely gorgeous mess. Everything I praised Mari Yamaguchi for in Sheep Man's writeup is also present here in spades; pretty much no instrument in this track is content staying in one place or performing the same role the entire time and there's so much happening here that I can't even begin to concentrate on the fact that there's only four sound channels. This is something that's pretty hard to pull off - I find that it's all too easy, when writing for the 2A03 chip, to create something where the gaps are audible enough that you realize that the NES chip's ability to fill in the space is fragile and it sort of breaks the 'illusion' that you're listening to fully-realized music, so to speak. That's not to say that there is only nobility in having no space in your music - in school, we called using too many notes "MIDI disease" - but I think there's something pretty special in writing something coherent that never allows me to perceive those gaps. This writeup is becoming an enormous clusterfuck, which means it is a microcosm of Drill Man's theme.