Board 8 > [VGMC] Video Games Music Contest 12 - Bracket and Discussion

(+) Yeah! (+)

I feel like I'm saying a premature sayonara to Sayonara already. Which is a shame, probably in my top 4 songs in the bracket.
---

azuarc posted...

I-haven't-checked-to-see-if-I-screwed-up-and-there-are-close-results

cheap treasure got 12 votes not 11. which the spreadsheet got so if anything the screw-up was in writing that post. >_>
---

xp1337 posted...

azuarc posted...

I-haven't-checked-to-see-if-I-screwed-up-and-there-are-close-results

cheap treasure got 12 votes not 11. which the spreadsheet got so if anything the screw-up was in writing that post. >_>

Was in the process of editing, actually.
---

azuarc posted...

xp1337 posted...

azuarc posted...

I-haven't-checked-to-see-if-I-screwed-up-and-there-are-close-results

cheap treasure got 12 votes not 11. which the spreadsheet got so if anything the screw-up was in writing that post. >_>

Was in the process of editing, actually.

You still didn't fix it though
---

*cries in a corner*
---

Results, day 35:
Castle of Illusions (Phantasmagoria) < Cosmic Hero, 12-23
Kaze no Ne < Undertale, 12-22
On the Edge < Mission 3, 14-21

Very similar results in each match. Maybe we'll have an exciting round 3 match even if it won't involve Kaze no Ne.
---

I'm guessing Cosmic Hero crushes Undertale and Kaze no Ne is just weak, but we'll see I suppose.
---

Mac Arrowny posted...

I'm guessing Cosmic Hero crushes Undertale and Kaze no Ne is just weak, but we'll see I suppose.

Sounds about right
---

Mac Arrowny posted...

Kaze no Ne is just weak

sounds right
---

Can't wait for the X-Stats to show RftM as the third strongest song in its division

Rivers still wins sorry guys
---

I don't openly advertised the seedings I use, although they're in the spreadsheet as many people have noticed. I was a little salty the last time some people brought this up because I knew I had erred in a few places, and I was worried I had harmed the contest in the result, but I think I've gained some acceptance of where things stand now. Sorry to anyone who I was condescending toward.

But since R1 is done, I figured I'd look at how the bracket did in terms of seeding. Just some random trivia:

Last year, IIRC, roughly 80% of R1 matches went by the seeding. In round 2, the seeding degraded another 80% to around 64% (meaning about 64% of 1-4 seeds went through.) This was actually roughly what I was hoping for at the time, as I believed it reflected an accurate depiction of which songs were strong, while still leaving some room for surprises.

Both are important, of course, because if I horribly mis-seed things and put the two strongest songs in the bracket next to each other, bad and disappointing things happen. (MGS2 theme, the winner of year 2, lost in the opening rounds to Baba Yetu, for instance.) OTOH, if everything goes according to the seeding, why even have the contest? Just let me pick the winner after the nominations round, or we could just skip to round 4, at least. Besides, the songs I got wrong last year were often the most interesting. Anything that survived to round 3 in spite of its seeding was typically a song that deserved to be there, even if my initial evaluation thought otherwise.

Now, onto this year.

Roughly 78% of R1 matches went according to the seeding. It certainly felt like a lot less. Some of the matches I got wrong were real doozies, and the matches I got right most frequently were the 8-9 matches, which is just plain weird. (Well, okay, I only got 1 wrong among the 2, 3, 4, and 8 seeds.)

I missed on the very first 2 seed, Jump Up Super Star, and then never got another 2 seed wrong. By contrast, I had a perfect track record on the 1 seeds until C3, and then both remaining 1 seeds lost. One of those (Blue Radiance) was a tired track with a good past history and the other was my newcomer gamble (Botanic Panic) that was paired against probably the most underseeded song of the contest. I'm still not sure how End of All got a 16 seed. I recognize its quality and I don't hate it that much, other than maybe the first few seconds.

On 3 seeds, there was only one loss, technically, but I'm considering Cosmic Hero's tiebreaker win over RFTM a loss. At least in my book, because I really shouldn't have been putting RFTM at a 14 seed. It deserves better. That stems mostly from the way I use past history as an indicator, and lefty pointed out in chat how he specifically gave it a bad round 1 match a few years ago to prove itself. It's barely escaped R1 ever since, despite respectable showings in its matches.

The other 3 seed miss was Your Contract Has Expired! and the lone 4 seed loss was Jenova Absolute. These matches both share one thing -- a heavily underseeded opponent. Contract might very well have been a decent 3, (Jenova was not a 4,) but Gokinjo Battle and 'Foundation' outperformed their bottom-25% seeding handily.

Someone asked me in chat what I felt the biggest misses in the bracket were, and this comprises most of that list. 5-12 losses famously happen in March Madness, and I don't feel bad about those. We're into the middle 50% at that point. I will note that in those middle seeds, more than half of the songs that lost were songs I was voting for and often pulling for.

The final bit I'll note is that so far in round two, 7 of 8 matches have gone according to seeding. The last was a 5 advancing over a 4. That does include 2 cases where the winning song was still not a 1-4 seed because upsets happened in round 1.
---

Now, if I haven't hit you with TLDR territory yet, I'll get into a bit of what I've said in Discord about the seedings.

First, let's get this out of the way. Yes, there is host bias. That's essentially unavoidable. MC_XD's stats show that I'm one of the people at the top of the "voted for winners" list. Some of that is because I have pretty decent mainstream taste where the board is concerned, and some of that is self-fulfilling prophecy. I like to hope it's more of the former. I do, of course, have my foibles. I'll crap on Banjo-Kazooie or Earthbound, and I'm sick to death of Persona 3 and 4 music that doesn't sound like anything special to me. (P5, I will freely admit, is a lot better in my book.)

So how do I do the seeding? I listen to the songs, try to guesstimate what I think of them, with consideration for if my opinion will reflect the board's tastes, and then compare that against the song's past contest history, if any. Usually, that works out pretty well. I'd like to think that, in general, I do a decent job of appraising songs. But I do occasionally miss badly.

When I overseed, it's usually because either I over-hype a song, thinking that if I like it that much, clearly everyone else should like it too, right? I was pretty good about that this year with my pet songs. The most overseeded songs (perhaps) were Jump Up Super Star, which seemed to me like it was popular, and a Cuphead track that I thought might be the latest hotness. I was in love with neither. I also gave Blue Radiance a 1, and put it against Amusement Park. I still think AP is garbage, which says how poorly Blue Radiance performed.

OTOH, when I underseed, it's much more concerning. I can sometimes bite my tongue and accept a song's power, but we get into trouble when I can't see the value in a song at all. (See my previous remark about Amusement Park.) The most famous example of this, as discussed in chat, was 12th Chapter in the Sky from last year, which I assigned a 16 seed and still put up a decent fight. I was absolutely dumbstruck by that match, and couldn't believe it didn't get completely wrecked. If you want an example of that from this year, go back to the beginning of the contest and how I treated Besaid, where I unrepentantly fed it to Laguerra in R1.

And sometimes, when I miss, it's because I misjudge a song on the first listen. I can only put some much time into each of these songs before contest. I have other things to do, and you're all screaming "We want the damn bracket!" so I don't go absolutely nuts here. I also don't appeal for feedback. I did in my first year, where I recruited Ed to help out, and he helped as much as he hurt in terms of fixing bad seedings, with us needlessly arguing back and forth over some stuff.

It's not that I wanted to talk that laboriously about the places where I err, but those are the bumps in the road that stick out to what is otherwise a fine bracket. And when people gripe about positioning in a way that seems to have a legitimate case, I feel guilty, so maybe I had to get some of that out of my system.

So that's enough about my errors. Let's move on.

After I've given the songs a preliminary position, I plunk in the top songs as 1 seeds, and then position the next tier as 2, and do my best to make sure the 1 and 2 -- should they meet, will be an interesting match. Not two songs that sound the same, not two songs from the same company, etc.

Then I grab a cluster of other strong tracks, and drop them into the 3 and 4 positions under the same criteria -- if they should meet 1 vs 4 or 2 vs 3, we want reasonable matches that contrast style. If people have trouble voting, it should be because the tracks are both legitimately good in different ways and the listeners can appreciate that.

5 and 6 take the same tack. I'm a little less worried about what # I give to 7-10, but my R1 pairings are built around this paradigm.
---

Now, what gets curious is that the songs I have lower on the my list kinda just get shoved wherever. Among 11-16 seeds, I'm mostly looking for just where's a good place to put them. By the end, I'm just shoving things wherever I have open slots still, and that does lead to oddities like Light Pollution as a 16.

However, one very important thing to note is that songs I think are intriguing are treated carefully. If a song is either unusual, or has some quality to it that makes me think that people might latch onto something that I wasn't certain about, I'll try to give them a match I see as "winnable." This is especially true when I think I've overseeded another track or think the style contrast might pull some voters in. The best example in the bracket of this was #4 Jenova Absolute vs #13 Gokinjo Battle. I'm using that pairing because Gokinjo did, indeed, win in R1.

That doesn't always happen, of course. ENDYMION did not beat Light of Nibel. Albireo Lake lost to A Beautiful Song. I put 'Wheels on the Bus' against Ar-ciel Ar-manaf, which I thought was enough of a hot-or-cold song that it might just prevail. (Turns out that one was counterproductive since they're both semi-weird songs.) The most striking place where I did this was Into the Light vs Devil Went Down to Georgia, which was a 2 vs 15 where I was unsure how people would react to ITL and thought people might gravitate to the hard metal of DWDTG over the soft, airy lines of Light.

Moral of the story: songs are more than just their seedings to me. I consider styles, I consider if some might be more deserving of a shot at a Cinderella run, etc.

Unfortunately, for every 1 seed, I do have to have a 16, so some tracks do draw the short straw, and we honestly didn't have many really trash-tier songs this year. Even the songs I thought were terrible, I generally saw some appeal that justified why people got it into the bracket. (Hi, Riot at the Bat Rack!) Say what you will about the nomination rounds, and how chaotic is was at the end with the bar raising to the point that 5-nom songs were being cut, but I do think the floor of this contest is a lot higher. The ceiling might not be, as I haven't found too many songs I truly love that were new -- Cosmic Hero and New World Order stand out -- but I think that the body of songs we had to work with did make seeding a much greater challenge than in the two previous years I ran the contest.

Oh, and let's not forget we have a few new faces voting. banshiryuu, MC_XD, and kikoman came in from other sites. I convinced a friend to vote in the matches. Their presence hasn't necessarily swung matches and altered the central view of the board, but it has colored the bracket via their nominations. I'd love to see some more dedicated new people next year as well, even if it hurts the likelihood I can make accurate predictions about the bracket.

On that note, there was a discussion in chat that it still might be valuable to have someone look over my shoulder before the bracket goes up. And I'd appreciate input, so long as it isn't going to lead to bickering and griping. I fear that with most people, it would lead to that eventually. However, I'd obviously need someone whose style contrasts mine, but who can evaluate the songs fairly. Since he listens to the tracks and ranks them ahead of time anyway, and because he offered in chat, the obvious suggestion here would be to ask Mycro for his opinions. That may or may not happen, but if it does, I think it's safe to say he'd be the most likely choice to collaborate with.

Anyway, congratulations to anyone who got to the bottom of this. I just wanted to take a second and talk about what went into the contest, now that we're deep enough in to see some of the results. I welcome comments and feedback, so long as it isn't openly negative criticism.
---

Even though we complain, we love you azu. VGMC is one of my favorite board projects and was a big reason I stuck around on the board after BGE 2015.
---

A rare day when two KCF songs won. I will likely never see that again.
---

shit goes wrong

that is what shit does

feeling like you have to justify yourself for that is silly >_>
---

I always do, though. That's just how I am.
---

Yeah, I don't think you need to justify yourself here. I also don't know what prompted this, but if it had anything to do with my occasional comments on seedings, I'm sorry. I thought you knew that 99.9% of the time I talk about them I'm just messing with you.
---

Results, day 37:
Apocalypsis Noctis < A Battle with Destiny, 19-21
Life Will Change < Sunshine Coastline, 18-21
Apollo Justice ~ A New Chapter of Trials! 2016 > EXEC_over.METHOD_SUBLIMATION/. ~omness chs ciel sos infel, 20-19

Life has changed for P5. One might say it's the coming of the apocalypses.

Maybe they should have written a caribbean version of that song and called it Apocalypso Noctis.
---

Side note: what was the Ys track everyone thought should have been in the contest by now?
---

azuarc posted...

Life Will Change < Sunshine Coastline, 18-21
Apollo Justice ~ A New Chapter of Trials! 2016 > EXEC_over.METHOD_SUBLIMATION/. ~omness chs ciel sos infel, 20-19

how can you people live with yourselves
---

by voting for the songs that are better like Sunshine Coastline
---

I haven't been on this board for a couple of weeks....

Yes! Apollo Justice won again! What is that other piece...hmmm.... it's actually pretty decent. I'm surprised AJ won against that. I guess people didn't like how calm it was or something?
---

Sunshine Coastline is the only Ys song that I've heard that I am a big fan of. The others are fine I think, but I don't particularly care to hear again.
---

For some reason I feel like the Instrumental version of Life Will Change would do better in VGMC.
---

azuarc posted...

The most striking place where I did this was Into the Light vs Devil Went Down to Georgia, which was a 2 vs 15 where I was unsure how people would react to ITL and thought people might gravitate to the hard metal of DWDTG over the soft, airy lines of Light.

while I do have a few quibbles with your seedings and I think having someone else glance over them is a good idea, I did think matches like this were incredible
---

The worst part was Sublimation was up 4 and then lost the last 5 votes.

like a dagger through my heart

Did Crossing Rage make VGMC? If not, probably that?
---

also heck yeah Sunshine Coastline

only weird thing now is that Last Surprise might outlast LWC
---

Janus5k posted...

azuarc posted...

The most striking place where I did this was Into the Light vs Devil Went Down to Georgia, which was a 2 vs 15 where I was unsure how people would react to ITL and thought people might gravitate to the hard metal of DWDTG over the soft, airy lines of Light.

while I do have a few quibbles with your seedings and I think having someone else glance over them is a good idea, I did think matches like this were incredible

you guys have no idea how much rage i'd have felt if into the light lost that match

on so many different levels
---

Oh, I interpreted that question as more, "Which YS song do you think should have made VGMC (based on the typical board 8 nomination trends)"

Personally, eh... we got False God of Causality and Genesis Beyond the Beginning in, I'm good. I guess Silent Desert or Water Prison? Maybe Termination but eh idk really.
---

I think I mentioned in my vote but I marked it for Legend of the Five Great Dragons, but now that I think about it I probably would rather go with Ice Ridge of Noltia lol. (almost literally every single incarnation you could think of) Extra shoutout to Release of the Far West Ocean, Boy That Had Wings, A-to-Z...

I'm listening to the Ys OSTs now. Tower of the Shadow of Death and See You Again (PCE) are so fucking goofy it's great.
---

banshiryuu posted...

Legend of the Five Great Dragons

---

Vacant Interference is by far the best song I've heard in any Ys or Falcom game (yet). I think it's way better than Innocent Primeval Breaker.

azuarc posted...

Apollo Justice ~ A New Chapter of Trials! 2016 > EXEC_over.METHOD_SUBLIMATION/. ~omness chs ciel sos infel, 20-19

I've never felt so guilty for voting against such a beautiful song; SUBLIMATION could have won this and I would've still been very happy for it.
---

I'm justifying arti's responses in Discord tonight.

I'm out right now, and not going to be home until late. Going to see movie after work. Someone else will have to put up the topic tonight, or wait until I return, whenever that is. Movie is supposed to be over at 9:40, so who knows. Theoretically I could make it, but that would require ditching my friend and running home just to post. I don't love you guys that much.
---

MycroProcessor posted...

for ys music...almost any from the PC Engine CD version of ys 1/2 arranged by Ryo Yonemitsu. Nothing beats that instrumentation/pace to me as far as falcom music goes. Can't even decide on a favorite but that version of Tower of the Shadow of Death used to be my favorite falcom song (maybe still is). Termination, Ice Ridge of Noltia and Palace are up there too. Probably more I don't remember, I used to really be into that version of that ost and I'd still support most of it if it were in a contest today

^5

Results, day 38:
Eleganza (Cthylla Stage) < Flash Frost, 14-20
LastPandemic < Fight Between the Wind and the Blinking Sky, 13-20
Soaring Through the Sad Blue Skies < In This Cage, 14-18

Cya Eleganza. Not sure if I expected those results, but it does continue an interesting trend.
---

Hey, I voted for all the winners again!
---

omg, I'm dying.

I'm playing a control lock against a control mage. It's a very slow game, and we're both hoarding cards. I play Skull of the Manari, and my opponent snap plays Harrison. Draws 1 card and burns 2. Poof goes polymorph. Poof goes Jaina.

"Wow."
"You win this one."
---

azuarc posted...

Results, day 38:
Eleganza (Cthylla Stage) < Flash Frost, 14-20
LastPandemic < Fight Between the Wind and the Blinking Sky, 13-20
Soaring Through the Sad Blue Skies < In This Cage, 14-18

Cya Eleganza. Not sure if I expected those results, but it does continue an interesting trend.

god dammit.

i could take this if it were Koe or Chou, but... In This Cage?
---

azuarc posted...

Soaring Through the Sad Blue Skies < In This Cage, 14-18

The most surprising result, somehow.
---

FL81 posted...

azuarc posted...

Soaring Through the Sad Blue Skies < In This Cage, 14-18

The most surprising result, somehow.

Yeah, I thought everyone was going wild about Gurumin, but turns out it wasn't that strong.
---

Results, day 39:
Into the Light < Ignition, 14-21
Boss Battle < Phantom R's Theme, 13-22
Studiopolis Zone Act 1 > SOLID STATE SQUAD, 21-13

More unexpected results. Don't think I would have predicted either main match would go that way.
---

azuarc posted...

Studiopolis Zone Act 1 > SOLID STATE SQUAD, 21-13

Darn...

Boss Battle < Phantom R's Theme, 13-22

UGH!
---

Results, day 40:
Last Surprise > Tokyo - The Trials Grow Complex, 22-14
Invitation of the Butterfly > The Best is Yet to Come, 24-12
Cradle Where Feelings Rest < Terrible Monster Attacking Crew!, 11-22

And on the final day of bracket A, the only bottom option to win is the side bracket. The best is no longer yet to come.
---

and so I missed both days my noms lost. sad.

azuarc posted...

The best is no longer yet to come.

Until next year, anyway.
---

UF8 posted...

and so I missed both days my noms lost. sad.

You saved yourself mixed feelings.
---

Results, day 41:
Fairyland Beginning > J-E-N-O-V-A, 16-14
Hidra Heteromycin > Reflection (Mirror Night), 18-13
Main Theme < Shevat, The Wind Is Calling, 10-19

Sexy fairies prevail! Evolution Era's successor does not.
---