Board 8 > Mycro ranks the 278 VGM tracks nominated by BOARD EIGHT [rankings] 3 -(TOP_100)-

(+) Yeah! (+)

Toxtricity posted...

59nd
Game: Dujanah
Title: Art Gallery
Composer: Jack King-Spooner
Nominator: @Simoun
https://jackking-spooner.bandcamp.com/track/art-gallery

You got a link for that RHEM 2 ost or something?

I'm sure you've already noticed but I find it really funny that both my noms for this game are both on the lowest and reasonably highest spectrum of your rankings. In general, my survival in this thing has been nothing short of an amazing miracle considering I only had your samples to work with at the time I was finding nominations for this topic.

I've never actually finished this game and all I remember was the author being very harsh on his own work for not getting the fanfare it "deserves". But I'm glad last I checked he's still making games. I've long since forgotten what this game's all about but I'm pleased that it has elicited such an overwhelming "positive" response in you ahaha. Oh I can't wait for a new ranking topic; I dunno if you're tired or what. I feel like I can get even closer next time around.

nah unfortunately the 'custom rhem 2 ost' was just me putting songs i liked that i thought fit on a audio editor timeline, and manipulating them in ways that made them fit better, and scrolling to and/or looping when i felt music was appropriate to come up, i don't think i saved any part of it really. but it was like majority oneohtrix point never music played at 25%-75% speed or something like that. so just listen to the garden of delete album pitched/slowed down and find the parts that feel like they'd actually fit in a myst clone and you'll get something similar to what i was doing probably

i was pretty astounded at you having such a wide even spread across my topic in general, but i did definitely think the contrast in positions for the dujanah noms was particularly funny of course

I have ideas for what my next ranking topic will be. some broader (not limited to vgm), some narrower (rating how well songs fit with my vision of particular settings: probably "dungeon themes" essentially). BUT these will not happen for quite a while. immediately after this topic is done i'll start running vgmc 2022 here for the next few months; and after that due to some personal stuff i will likely not be able to be online almost at all for most of the rest of 2022. but sometime in 2023? it's possible

53th
Game: Unlimited SaGa
Title: Battle Theme 3
Composer: Masashi Hamauzu
Nominator: @Haste_2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fBy6Lg69Vk

Hamauzu

Ah yes. Another song for me to say "ah yes, composer" at. I've liked hamauzu ever since I discovered him from Musashi (Masashi )samurai legend which in itself i discovered because of the Junya Nakano connection it has with threads of fate. and threads of fate was a thing I discovered because of a board 8 user streaming it on stickam in 2009. I could have been a normal person and discovered both from ffx but that is not what happened! Oops!

i suppose this is sorta in the same "the haunter12o noms that were the higher ranked ones" category of like "music with jrpg tropes but also dense sorta prog harmony at the same time", hamauzu certainly appeals to the same set of traits (and even wrote for a front mission game!), so i guess it's not too surprising i ranked it around the same place as like the front mission song and stuff

this track is pretty beautiful while still feeling like clearly a battle theme, and i really appreciate that: again a balance that has to be very carefully touched. The chill jazz fuse-y harmonies (and AMAZING trumpet solo) that feel like a "lounge space" can not actually feel like a lounge space, and the battle theme energy can't overwrite the dense piano chord clusters and the open skies they paint. This balance between "intricate dreamlike beauty" and "simple raw energy" was ATTAINED by the GENIUS known as "Hamauzu". that seamless merging reminds me quite a bit of watson, who i gushed about and will definitely gush about again sometime soon (never thought about how similar of composers watson and hamauzu are until just now)

the rhythms in this one are pretty funny, almost everything is on the off-beats, it's kinda like a sped up version of lasa's spyro nom, except with the mexican touhou trumpet, and not as easy to get turned around. this is pretty astoundingly well orchestrated. Combinations of instruments come together to make "new instruments", that don't feel like the separate components that make them up. the synth bells and dark analog-like drone in the back are very welcome textures that just barely feel there. They don't feel like they tether this track to a particular era, nor does the old stuff drag this tune into a realm of only being acoustic, everything organically melds perfect!

the brass solo in this reminds me of the trumpet solo in Border Down - Bye Bye Mars Take II (which is one of my absolute favorite "jazz solos" in any piece of vgm)
https://youtu.be/WcSmBMQMK2g?t=109

they have a very similar nature, just, very subtle things like the timing of the grace notes and stuff like that, and i guess the fact that they both have an echo effect applied! that's quite a distinct thing honestly, delay echoes applied to a brass solo is not something i can point to many examples off the top of my head of

this song has even more quartals in it than the hayato matsuo nom that just went out! that's rare for hamauzu to beat matsuo on the "quartal count"

oh yeah i love the reversed/rapid volume sweep going into :19, stuff like that's always a hit with me! one of my absolute favorite production techniques. gives a cool pristine clarity between sections and it's really nice when it contrasts with looser realistic stuff this has elsewhere too

You are very welcome. It was fun paying attention to this once in a blue moon!

Toxtricity posted...

they have a very similar nature, just, very subtle things like the timing of the grace notes and stuff like that, and i guess the fact that they both have an echo effect applied! that's quite a distinct thing honestly, delay echoes applied to a brass solo is not something i can point to many examples off the top of my head of

I can't think of many examples either, but a visiting trumpet prof came to my university (a few years back) to do a recital/lecture and he had some equipment that allowed him to use delay echoes in real-time as he played... cool stuff.

Ah, you ended up using the newly uploaded Hamauzu channel upload. Nice. Whoa... I swear this one is higher quality than the previous video I used. Anyway, the more I listen to Batttle III, the more blown away I am by it, both the sound design and the composition... A lot of people would probably dismiss this track because there's no mainstream appeal in terms of melody, but the lack of a normal melody is largely why I find it so intriguing. The melodic/harmonic interction from 0:32 - 0:35 is just fantastic. It is my #86 vgm (really, it should be higher). It is also, in retrospect, my #1 vgm before "getting into" vgm 3 1/2 years ago.... I just never realized how much I loved it until I rated it alongside music from other games.

52th
Game: Murasaki Tsurugi
Title: Darkness and Rumbling
Composer: watson
Nominator: @UF8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wxDTgzf9o

I wonder if Watson (gym leader) would ever do a cover in his style of relevant gen 3 pokemon music.. . .or if he would think it is very annoying that I have created a forced inside joke with myself of always calling him watson(gym leader)

This song checks a lot of boxes for me
1. Chord changes based on transposing one single chord around
- this is especially cool at the beginning, as what is initially a plain chord loop gets other layers adding even stranger harmonies in top of those same chords. And as more elements come in, it starts to contextualize it all as something more 'musical' than the initial simple cluster transposition (and of course, enforce the thing i love where melody lines and whatever have to essentially change key every 2 seconds to work and how that makes me float in the sky)
The filter sweep effects on those pads and all that really bring this element alive!

2. Very fake slap bass
- and fake versions of real instruments in general I suppose. One thing I think is very cool about this track is the fact that the "fakeness" all resides on the timbres themselves, but the composition is by contrast super alive and organic, liveplayed feeling. Like theoretically this could be a live band all playing midi controllers, where someone with an EWI could be playing back a guitar sound, live electric drums, epiano being played back by a "marimba lumina", all hooked up to laptops and set to cool synthetic vsts. something like this:
https://youtu.be/IHmwfT_HBWA

3.(I had a 3...but i forgot what it was)

i saw that "eBand" concert that i linked above live..i think. anyway i was always inspired by things like that back when the idea of it was 'new' in the early 2000s, now the idea is a bit more normal though usually not actually live. watson's probably just playing all his layers on his midi keyboard live and recording the data into the daw and messing with it. there's an irony of jazz-adjacent genres being entirely electronically produced: a category typically priding itself on freedom and the organic nature of human expression. but i think part of why it works is because jazz and all it's derivatives have always been pretty centered around the idea of it being "new" and evoking the urban. So naturally, evolution of it transforms into watson/yack electronic fusion zone by the 2000s. (ironically NOW "jazZ" is like, old, traditional, and most people in the vgm world probably think of "cuphead" before anything else, despite the profound influence modern fusion has on even very mainstream vgm. and there's also some really stubborn people who refuse to acknowledge it can evolve wildly and still have the same roots. )

Uf8 loves to sit in a lounge chair that has a post-memphis-milano colour scheme while looking at the skyscraper window into the darkness and brightness of the fast moving urban night

I JUST REALIZED how much this song feels like Wataru Ishibashi. I was getting all ready to make Yack comparisons but this is definitely more comparable to the mood of something like The Ruined City Kishgal. In fact if I had to guess composer without knowing the track already id probably guess ishibashi, even though Watson would be incredibly obvious in hindsight

Toxtricity posted...

nah unfortunately the 'custom rhem 2 ost' was just me putting songs i liked that i thought fit on a audio editor timeline, and manipulating them in ways that made them fit better, and scrolling to and/or looping when i felt music was appropriate to come up, i don't think i saved any part of it really. but it was like majority oneohtrix point never music played at 25%-75% speed or something like that. so just listen to the garden of delete album pitched/slowed down and find the parts that feel like they'd actually fit in a myst clone and you'll get something similar to what i was doing probably

i was pretty astounded at you having such a wide even spread across my topic in general, but i did definitely think the contrast in positions for the dujanah noms was particularly funny of course

I have ideas for what my next ranking topic will be. some broader (not limited to vgm), some narrower (rating how well songs fit with my vision of particular settings: probably "dungeon themes" essentially). BUT these will not happen for quite a while. immediately after this topic is done i'll start running vgmc 2022 here for the next few months; and after that due to some personal stuff i will likely not be able to be online almost at all for most of the rest of 2022. but sometime in 2023? it's possible

Well with your kind of ideas for writeups, I would be glad to be in anything you want to rank. I used to nom stuff here all the time, but ever since I stayed in your topic idk I just want to see it through the end and have forgotten anything else. Previously, I had gained number 1 in some top 100 Anime OP or something. That was ages ago haha.

Toxtricity posted...

Uf8 loves to sit in a lounge chair that has a post-memphis-milano colour scheme while looking at the skyscraper window into the darkness and brightness of the fast moving urban night

if i had infinitely more money than i do this would surely be the case

elementary my dear watson

51th
Game: Game & Wario
Title: Masterpath
Composer: Yasuhisa Baba, Masanobu Matsunaga, Takeru Kanazaki, Hiroki Morishita, Sho Murakami, Yoshito Sekigawa
Nominator: @DireKrow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv82USNE6Ik

i originally ranked this song way higher but it somehow got down here by the end of the 2018 ranking. i think a 2022 version would have this particular pick at least a bit higher again (i mean "51" is pretty high ranked by the standard of quality of noms for this topic). at the very least this nom is one of the ones i've found the most lastingly impactful on me, as in this song comes to mind very instant when i think of "cool new things i was introduced to" from this topic

i have no idea how to guess which of those composers listed above could've been the one to create this monstrosity. I know of cases of ALL of Baba/Morishita/Sekigawa doing some pretty ridiculous stuff (and probably the others too), this feels enough like the 2000s paper mario games that i'm leaning sekigawa/baba

i don't even know where to BEGIN this song is so insane hahaha. I think it "sounds weirder than it "actually is" '" which reminds me a lot of favorites like evergrace-buying goods at palmira and that sorta thing. part of what makes it feel so weird is: even though i much prefer darker over happy, i think i like this song largely because it has the anomaly of somehow being super happy exterior while being this much of a mindfuck. usually this sorta distortion /is/ unsettling, so it's natural for it to represent darkness. the fact that this is so happy makes all the off-kilter stuff about it actually be waaay more strange, because it's not being used to represent the inherent unsettling feelings you'd expect from elements this unusual

I think if you only had a couple layers of this song playing at once, it'd actually be fairly normal. Its the overstimulation of so much at the same time that obfuscate the simplicity of things that might not be all that weird as individual layers. But "too much at once to take in" is something I always love, so I certainly appreciate that here! I suppose there are some ways certain individual layers are undeniably strange even in isolation, no matter how you look at them, but they'd at least be a lot more comprehensible alone. but one other factor i love here is how much the off layers only feel 'slightly off', they're doing something that'd feel conventional but they distort and warp juuust enough to put this in a trippy cartoon dreamworld zone.

Lots of my favorite sorts of sounds here. Cool filters on that bouncy synth bass. I love the woodwind doing the crazy bends and notes. ac1ually one of my favorite things about this song is the fact that the acoustic-electronic barrier has been broken. I think this is most observable in the woodwind, which feels very "ancient" [blending well with all the very traditional plucked strings elements], but then it'll have weird filters that morph it into a totally strange synth that [now blending with that bouncy bass]

i dunno if anyone would relate to this comparison other than lasa and maybe a few others but. while normally I compare paper mario ttyd/spm-esque stuff to Jordan Rudess (which this does still kinda sound like), honestly the more immediate comparison to me is Marco Minneman (who rudess has often played with). here's an example(s) of what i mean:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQTnyFKVgUw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lPq54hPBBg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD15NKavKeo

though i shared this game&wario song with my brother to ask if he agreed that it sounded like Minneman, but then he said "it sounds like it but also has enough rudess-ness that its more like spcefically LMR"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0twa TBp0JJA (broken by censor filter, remove the space)

the comparison with that specific track he linked there is less obvious because it's more heavy and dark a track, but i guess i can see the comparison. especially that particular synth bass sound! some other tracks by levin minneman rudess (or solo marco minnemann or solo jordan rudess) might make more sense than these examples i gave. just a similar very desne heavily layerd composition using similar sounds.

but HONESTLY; this game&wario track is a unique sound. i'm compelled to /try/ to make comparisons, but it's difficult because this track is legitimately strange in some uncommon ways to be strange at that! honestly the other comparison i was about to make was norio hanzawa: norio hanzawa literally composed to a wario game lol so, i suppose that just shows his distinct wario's off-kilter (but still playful and lively and cartoony) version of reality is

top 50 time (sorry i forgot to make fanfare earlier but now i am making this post so that it seems very slightly more exciting a land mark. who cares about round and even numbers tho prime numbers are where its at yea

50st
Game: 140
Title: 140 Part 4
Composer: Jakob Schmid
Nominator: @kaonashi1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in6bX_HL9Wk

TOP 50 time. it would have been so funny if this was 140th place, but unfortunately i liked it far too much for that to happen

it's strange that i'm not more educated on certain edm categories (especially like, trap, and lots of types of the hip hop) given what a fan of ~90s production techniques i am; like i instantly get excited when i hear 808 hi hats and stuff, but i've historically avoided their use cases outside of stuff closer to when they were invented. so this modern full spacious incarnation of this instrumentation, is fairly foreign to me despite that it's not even uncommon in modern popular music. but i suppose dance music is an incredibly giant category, so there's bound to be some areas i don't see. the direction this takes that sound though is something i'm not even sure i can point to much that's simiilar at all! There's honestly probably plenty (maybe blank banshee is the closest i'm familiar with),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLESzyscHAw

but really, regarding 140: composition this angular, mathematical, full of quartals and stuff, that's not that common to see paired with this production or instrumentation style

i guess the other closest song i can think of to the mood of this is this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtVZAHo_Hb0

but that oizo song's a lot more ttyd/super paper mario-y and dissonant

ANYWYS I LIKE THIS 140 song I get a KICK out of the fact that even the KICK drum here is going up in a fourths arp (actually i guess it's just electric toms but they're kinda hard to distinguish when re-pitched on these sounds), what a way to have a "quartal run" embedded even into your drums...

this track is entirely based around transposition, and oh my ghod IT IS SO BEAUTIFUL ; i joke about how when i listen id~purpose i start floating in the air. i do here for the exact same reason; constant modulation and all that. but this environment is different. instead of id's castle above the cloudss, this takes me to soaring above the neon wireframe cityscape inside the infinite computer void of 1s and 0s. How very quilava(sneasel), just in time for "march is mustelid appreciation month" and "marten day" (i know that mar10 is also mario day, but GUESS WHAT. have you ever listened to "Ice" from super mario odyssey?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42v5g_9L1Oc

it's this mood too i guess. i love that mood, reminds me of that weird 'charge cycles' game).

unlike id tho: the transpositions in 140 part 4 are based both the chord progression itself, and individual chords just jumping around for more dissonant textual flare. still gives me very similar out of body experience into the sky though

the exact synths here...so percussive and FM? and some "iconic korg m1 presets" at least i think (if not, at least similar). i especially love the punch of that low organ hit, and that 808 cowbell at one part... you nailed my sound palette interest here, but taking the step further and putting that sound palette into an environment of composition that elevates my interest a lot more than its traditional use case. one of my more common complaints is my favorite sounds not lining up with the types of music that have my favorite composition but this song pretty much nails that merging! It feels very deliberate too, like it's meant to be a deconstruction of historic dance music tropes, and how proggy and strange they actually can be used! while still all being a simultaneously beautiful and intimidating traI LOVE THIS SONGck

the individual harmonies here are not only that cool desne and full extended type of chord i love, but i THINK they seem at least a bit detuned for purposes of just creating a more crystalline sound? I like that : ) i guess i understand why rwlh always calls music like this crystally now (it was the first word that came to mind and i couldn't think of any other). I'm not sure this is going for any very specific non-12edo intervals (as that's one of the main incentives for microtonal music for many people), but it does remind me of this just intonation acriel song, in many ways! I love this song!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_4zr0Qk6o0

anyways i have to say; i've listened to 140 part 4 enough times that i got pretty big chills that when this autoplayed "0x8c" next for me, and the chords at 3:01 in that song played there:
https://youtu.be/M4wxte922qQ?t=180

I'm so familiar with this 140 part 4 song from this being nommed for me 5 years ago, hearing 0x8c for the first time, during typing this writeup...it felt like i finally beat an impossible boss in a video game i'd been stuck on for 5 years and am having the main theme called back. I KNOW I'm talking about THE WRONG SONG right now, but like, to me this makes me appreciate how powerful motifs can be when they're not even something melodic. In this case, it's just, a pair of a couple chords played back on a specific patch. It gave me chills and that's all it needed to do, was recontextualize those same chords and sounds in a darker, more dramatic environment. good job Jakob Schmid (i don't get chills that often in music these days, very thankful this managed to do it for me) I LOVE THIS SONG

140 part 4 was probably one of the most memorable noms of the topic to me. I wouldn't say it's ranking is anywhere other than accurate even after 5 years, it definitely belongs in this position in terms of where i rank it. but when i think "my ranking topic on board 8" it's almost like this song starts playing in my head, well, this and [ranking topic spoilers], and maybe [ranking topic spoilers] as well. but this is just as memorable as those top-10 tier things (i actually have to say this about masterpath as well. i suppose that defines this exact range of the ranking: still in the 8.x zone, songs that by definition i don't necessarily consider "favorites" even if they're in my regular listening rotation. but these are the songs that... while they don't have 'that' golden status, they still did the maximum they possibly could without breaking that threshold. i had a similar thing to say about the high 7s / high 6s / etc. it's sorta the definition of the purpose of tier-ing, they're different "categories" of enjoyment. and this song is very toward the top of the category of "music i would put on a cd mix but don't consider a favorite", that in itself is astounding! because once i shift to the 9.x zone, the reason behind my enjoyment changes, meaning that the high 8.x's are the top songs at appealing to my tastes in the "i would give a song an 8" sort of way?!)

((long winded way of saying this is one of my favorite songs that is possible for me to love in a "chill lo-fi quartal beats to study to" background sorta way. but in a ranking you're less incentivized to celebrate that, than the "the epic standouts", but fuck that, that's dumb, this song wins an award of some sort for sure for me, as well as the others i'm ranking near it))

Yo that song is great. Very crystally. lol

Hmm. I may have to listen to more of this "140" thing.

i definitely hear the similarities between masterpath and those marco minnemann and LMR songs yeah.

sidenote: i'd actually never heard of LMR! it's awesome to me that they're just liquid trio experiment but with minnemann on drums instead of portnoy, since i'm a big fan of liquid tension experiment/liquid trio experiment. i need to listen to all of their stuff now!

49nd
Game: Driving Emotion Type-S
Title: Best Tone
Composer: Ayako Saso
Nominator: @JONALEON1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zcz7Eb1e9s

ok WHAT the fuse (fusion), i had this song in my head earlier today and had no idea what it was. i was listneing to another jazz fusion song and i was expecting it to do that cool rapid abrupt modulation thing this song does at like :22/:36/etc (but it didn't do that. btw the song in question was the first track on this if you are curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gljhu6u44g

if you like Driving Emotion Type-S - Best Tone. you will probably like this song i have just linked too)

the top comment on Best Tone compares it to "Dimension" and i'd say i make that comparison too, of the various bright happy poppy japanese jazz fusion bands, dimension is the one that integrates the most intricacy into their compositions (stuff like :22/:36, but also like...there's like, SO many moments in this track i could point to that are just constant rapid successions of tonal center changes every 3 seconds and stuff, in that sorta 'mathematical' way that Dimension does. now that i think about it, "Dimension" is a good name for a band that does "mathy things" a lot...)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYiyWgXaHIw

(i'm pretty sure i linked that exact song earlier in this topic). i've been trying to listen to all of dimension's music but they have like 27 albums so it's taking a long time @_@

anyway the R3AL composer here is Ayako Saso! She is very good at jazz fuse; one great example of ayako saso jazzfusion is "Ayako Saso - Blood vessel of city" from the non-video game 2197
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftSJgd4NnAc

i always feel like i have to be such on the 'defense' here; because i'm so used to being attacked for approaching music from a vantage point that others misinterpret as very "detached theoretical nonsense" or others even under a wrong impression that i somehow think i'm better than everyone else just because i openly describe my favorite stuff as "complex" or whatever. (in reality i feel very alienated and insecure about my own music taste being what it naturally is. and i think that everyone who disagrees with me is out to get me and i have the delusion that everyone who likes simple conventional music and berates weird prog or 'complex jazz fusion' or whatever is part of a secret underground organization that is plotting to murder me specifically and i tend to react accordingly).

but imo 'mathematical' is a feeling, it's why 'angular' is an overused word in reviews about the type of music i like. because it's a visual way to describe how stuff like this sounds. i'm inclined to say things in terms of a bunch of theory jargon because it's just the words i think in easiest (and a lot of the things that impact me the most, are very easy things to point out in that sort of language, as they're largely about subversion of tradition that work kinda in a math puzzly way). but that doesn't mean my response to such things is anything other than what it is to anyone else: it's a "feeling" that i like that i think is "cool". jazz fusion in this vein does "angular"things that are the same things that excited me when i was an 8 year old and didn't know anything about music.

'angular' stuff visualizes industry pretty well, maybe that's another reason for the jazz fusion=racing trope. car engines and machine parts and stuff. Racing tracks are curvy but they're still clearly artificial; and on a hard surface. maybe that in-between artificial and organic (shape) is why jazz fusion works so well. Organic instruments and solo style, improvisatory-adjacent nature (the shape of the courses), but hard jagged mathematical composition style in structure otherwise (hard surface of asphalt.,,,,Cars that are MACHINES and all the grids of lines that are yellow on top of the tracks. ) GEOMETRIC

i'm,,,,nearly certain i have linked this, maybe even in a recent writeup that i also linked dimension in, but i can't help but think of it again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apVtO6Vv1yE

this spy fox song, was something I first head in "Spy Fox Cheese Chase" (even if it originated in the dry cereal game), and it is one of the first things to awaken my love for vibraphone as an instrument, but also this modern frantic cityscape category of it. but................this means i can say i actually got into jazz fusion from racing game music....well a game about cars...well, sort of, you're on like, a motor cycle thing chasing the bad guy cars on CITY STREETS it feels like racing game ok. given that jazz in general took over my life in my early adulthood for a very large number of years, i suppose

anyway BEST TONE that's a pretty good name it sounds like ayako saso thought she was a genius and has come up with the best tonality for a song to have in it. i mean, it's not far off from my perspective on it...

ELIMINATION FIFTEEN

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
15) JONALEON1 (Average placement: 122.5)
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
26) NowItsAngeTime (Average placement: 157.4)
27) jcgamer107 (Average placement: 159.125)
28) Haunter12O (Average placement: 161.375)
...
30) Snake5555555555 (Average placement: 167)
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
33) OrangeCrush980 (Average placement: 190.5)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266)

BOTH "15th person eliminated" and "15th place in terms of average ranking" huh

jonaleon1; you are someone who has been one of "the people i relate to them because of the music they like" since my earliest days on this board. like back in vgmc3 era when i was pretty severely out of place with the tendencies of the board the most; you were one of the few (if not the only, at times) that was on my side of most things. and i've always loved things i was introduced to by you

for this reason it's sorta a surprise you didn't score higher, if i had to guess which person would win top avg rank or so in my topic, you'd be one of my first guesses. though you went on longer than most people without losing a nom, so did have that statistic in your favor. your run was actually very similar to zig's just with a higher upper bound. small-ish range your tracks wind up in, going out in the early half of people going out, but since nothing actually was ranked low, your avg rank is still decently high

anyway, despite maybe going out earlier than expected, it's not like i couldn't tell your noms were /yours/. fun rhythm game stuff and fun jazz fusion, all very much my jam here in your presents for me. thanks so much for those! I will listen to them a lot now! maybe next time you will win, but you don't need to win every time. I strongly appreciated what you've presented to me as usual regardless!

current stats of that stuff
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/8/4/1/AAefu7AADBzx.jpg

Huh, for some reason I didn't realize we were in PURPLE TIER.

Whoa how am I doing this well wtf

Pretty happy about it though, since my 2 proudest noms are still left! *crosses all possible pairs of fingers*

still hanging in there...! though it looks like position 178 got duplicated on that chart somehow, so it shows me as having 2 songs remaining when it should actually be 3

this 2nd place is feeling a lot more like 4th currently. hoping the rest can make it to magenta, given the songs that have been coming up though i wouldn't be surprised if one or two more fall sooner than that

Zyxyz0 posted...

still hanging in there...! though it looks like position 178 got duplicated on that chart somehow, so it shows me as having 2 songs remaining when it should actually be 3

oh sorry about that, with the fact i was handling that page manually there was bound to be errors, but i've now fixed it!

UF8 posted...

this 2nd place is feeling a lot more like 4th currently. hoping the rest can make it to magenta, given the songs that have coming up though i wouldn't be surprised if one or two more fall sooner than that

you are a genius

48nd
Game: SOUND VOLTEX II -infinite infection-
Title: crazy cinema story
Composer: Chroma
Nominator: @UF8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRFB6TduVhE

you know, having just talked about how jazz fusion is "angular - except on organic instruments" in the previous writeup, listening to this straight after gets me thinking about how a lot of rhythm game tropes, anything even slightly fusion/artcore/etc adjacent: that's like...an experiment on "what if the actual timbres of the music reflected the composition style that jazz eventually developed". IT's like, a cyclical jump from among the most loose and organic expression of freedom to, FRANTIC GRID (and i mean this in a good way...this is perfect for the concept of what Rhythm Games even are!)

example: the piano noodling at :19-:30 or so; if this song was a "real jazz song" (or even just 'by watson') that stuff would actually feel loose and smooth. in this context it starts to feel more like MACHINE PROG instead, which is cool! New GenreRhythm game. I LOVE THE QUARTAL HARMONY TRANSPOSIGN iN the piano 0:42 - 0:53 THOSE Are those notes that i like when theyh happen

that's not to say this track doesn't also do its own merging of artificial and organic of course. the woodwind layers feel a lot more "world music" (chrono cross) and therefore work to fill this space with a lot more variety, though still have their own fakeness, but that adds to the charm(chrono cross from the 90s)

i dopn't know where constant 8th or constant 16th string lines came from as far as rhythm game trope; but i've always loved it, they make me think of this song which i love so much and tightly like a million amount (this is a harmonically pretty similar song too. lots of "quartal and quintal harmony" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartal_and_quintal_harmony (i should just link this page whenever people ask what kind of music i like)) type ideas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czAH6g3KuV8

another absolutely stupid comparison i can make...the strings at 1:43 (and similar parts to that), i can't help but instantly start getting this song in my head
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3i0C9xy9DU

please do not hurt me. . . i k now that comparison is very silly, but yeah magic school bus explores the human body ost has a lot of "jazz influence" but particularly takes quintal/quartal harmony stuff as its way of actualizing that...so maybe ESPECIALLY because of the whole thing i just talked about, the irony of a very 'organic' genre eventually evolving into 'math grid' genre, and consequentially evolving into music that is played on a computer midi file. it works! I like that! maybe i should commission chroma to do covers of magic school bus explores the human body music (and still watson for covers of gen 3 pokemon music of course)

anyways, i would probably never even naturally register this song as 'jazzy' if it weren't for just talking about fusion harmony in the previous topic, really this is RHYTHM GAME PROG or whatever. kinda artcore adjacent because o the fake piano. it doesn't have a bemani genre name that i can find so i can't use that but if i had to give it a name it would be ENERGETIC CONTEMPORARY

the random static at the very end immediately puts Class::EXSPHERE_NOSURGE; into my brain ha ha ha

ohright the time sig chart (this is directly ripping off the in-game barlines, which might not be the "correct" way to write it on traditional sheet music):
(0:00 - 0:13) 7 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 3/8
(0:13 - 0:28) 5 bars of 15/8
(0:28 - 0:42) 8 bars of 4/4
(0:42 - 0:53) 4 bars 7/4
(0:53 - 1:20) 16 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 1/4
(1:20 - 1:35) 8 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 15/8, 1 bar of 7/8*
(1:35 - 1:50) 9 bars of 4/4
(1:50 to the end)1 bar of 7/4, and then a long note, and then a loud noise

*=this "7/8" bar is an ambiguous hold and i don't have the energy to figure out if it's exactly timed like that to a metronom,e but also whoo cares on sheet music it'd probably not even be indicated the amount of space there WHO CARES it's just a game(this isn't vgm in odd time of the day please don't tell me to be a perfection object)

oh yeah this track reminds me of that one ichiro shimakura song from star soldier vanishing earth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlE88InZ-ic&t=40s

that similarity is not that real...i just think of it because they both have a similar hi-hat part when they "calm down" (dont' calm down). At :40 in the star soldier vanishing earth boss, at :53 in crazy cinema story. i have to have thought of it like 9503 times so i can't not mention it even tho they are not actually that similar...

getting placements just short of a new tier is my specialty

how do I still have two songs left

UF8 posted...

getting placements just short of a new tier is my specialty

challenge accepted

rwlh posted...

Huh, for some reason I didn't realize we were in PURPLE TIER.

Huh, for some reason I thought purple tier was the highest tier.

*sweats nervously*

purple tier is the highest tier because purple town is purple

47rd
Game: Iji *Remix
Title: Tor Remix
Composer: HyperDuck SoundWorks, Robotaki
Nominator: @Shonen_Bat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU3d3FDIjRI

: ) i love this song ! i've always had at least a mild appreciation for the original---mostly for the composition specifically (meaning, it's something i WANT to see remixed with other styles. same notes but with ideally very different exuded aesthetics). but this takes content that i already enjoyed and changes the world to something i wholeheartedly LOVE with all of my energy. For the first 1:21 or so i'm expecting this to be totally grand orchestra world (which i like to begin with)...then the (REALLY good and engagingly manipulated) breakbeats come in and now it is "GUST SOUND TEAM" ar tonelico mood. fusions between electronic-ancient are something i've regularly expressed liking of course. i'm glad this doesn't come across as "epic orchestra song TECHNO REMIX" either, the electronic elements do not feel slapped on to a pre-existing thing in the slightest (which many remixes often feel to me). They're a /surprise/ when they suddenly come in, but they still feel like they belong in this merged mixture of timbres, as if they always belonged there, and just hadn't shown up to the party yet

i of course have interest in this being in 7, and i'm going to stubbornly say "7" rather than 7/8 or 7/4 or whatever, because this is a track that plays with different container sizes! The space of information of the song is simultaneously the length of 7 quarter beats / 7 eighth beats / depending on the layer you focus on here and i LOVE that! as a positive result of that to me, it doesn't feel like a rigidly enforced incarnation of odd time, it just becomes a new world, a new type of thing the song can be. new type of container for note positions (even if 7 isn't even that uncommon relatively speaking). i think that contributes to the open mood this has too, 7 can feel uncertain and claustrophobic, but this looser, harder-to-follow manifestation, especially given the instrumentation: it paints an open space to me.

it's pretty quick that i'll be excited about a song when i hear mallet percussion, lots of beautiful marimbas here...you know, the combined mixture of marimbas and 90s/00s electronic dance music drum elements makes me think of this remix by D*Note of "Piano Phase" by Steve Reich, which i've often used to signal a very good representation of what my taste in music is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZx-KL7yQ3c

this iji remix has exactly that mood, math-y composition on acoustic instruments such as marimbas which are often associated with "the jungle" and then electronic drums that are "jungle (genre) ((except they're not jungle, at all, but you get what i mean...))". but i think the big difference, the iji remix takes everything i like about that piano phase remix but makes it become EPIC. and I like epic~! That is so good and makes me very happy : ) thank you for nominating this wonderful song that takes me to a wonderful world with cool emotions and also has cool numbers in the song

Always happy getting to put that up somewhere. Great game that never got to blow up like a lot of other indies. Tor one of my favorite boss themes also, nice writeup

46st
Game: Entomorph: Plague of the Darkfall
Title: Saltmoon Village
Composer: Danny Pelfrey, Rick Rhodes
Nominator: @Zyxyz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_qOpCjBpy8

LITERALLY JUST DEEP FOREST (i love "Deep Forest")

so this is "worldbeat" maybe, the genre of music that is imitating music that sounds like the artist Deep Forest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovwGCpx8ecY

that is one of my favorite genres for sure; a very distinct subgenre of "new age". definitely the precursor to things like ar tonelico or whatever, but more specific. there's a very distinct sound worldbeat has that isn't approached often outside of it really, even if i could make some vapid comparisons.

a lot of people cynically dismiss 'world music' as like shallow, or even outright harmful cultural appropriation. i do not want to get into the political implications of the topic, but one thing i will say, is that I appreciate what my interpretation of the motive is (whether or not the artists or others will share this interpretation):

TO ME "world music", is sort of a celebration of the optimistic enthusiasm of the 90s that,,,, all around the world, we were human---regardless of where we were from, and we could start to connect to each other with less fortified borders cutting us off from each other. this started to be big because INTERNET (wow) and a connected globe

I think people misinterpret the definition a lot. The reason it's called "world" is not designed to reduce anything "exotic" to a vague meaningless qualifier to exploit. On the contrary, the optimistic motivation was this idea that the genre is "music of all eras and types, from all around the world, merged together", to celebrate combinations of traditional music elements that historically were not otherwise possible to have interact with each other. You call it "world" rather than ever indicating any specific country on purpose: because you're removing the borders that require such a delineation (and ideally, combining multiple unrelated cultural heritages together), and allowing every type of tradition (and modern non-tradition) to work together to create something new. Traditional bulgarian chanting is no longer alien to electronic music producers in the uk, and you can hire an actual Aboriginal Australian didgeridoo player to work with you too in the SAME song. Now that technology and WORLD PEACE have connected us all together, no culture has to be cut off from celebration

i wish 2022 felt this optimistic

honestly most times in history never had this level of GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING optimism the 90s sorta pretended to have, but this song takes me back to the fleeting moments when the world did feel that way to me.

anyway, whether or not an artist approaches this merging-of-traits-from-unrelated-cultures-and-eras in a way I agree with or not; almost always, the most IMPORTANT thing is "i think it sounds cool usually".

For me, i think it's as simple as the [traditions-of-the-old] and [technology-of-the-new] not being cut off from each other, they're not enemies, and if blended right can make something unheard of and beautiful. while i do have my preferred countries where i think their traditional folk music is most interesting (proud to be marginally bulgarian...(i am mostly mexican though)), it actually usually doesn't matter so much where it's from, because the cool part is the anachronistic blending of the old and new. This is why "world music (genre)" speaks to me: it's not that i objectify my perception of exotic, it's that traditional music represents the old, and when you blend various traditions from around the world with something modern...it's just...cool!!! It's a NEW WORLD where the african savannah morphs into a psychedelic color swirls and neon wrieframe grids transport you in an instant to amazon rain forest. That's just a cool "new" reality that isn't possible with strict borders between which styles are allowed to exist with each other or not. so i've always been a staunch defender of eliminating that barrier, the same way i'm enthusiastic about other genres with words like "fusion" in the name. if jazz can be played by modern synths; you can put amen breaks under bulgarian chanting

this entomorph song is bursting at the seams with so much cool detail. it reminds me quite a bit of Yoko Kanno actually in that department, there's a pretty good bit of anime music from her that's like...this. Just lotsa layers piled up on top of each other for cool. some songs that come to mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn4vp9mAgjs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2efYOIPZIgs

Something that's easy to underappreciate with songs like this (things like gust and kanno, or even Deep Forest themselves) is the number of layers doing the same thing as each other on top of each other to create a sound more full. I'm more inclined to recognize when layers doing very different things from each other are intersecting, but here you have stuff where like that high bass almost feels like its a percussion instrument. And electronic drum loops don't actually feel separated from the live traditional drums. Its hard to tell where the barrier is between synthetic future elevator machine drums and real hand drums. They have MORPHED between each other. That is so cool!

One thing this entomorph song does that I actually never heard much in deep forest or anything like that is how at some parts here you've got the voices with like a flange/phase filter on them. Makes it feel like those drakengard 3 songs that do that...coool!

Honestly 90s electronic music had so much stuff "figured out" that its absurd to me that it is associated with the feeling of being dated. In some contexts there's a feeling of limitation, but this feels more sonically immersive than anything modern.

There's not any static sound here, every synth pad morphs between timbres, every lead has so many pitch bends, cool background pitch bends that create this sense of depth and height as well

If you haven't yet, and like this song. In addition to checking out Deep Forest I would highly recommend checking out the Lost Eden OST as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLjKjNp5N_Q

As i said, worldbeat is one of my very favorite electronic/new age subgenres and although it was "all the rage in the 90s" I really can't think of any examples of it being in VGM directly other than this track and the Lost Eden ost (if anyone has any good examples let me know!). I'm thankful for those examples though because they are so cool!

Toxtricity posted...

As i said, worldbeat is one of my very favorite electronic/new age subgenres and although it was "all the rage in the 90s" I really can't think of any examples of it being in VGM directly other than this track and the Lost Eden ost (if anyone has any good examples let me know!). I'm thankful for those examples though because they are so cool!

it's not quite as cool as those soundtracks, but that reminded me that I do know of a VGM track that's literally called "World Beat"...!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VM-hZmDwLM

I've always nominated Tor Remix in music topics but always get shafted by a low rank and I was kinda tired of nomming it so I just didn't this time lol. I should've---honestly anything that isn't my terrible 2nd to the last ranker.

EDIT: Sorry I meant the original Tor's theme, not this remix

Zyxyz0 posted...

it's not quite as cool as those soundtracks, but that reminded me that I do know of a VGM track that's literally called "World Beat"...!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VM-hZmDwLM

omg whoa; i don't remember this. i think i might have never checked this particular ost out even though i've listened to most of the series' music. this is definitely cool

one of the first 2 game soundtracks I ever heard (before i ever played a video game) was "the even more incredible machine" (my story with that is the first day i used a computer, before ever playing a game in my life, i listened to every MIDI file on the machine, including those to pre-installed games and the pre-installed games were The Even More Incredible MAchine and Lode Runner: The Legend Returns. So "listening to vgm out of context" has always been in my blood.....)

Simoun posted...

I've always nominated Tor Remix in music topics but always get shafted by a low rank and I was kinda tired of nomming it so I just didn't this time lol. I should've---honestly anything that isn't my terrible 2nd to the last ranker.

EDIT: Sorry I meant the original Tor's theme, not this remix

It probably would've done well! somewhere in this purple tier but not as high as the remix

45nd
Game: Jumpstart 3rd Grade Adventures
Title: Molecular Awe (WGM)
Composer: HaleSong Music Productions, Randy Hale, Big Fish Audio
Nominator: @Zyxyz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP6OxERlMGM

90s Edutainment VGM OST representative!!! thank you!! (of course it's from you hahaha) i'm a big fan of this soundtrack actually

i had a fascination with this song when younger. generally how weird it was, but also it was a permanent tie-in to me. the idea of being shrunk down to microscopic in size to the point computer generated 3d spheres (molecules) were bigger than you...it's a weird idea! It's a totally, impossible thing to experience with current human technology, so naturally the music follows what that feeling is. in general---in life, i've always had fun imagining places i go about in real life being places they're not (it's funner to go to science class when you imagine that the classroom is inside of a volcano! or whatever), and since i was exposed to this game "in 3rd grade", i was able to have it ingrained pretty early on that one "option" for imagining as an environment was microscopic molecule simulation world, or at least things that felt vaguely like that. This song would start playing when i go to the McDonalds that is inside of a giant DNA strand or whatever

interestingly, the metadata in the midi file for this game, indicates that this track was originally called "Gaseous", and level 2 and 3 being called "Fluidity" and "SolidMan". but knowing that this track was supposed to indicate GAS specifically, that really explains why it avoids having anything to stand on. the music is really cool to me in that symbolic sense, without knowing exactly the context i'd definitely have assumed it was something at the very least "spacey", not solid. so it does a great job at what it's clearly intending to represent

it's not necessarily easy to find very "sound-design"-focused midis, this isn't necesarily limit pushing at all, but midi tends to incentivize "composition-focus" by its very nature. MIDI is all about storing notes, not sounds, composers know it won't even sound the same between sound systems that play back midis with entirely different sounds. So often sound design takes a backseat...but not here! You've got cool delay echoes, cool pitch bends, interesting uncommon use of the specific midi patches it's using. This actually clearly is going out of it's way to sorta turn the sounds it uses into use cases where it won't really matter what you play it back on---it will still sound cool!

here's my cchannel visualizer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeY3bWpMnYg

as u can see from the fact that these tones are held down for very long portions of the songs, and the crazy panning/pitch/vibrato/etc control changes visible on the left. so many layers don't even have any "new notes", but they have so much done to them while held down, vibrato and pitch bends. slowly fading in volume, all that stuff. It means that the function of these sounds is more akin to raw waveforms of like a gb or nes, like they're /not/ that, but they feel more like that, because the exact timbre playing these notes back doesn't matter so much, because the sound gets manipulated through layering and all those sorts of effects anyways. I wish i saw more examples of stuff like this! One game soundtrack I know is full of this kinda thing is "Obsidian", a myst-clone i really love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySfWqqbpKQU

given that i just said i think Molecular Awe would sound good on alternate soundsets, and standard MSGS is far from my favorite MIDI soundset, here's a few examples of this track played back on other things i've just recorded!

Creative Sound Blaster Live!'s 8mbgmsfx:
- this is likely how i first heard it as a kid, I definitely did not hear the MSGS version you nommed first, because i didn't experience that until i got windows XP in 2002, which was definitely notably after i'd originally played this. but i did havve a computer that would make the song sound like THIS (probably, it actually had multiple modes for how it could sound but this was one of them)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0lpQQxtZe4

OPL3 (the fat man 2op set):
- although, it's also likely i had just heard it on this originally, which was my first MIDI experience on my Win3.1 machine (only recently 'upgraded' to windows 95 at the time). the balance in this thing i've uploaded is a bit off with certain instruments loud-leaning---this is not how this always sounds on opl3, just the particular emulator i recorded from here, but it was better than some other emulators i found with other artifacts. i'm using an opl3 emulator here but i still have that computer from 1995, i could try recording this from it but it'd be a bit of effort (and would likely result in lower quality)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyw80bWHJ30

i guess neither of those examples turned out amazingly (and i've tested the midi on plenty of other things and it sounds nicer than these examplse) BUT i picked them becauUSE that they are the first two ways i heard it (not sure which of the two came first). I was definitely playing this game pre-2002 and the two soundsets i had on the computers in my house at that time were these two (then i'd have heard the version you nommed when i replayed this sometime post-2002 on the xp computer probably).

44st
Game: Taiko no Tatsujin: V Version
Title: MM
Composer: LindaAI-CUE
Nominator: @DireKrow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddoFtn_EK9A

(picking a much higher quality link than what you gave me, i think this quality level wasn't available easily before, but luckily it is now!)

((Actually i think there's some issues with that one too...neither of these are how this is supposed to sound i'm pretty sure, but here's the original link if you want an alternative to that one anyway))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b_M2L829Lo

i kno you said you picked your picks more "trying to appeal to me" rather than songs you specifically liked yourself, but you NAILED exactly my aesthetic with this one, and in ways that do overlap with your interests, even if you're not necessarily into this song. It's VERY epic, cataclysmic, dark, oppressively so, and that's an interest i certainly share with you. this is the music that plays when you fight yvetal in the middle of when it does some apocalyptic thing

LindaAI-CUE's style is often recognizable from miles away, it's not just the "wacky crazy complex weird rhythm game song" that defines their stuff, but it's very precise peculiarities about the production. There's a freedom that's not often found in other rhythm game music, honestly it makes sense for "taiko" because it almost feels like a dream (nightmare) translation of the furious energy of real life drumming, but everything you're imagining that could be played at the same time layered on top. Like you're drumming a normal set of drums but then each hit is releasing GLOWING DARKNESS energy (represented by every other sound of the song), and what you hear is this. There's all these strange imprecisions and it's exactly what's attractive to me about this.

for a long time i was saying that i can't really decide my favorite LindaAI-CUE song but it honestly...at this point i'm almost certain it's this? Which i was introduced to because of you, so...congratulations! You showed me my favorite song by a composer i love! The realization this is my favorite one took a while tho, i definitely didn't think it was at the start of this topic. it's less mathematical than other standouts, but that's less important to me these days than the more enveloping concepts like "atmosphere" and how hard it actually is to follow. This song is, despite being all 4/4, far harder to follow than the mixed meter linda songs (partly because linda's style of mixed meter is very much like "making it very obvious that the song is in odd time and having changing timesigs"). There are some others i'd place at a similar level of "hard to follow" but they're more silly than this one so i'm not able to get quite as into them as i am this serious display of the chaos realm. MM has the perfect balance of "serious darkness" and "rhythmic ambiguity/difficulty" and also just productionally probably the one i find the most cool.

despite that i just said linda's style makes odd time obvious when it happens, what he doesn't do is make ANY OTHER rhythmically strange thing obvious---it's only that it's usually clear where the barlines are. but his non-obvious rhythmic choices are more things along the lines of...impossible-to-comprehend polyrhythms (donkama 2000 . . . [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OrXuTysJ_I]),

but at other times (MM) the way the rhythms are non-obvious and extremely hard to follow take the form of just,,,,weird tricks. 1:30 is still in 4/4, but the tempo has been sped up suddenly, with no pulse telling you exactly /how much/ it's been sped up. so these tricky "syncopated within fast 4/4" funky rhythms (which might otherwise not even be that weird on their own) are actually /insane/ feeling rhythms, and it's definitely my favorite bit of the song. i think it helps obfuscate the tempo/rhythm the fact that the rhythms are sorta "bouncy" ones, so before the rapid 4/4 kick comes in, you're potentially hearing it as 6/8, or swing/shuffle/triplets at a completely different tempo (This is USUALLY what happens to me, despite that i know what it "really" is doing there)

one other thing i appreciate is how thick and full the chords are. i was lamenting the other day about how frustrating it is that dark/epic/"tough" things tend to have less dense chords, leaving all that stuff for like "chill jazz fusion" or "cute disco for pink spheres", and that frustrates me because my personal aesethetic is far more aligned with "edgy werewolf dragon of DEATH" or whatever, and i want those cool chords! Why can't i have them?! why is all the edgelord music boring triads : ( well this song isn't like that!! THis song has COOL string chords when those happen. it's actually not that often that it's legible easily in the song, but it makes the bit at 2:22-2:25 especially a cool payoff when it happens, i love the feeling of those chord hits on the strings when they hit

man i love flanged violins...makes me think of...shining wisdom. the other big production element i like here is the how just sliiightly desynced the glitchy sounds are at 1:12 (which actually seems very intentional, looking at some of the rhythm game charts, you're actually expected to precisely time those in at least some of the difficulties?! crazy, reminds me of E.G.G.'s groove coaster insanity, which has similar things in a couple places), that glitchy section in general is surprisingly beautiful too! it's like the absol showing up to warn you about destruction about to come and you are looking at the landscape turn a red shade as the sky starts to become infected by "the dark force" that is going to be bvery mean to you

i always liked linda ai-cue, but since the making of this topic i've dived in deeper largely because of this song. dire has such a good track record this topic of getting me to more seriously look into the work of an artist i'd only had a passive (but positive) familiarity with before.

ELIMINATION SIXTEEN

Ranking by average placement:
1) ???
...
7) DireKrow (Average placement: 99.625)
...
15) JONALEON1 (Average placement: 122.5)
...
17) Zigazagoon (Average placement: 135.25)
...
25) AndywoodCubeGmr (Average placement: 156.8333333)
26) NowItsAngeTime (Average placement: 157.4)
27) jcgamer107 (Average placement: 159.125)
28) Haunter12O (Average placement: 161.375)
...
30) Snake5555555555 (Average placement: 167)
31) tazzyboyishere (Average placement: 182.875)
32) pyresword (Average placement: 187.75)
33) OrangeCrush980 (Average placement: 190.5)
...
35) SuperNiceDog (Average placement: 211.125)
36) handsomeboy2012 (Average placement: 221)
37) DragonImps (Average placement: 232.5)
38) Se7enthrust (Average placement: 252.625)
39) lordjers (Average placement: 266)

in every way, the best performing person to go out so far by a noticable margin

as i JUST said, i know you picked more based on what you thought i might like that you knew of, rather than what you liked most yourself. but i could still "feel" the 'dire' in these picks, mostly just the general edginess which as you know i of course love. and even just because you're picking from sources like rhythm games and things that feel very "you". but you did a great job particularly with the darker ones nailing the emotional alignment i go for. and with masterpath you somehow nailed the rare anomaly where i absolutely adore something really happy almost specifically for it being such too

you also got me seriously looking at a number of things that prior to this topic I didn't take as seriously (alerted me to more seriously look into frums and feryquitous. and i wasn't aware that MM was my favorite linda ai-cue song, and now have dived even deeper into their work. all that sorta stuff.)

I think certain picks in the re-rank will be higher (mainly masterpath and mm) but i dunno if it'd affect your avg placement or not, we'll have to see i guess! 7th is still, super high, obviously!

thank you for your contribution and your set was certainly very memorable to me. and had overall one of the biggest impacts on the music i've come to listen to since then (given that it got me into or at least more into multiple artists i'd been sleeping on)

[EXITING PURPLE ZONE]

(apparently i forgot to say that at the end of blue zone; this topic's been going so long i forgot my "formatting pattern")

Current standings as of the end of PURPLE ZONE!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/3/0/AAefu7AADDAK.jpg

everyone's shown up finally, and about 40% of participants have gone out, as opposed to the 13% at the start of purple zone. purple was a lively tier in that sense. magenta will be even more chaotic given that 23 people need to be eliminated in the span of 43 songs!

[MAGENTA ZONE]

43th
Game: Mega Man 5
Title: Gravity Man
Composer: Mari Yamaguchi
Nominator: @Haste_2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPiKZ4AZR8A

Now I understand what para meant by some of these amazing mm songs being intimidating to talk about. They're so perfect and just leave me almost speechless because I don't even know where to start. So I've been sorta dreading figuring out how to talk about this one for a long time now

Well ill start with this. Here's a upload with a visualizer for this one (it's useful for making the harmony and stuff easier to understand and point to too):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9kHQtGfutE

This track largely defined and messed with the boundaries and definitions of my rating system. the fact that i define 9.x tier as "songs i consider favorites". I have always thought of this soundtrack as a "favorite" (my favorite nes megaman soundtrack AND favorite 2a03-only nes soundtrack overall), with this being my favorite song from it! In fact i consider this my very favorite track in the classic megaman series, and favorite 2a03-only nes song!? Originally the 9.x magenta tier was only the top 15-ish of this topic, what happened?! I realized i had to extend the tier all the way down to this song and redefine what 9.x meant, just because of it! I now think of the 9.x tier as "songs I think of as favorites---OR songs that I clearly like more than songs I happen to think of as favorites". a lot of stuff that i don't think of as "favorites" definitely felt fitting to rank above this song when i ranked these all, but if i'm just listing songs that have a very serious, deep impact and meaning to me? This is on the same level as the stuff i gave to the top 10 slots to, so it's a weird situation

That said in my current state of being this one would be legit just higher regardless of all this talk. But putting it higher than this didn't make sense with my 2018 taste

A lot of why my response to this track might be so weird is also probably because the original time I heard it was this cover of it by teckworks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggwPXW29o3M

Those pitch bends at the start!~ All these cool full echoes reverberating throughout my skull...just such a perfect set of sounds chosen to represent each element. i could go on about all the amazing things i think this arrangement does but then i would be talking about the wrong song here. It's one of the nicest sounding midis on msgs without really doing anything gimmicky (though it was almost definitely meant for yamaha syxg50; knowing teck...tho this is from 2004, i do not know if he actually used that in 2004)

At the time i made this topic i would have said something like "THAT version would be 39 slots higher!!!" or whatever. THAT version, both then and now, is unquestionably a top 10 by this topic's standards. but now...? well this will jump in the rerank for sure, even if that cover is my favorite version of the song, i'm not sure i consider the original far behind at all anymore (not sure how much exactly, we'll have to see! but the teck remix, both then and now, is top-10-of-this-topic level of good for me, and i consider the original to be a lot closer to it now)

This cover by teck sorta spoiled me in terms of like...how much information is given directly to me, rather than being implied...but ironically one of the original's greatest strengths is how much information is implied despite the soundchip limits! you get ALL these cool chord chords and chord changes and the melodic line weaving these unexpected patterns between each other into something cohesive. you get THAT, something that's hard to comprehend, all given to you on a soundchip that can only play 5 notes at a time?! (and is actually only using 4 of them? only 3 tonal ones?!) Yeah! THat's so cool!

i'll go into some of that. one of my favorite parts of gravity man is :39-1:00 or so; a big part of that is ironically because the melody line there is SO simple it's just like...one note, held out lengthily and repeated. It's the same reason Kimera II spoke to me a bunch i think. When a repeating, very simple layer, changes meaning /significantly/ because of the surrounding material changing around. The chords/chord changes there are pretty weird tensions in context of the rest, and also emotionally profound! but that melody is mostly just playing one note with a few hiccups in a saori kobayashi "holding one note down and then jumping up and down sporadically with one hand on the pitch wheel" way (she does this a lot). this one single consistent note threads these opposing odd chords together in the simplest way...all while feeling super organic and ALIVE...on a NES!? Those subtle fades and aaaaah it's so nice!!!! I also like the fact that the arpeggios to make up the chords somehow feel more like an ethereal spacey (gravity anomaly?!) sound design choice, rather than like "THIS IS A VIDEO GAME SONG"-styled nes arps that i'm more used to. These arpeggios feel natural, and not like you can feel the seams of compensation for limitation. Really i would not even /think/ this song was limited to only 5 polyphony if i didn't know it was nes. because that layer especially just (without even doing anything particularly fancy) feels like it's part of the song! and nothing more, it's beautiful, honestly! One of the most beautiful sections of any nes song

by contrast, the other major section of this song (:12-:40) is actually quite 'smooth' in terms of the way the chords jump between each other, a bit more conventional (even if still 'complex') a progression, but the melody line is moving around quite a bit more! in this case the chords are implied by funky beeps and alternate with longer harmonies for just split seconds and aaagh. beyond how much i love this song compositionally, it's a masterpiece at just sounding like there's way more going on than there actually is, how does mari yamaguchi fit all of this information into 3 notes?! HOOW MUCH JUICE IS IN HER BRAIN i mean, nothing i'm saying here is stuff para didn't already say in their topic where gravity man was spoken as if it was the genius song that was so cool.

the intro? well that certainly sets the tone, i mean i could just list every individual element of the song. every chord, every note, every time something cool happens. I didn't even talk about the crazy chromatic prog stuff from 1:07 until the loop, that's probably the obvious part that sounds like a thing i'd like but i don't know what my favorite part of the song is (it's probably :39-1:00, i mean look at how long that paragraph is compared to the other ones!) but sometimes 1:07 is my favorite part because it's like a computer, and the short plucky notes in triplets is such a cool feeling. how is this in a megaman song?! I don't know!?

It's cool to me that this set the tone for future "gravity" songs in the series i feel. which are consistently among my favorites, some examples:

MegaMan X8 - Gravity Antonion (this might be my favorite megaman x series song? saying this is informed by gravity man might be a stretch but i don't think it's a coincidence entirely. there's some really cool harmonies here and weird dives into the same sorta short jagged triplet elements gravity man has in the 'weird section', and those 16th arpeggios? hmmmm....):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy8g6h3Iwaw

MegaMan Network Transmission - Abnormal Gravity Area (GravityMan's Stage) ((QUARTAL SONG!!!))
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_ij1jJGSJ8

[continued...]

[...continued]

anyway those songs, and the original gravity man, all inject me with this intense feeling i rarely experience from music. i don't know how to describe it exactly, but the moment i heard all of these, i knew i was in love, and thrust to this expansive, universe-sized musical environment i had never been inside of before. it was like every note was now possible, somehow. there were no limits, even with a misleadingly conventional exterior, anything could happen and it would feel profound. there did not have to be a sharp dividing line separating convention from abnormal area; at the flip of a switch your world could turn upside down. And it would mean something, it wouldn't just be writing on a chalk board in a class room with a guy that is telling you what he thinks is cool. You are a kid playing a video game and having so much fun being this blue guy, and when this comes on, for me it's "immersive", i'm "there", how do you do that with just some beeps? this did that, i love you mari yamaguchi. i think this write up makes me sound like a hippie on too many drugs, i am so sorry, i don't know hwhat to say, because i like this song too much ha ha

man we're really getting to the section of this topic where the songs start to forcibly thrash my body about as i float into the air/ / // / this is doing that for me! It's really some of the emotionally i've been moved by an an all-psg chiptune. it's just such a perfect melody and accompaniment to it integrating with each other to make me turn upside down and start standing on the ceiling of my house.

ELIMINATION SEVENTEEN

?) Haste_2 (Average placement: 95.33333333)

i didn't want to do this but i have decided that i will not post the final ranking position comparison thing for people who go out in the 9.x tier because uhhhh; i realized that if i continue to show that, once i get far enough, people who are so very smart will be able to figure out the order of the remaining songs like a math pujzzle. this would be creating "spoilers", so i will refrain from showing where everyone here wound up until the end. but i'll still post your average placement in a bold text and i'm not getting rid of what's listed on the sheet or anything

well! You are a genius; you did not know me all that well at the start of the topic but it's become pretty clear in these past few years since then that we get along very well in terms of musical interest. we share LOTS of favorites (including gravity man!). and your avg placement / rank is clearly pretty high. i'm not sure how substantially it will change but gravity man is definitely going to be higher by the end, i'm almost embarrased i had it go out this "low" (43rd isn't low by standards of this absurdly well-curated set of noms given to me for this topic).

thanks for your contributions and i can't wait to see what music you have to share with me in the future!

I need to do a relisten of the Mega Man Classic soundtracks. I'm not sure what my favorite would be. 5 might be the one I love the most consistently though. There really isn't a stage theme in the bunch that I don't like, and Gravity Man is certainly included in that. 2 might have higher highs (and maybe 4?) but everything about 5 is just so, so solid to me.

Toxtricity posted...

i realized that if i continue to show that, once i get far enough, people who are so very smart will be able to figure out the order of the remaining songs like a math pujzzle

Probably not the song order, except in cases where people are very close together, but they can probably ascertain the remaining eliminations. Like, I have 2 songs left that are top ~40, but I also have one song in the red zone dragging everything down. Whether I assign those remaining tracks spots 1 and 2, or 42 and 43, I'm probably still in the same part of the list.

there's enough information as-is to figure out certain things. but when you know slots for 1-4th and 6-11th place avg rankings are taken, or something, you'll definitely be able to tell that a remaining song has to show up in a really thin window of positions, since a person with only one song left wouldn't be able to have an average ranking that fits into the non-taken overall placements otherwise. or things like that. i think... and careful analysis of everyone in that way, with enough information, could definitely allow a huge chunk of the remaining order to be almost certain.

this isn't a big deal at 43rd but it'll be more serious when more people have been eliminated and there's way less options. so i'm cutting this information off early to preserve suspense (though people here are persistent and smart at contest analysis...i'm sure people will figure things out anyways)

Huh, you had said like three years ago that Napalm Man was your favorite MM5 track, but things changed since then, I guess? (or maybe you lied in an attempt to avoid spoiling this topic!) Also, funny, 'cause I was specifically thinkiing "this won't make the 9.x tier, but if it does, Tox will surely revise it down lower"...so much for that. But, like you, I am absolutely astonished that Gravity Man's stage theme exists. Octave-jumping chromatics (and the way they interrupt the previous material) are the coolest! The middle section was the part that initially hooked me, though...

I don't think I ever said napalm man was my favorite directly; but i might've implied it was by accident, just thru omission? But i very specifically have said things like this, consistently, over the past many years:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/3/AAefu7AADDYH.png https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/4/AAefu7AADDYI.png https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/5/AAefu7AADDYJ.png https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/2/6/6/AAefu7AADDYK.png
i kept alluding to my "top 10 classic megaman songs" during para's topic; i guess i can finally say what that list is:

mm5 gravity man
mm&b astroman
mm10 chill man
mm8 frost man
mm8 opening stage
mm5 napalm man
mm5 crystal man
mm7 wily stage 1
mm8 grenade man
mm10 sheep man

(order is not absolute, i've changed the order a bunch of times. but this list of 10 has been consistently the same 10 songs, for at least 5 years. and gravity man has always been the highest of the 3 mm5 picks)

so yeah. i was deliberately not making it clear in your presence what my favorite mm5 song was, but it's always been gravity man. if i said it was napalm man i was probably not thinking or something (and it's always been close, regardless)

42th
Game: Gran Turismo 5 Prologue
Title: Moon Over the Castle
Composer: Vince DiCola, Doug Bossi, Masahiro Andoh
Nominator: @Raetsel_Lapin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6lF2uWvL7o

(0:00 - 0:29) 27 bars of 7/16, 1 bar of 9/16
(0:29 - 0:46) 15 bars of 7/16, 1 bar of 9/16
(0:46 - 2:54) 55 bars of 4/4
(2:54 - 3:03) 2 bars of 6/8, 2 bars of 4/4
(3:03 - 4:33) 39 bars of 4/4
(4:33 - 4:40) 3 bars of 6/8, 1 bar of 4/4
(4:40 - end) 48 bars of 7/16

yeah i've talked about this before; i like mathy numbers. I LOVE vince dicola (transformers 1986 for a very long time was pretty much my favorite movie soundtrack). I never thought much of any version of Moon Over The Castle other than this one back then, but i think being so into this version of this song has made me retroactively nostalgaic for all versions as a whole?

even though you don't have to write it as x/16 (could list the tempo as faster, and write as x/8, or combine bars to make it all work out to less jagged timesigs) I really appreciate that the speed of rhythms in this song at the very least IMPLIES this level of asymmetry. it makes no attempt to "smooth over" the erratic rhythms, and although they're not as insane as things /can/ get, they're in-your-face enough to make it undeniable that "mycroprocessor on board 8 in 2014 or whatever would nominate this for vgmc" which i think did happen. or something (yes, it did).

it's very JOLTEON in that sense. actual rock organ being a big factor in that too. it's undeniable that this is "progressive rock", compared to other versions of the track, it is the version of moon over the castle arranged by the guy who sent Keith Emerson (rip) his music to tell him what a big fan of his music he was and Keith Emerson Told Vince Dicola that Vince DiCola was good! HOW LUCKY. what a lucky man he was

during the period where progressive rock (as in the actual genre and not just me calling everything i like "prog") was my primary musical fixation, one thing i think i was struck by was lots of rapid arpeggiated floursihes. keyboard player playing lots of notes really fast but only for a split second! things like the start of this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeboHGRHlW4&t=2s

this moon over the castle remix has a lot of those, you don't really hear things like that (especially not on keyboard) in mainstream popular music. in 2011, being suddenly exposed to artists like fairly surface level prog bands like Rush and Yes (which---to me were actually pretty alien in 2011 or so, i hadn't heard much like them in my exposure at the time), was a big deal. part of why it was a big deal was because they were /popular/, known for things that aren't even prog at all. but they bridged the gap from the very conventional as a natural segue into way more chaotic and strange work like king crimson and whatever.

2011 really was there year where i was exploring progressive rock specifically, as opposed to "vgm in odd time", or wishing that edm would have odd time signatures in it. i'd known what prog was before but honestly had only minimal exposure (and maybe some of the least 'adventurous' prog exposure i could've possibly had, i didn't even realize the genre was THE place for odd time, despite loving odd time, until my friend had showed me some rush songs with little odd time tidbits...which seem like 'nothing' now relative to what i've become used to, but at the time hearing stuff like that rock music was kinda mindblowing).

anyway i think i discovered Vince DiCola only a year off from that, 2012, and i was pretty psyched! because it was hard to find that style as translated to 80s synths, most prog bands got a lot simpler in the 80s, even if i was more attracted to the heavily produced, shiny plastic sound of that decade than anything before it: this just didn't correlate with composition being what i wanted. Vince DiCola fixed that problem! He didn't exactly keep the same sound in the future, and this track honestly sounds more like it's out of the 70s despite it being so new. but i'm not really complaining there, it's exciting that it makes his influence clear!

i'm a big fan of how some of the later sections here keep the erratic rhythms from the beginning, but the energy level is somehow the calmest of any part of the whole song. the contrast between that and the aggressive intro, is a good show of how even something as forcefully asymmetric as these prime numbered machine gun spasm rhythms, can have just as much variety in intensity and emotion as any other type of music. I like seeing this stuff as simply another option that music can be, rather than even insisting ideas like 'odd time is unsettling, it's good for horror' or whatever, it's good for anything, it can sound like anything. Here it sounds like everything.

this song is so sad. it's pretty emotional, furiously dramatic, much of that is sourced from the original material, but this arrangement's flair highlights it all to me just because by design there's so much constant motion between all the notes and stuff.

ELIMINATION EIGHTEEN

?) Raetsel_Lapin (Average placement: 164.3333333)

you probably don't really fit into the concept of rating the performance of each individual who submitted songs, since your set was largely comprised of picks other nominators had abandoned. like a chimera of nominators. but well, i'm glad you picked those up, because some of them were quite my thing! especially this moon over the castle one of course. thank you for submitting, and saving the abandoned picks that others had made too!

Well, I'm famous for having a bad memory! And, I'm sorry to say, but I prefer Dark Man to Gravity Man, just slightly. But they both are my top two NES themes....

41th
Game: Touhou 11 *Remix
Title: Hartmann's Youkai Girl ~ Todestrieb und Lebenstrieb
Composer: ZUN, Demetori
Nominator: @FL81
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNT8cQvmj-M

Oh no!! Another TIME SIGNATURE song. this one's a lot simpler to follow though i think.

(counting at around quarter note = 111, a lot of people would prefer this written at 2x the tempo, which'd change the numbers below (all the /8s becoming /4, and stuff like that), but i have a hard time thinking that way for some reason in general. technically what i have makes more sense if in respect to the original track anyway)

(0:04 - 0:12) 7/8, 7/8, 7/8, 4/4
(0:12 - 0:28) [7/8 + 4/4]x4
(0:28 - 0:37) 4 bars of 4/4
(0:37 - 0:53) [7/8 + 4/4]x4
(0:53 - 1:25) [4/4, 17/16, 4/4, 5/4, 4/4, 13/8]x2, 2/4
(1:25 - 1:43) 8 bars of 4/4
(1:43 - 1:59) [7/8, 4/4, 4/4, 4/4]2
(1:59 - 2:16) 7 bars of 4/4
(2:16 - 2:18) 7/16, 5/16, 5/16, 9/16
(2:18 - 2:25) 4 bars of 7/8
(2:25 - 3:23) 25 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 5/4
(3:23 - 3:31) [7/8 + 4/4]2
(3:31 - 3:40) 4 bars of 4/4
(3:40 - 3:54) 8 bars of 6/8
(3:54 - 3:59) 6/8, 6/8, 6/8, 2/4
(3:59 - 4:15) 7 bars of 4/4, 1 bar of 7/8
(4:15 - end) 5/16, 5/16, 9/16

ok never mind that was not simpler to follow

my interpretation at :53-1:25 is based off of the 2&4 snare of the drums there. Theres lots of layers at once all with different accent patterns so definitely inteperperatable as polymeric (meaning multiple possible barlines to list). A lot of people say that you should always base transcriptions if ambiguous timesigs off the drums but I think djent---a whole genre centered around the drums stubbornly staying in 4/4 while the rest of the song does entirely different things---that's the last place where I wanna say the drums layer is the right way to feel things.

The other main layer in that section of note is the chuggy guitar highlighting accents in something like a [5+4+6+3+3]/8 pattern, which gets cut off and reset from the start every two bars, but it floats over the barline only adding to this airy multilayered feel I'm deeply in love with

Anyway this section of this track is one of the rhythmically most interesting portions of any song nominated for me in this topic. I'm super attracted to how hard it is to follow and just, obviously I like polymeter with lots layers on top of each other doing different things. And high king crimson esque echo guitar is a good trait too. but most of all it just feels floaty and cool~!

One thing actually typing these numbers out is making me notice, that I wouldn't have noticed on a casual listen, is how every one of the sections where its alternating between 7/8 and 4/4 has a different looping pattern in which their alternation occurs. It was easy for me to just kinda gloss over those sections and assume they were all like the first 7+8 one. But we've got 7+8+8+8 and stuff as well. it's funny that it's all sourced from a pretty simple memorable 7 pattern in the original touhou zun version of the song, this just tears it into various different cool deconstructed directions and that's something i always look for in proggy remixes of songs

A lot of why I like this is simply that it reminds me of other music I like. Prog metal but especially the djent aligned stuff like animals as leaders. The specific band id compare this track to might be Haken, especially because of the glitchy processing effects on the drums at a couple places

Haken - The Endless Knot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVZHNPyMhMo