Board 8 > [VGMC] Day 30! Karma v VIMP, Xepher vs Japan Cereal, Calling v Teknopathetic

(+) Yeah! (+)

Welcome to Video Game Music Contest 15, an annual celebration of the best of the best video game music according to the voters!

Important Links:
Bracket: https://www.bracketmaker.com/tlist.cfm?tid=474630
Contest info sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16XAaBMDuUnQ4c5AxQNL9ZhvD7VG5kQyrXWWZxnkrn-o
Contest discussion thread: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/79443554
Main bracket playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT3m7iohpL0xt7lOF1eB-H4NpAaF1yAnU
Compatibility sheet (courtesy of Haste!!): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iGYWo_ifr_p2uYpD_I6TwBQS2tm7zJtPCxYZfRJcG8I
Last years spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VNrPnFRI7nJ4PqFiURBW0NWqxvXiuasoq8Sn_O169ss
VGMC total stats sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K1XdLWiUKB2kX99qYBgnRbLU_sCz4dvZSByKKJHCT6o
Discord: https://discord.gg/WDvMS4a

Rules:
- Listen to both songs in a given match, at least through the loop time provided (to make sure you don't skip before you've heard the whole thing!)
- Please consider the loop point listed when judging the song; if a video loops one minute 5 times, don't treat it as if it's a repetitive 5 minute song
- If it's a match between your favorite song ever and a song you despise, still LISTEN TO BOTH! Votes can and will be disqualified if there is suspicion songs are not being listened to, and you may be discounted for the rest of the contest for repeat offenses.
- No alt accounts, no rallying or begging, etc., etc.... You only get one vote! Swapping votes is alright, just make clear that you've already made a vote and are swapping.
- Make clear what your voting options are! Please keep votes separate from any comments, and use the titles given in the topic post.
- Voting in all matches is not mandatory, feel free to skip matches you do not wish to vote in.
- Vote based on the links provided, and not other sources of audio. Links are specifically chosen for best quality and the like.
- Don't discuss vote tallies in this thread, or in other threads, as they may influence votes. Likewise, please refrain from looking at the running tally before voting.

Voting Period:
- Today's matches will last 24 hours from the time of posting, or 24 hours from 10pm Eastern, whichever is the later time.
- Please note this may mean that two topics will be active at the same time!
- If you anticipate being unable to vote in a given day, please send an absentee vote to @banshiryuu or

Congrats to azuarc for winning the GotD Guru!

Karma
Xepher
Calling

I like Meaning of Birth quite a bit more than Karma, but Karma's still good! Love all the hopeful songs. VIM doesn't particularly stand out to me in any way.

Xepher extended adds nothing to the original. One of the great parts of the original is how it's full of variety and constantly going all out, while the full version adds some repeats and doesn't go as hard. Of course, the original's one of my favorite songs, so this is still good, but I'd vote the original as my favorite in the contest. Elegy is pretty nice. Kinda like a Fez song or something?

Not super huge on TWEWY's OST. Calling has some nice energy to it tho. Could be a much better song with a better vocalist (or no vocals?). Teknopathetic may be the most similar song to Calling in the whole contest! Wow! How can I choose? (easily calling is better)

Xepher > Karma > Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia > Calling > Teknopathetic > Vast Ice Mountain Peak
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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

Karma (85th) vs Vast Ice Mountain Peak (54th)
Xepher (48th) vs Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia (208th)
Calling (25th) vs Teknopathetic (238th)

motoo fujiwara has one of my favorite voices ever i think, but karma is kinda mid-tier for himm... song is still way better than meaning of birth and even MoB is great so yeah good song!! meanwhile VIMP uses a ton of specific sounds that make go WOOOOOO turnss to crystal so i have to be a SIMP here (banned word)

HOW FAR DO I HAVE TO GO TO SEE THE LIGHT? (reunion next year pls?? thx)

oh my god i did not realize how much i actually love calling until this contest lmao how do people even think twister exists when this song stomps all over it

Karma
Xepher
Calling

I like Bump of Chicken.

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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Calling
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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

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Karma
Xepher
Calling

close first match
god Xepher rules
petition to purge the third match from existence and bring back To the Distant Sky

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VIMP
Elegy
Calling

lmao

hell yeah

worst tatsh song in the bracket

best a high fiber, japanese empire cereal song in the bracket

why have one of the rare same(ish) style matches today when match 2 exists. calling hitting harder than usual. still would've lost to the teknopathetic remix, though the PSO instrument at :30 was briefly convincing

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Tales of the Abyss - Karma
beatmania IIDX 12 HAPPY SKY - Xepher
The World Ends With You - Calling
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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Xepher
Calling

Karma
Xepher
Calling

Karma
Elegy
Teknopathetic

VIMP is "better than average for a dungeon theme" but idk if it's good enough to vote over mmmmmm j-rock. KANARAZU more like this song is kanarazu getting through this round if i have anything to say about it.

Xepher sounds like everything i *don't* like about Camellia. "oh lets throw stuff that sounds fancy in here to wow the audience hurr durr" well it don't add up to anything. maybe i just dont like the organ in this one. or the vocals. or the cheesy edm sounds. oops i just dont like this. Elegy on the other hand does what i want it to do, even if what it does isn't something i usually seek out.

Calling is "cool". cooler than i remembered tbh. id definitely rather listen to naganuma tho.
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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Calling

Tales vs. PMD: VIMP sure sounds like a Metroid area for the opening. The rest of it doesn't grab me. Tales, meanwhile sounds like one of the better anime openings, again. Am I generalizing this? Perhaps, but as someone who doesn't watch a whole lot of anime, ehhhhn.

Stepmania vs. Colon Blow: I have extreme distaste for Xepher. It's not the song's fault, nor any of the nominators, it's the jackass from my dorm way back in the stone age who would blare his rhythm games at 3 in the fucking morning, invariably when I had an 8 AM the next day. I do not like the eurobeaty sounds in it. Elegy is much more calming, and I like the funky opening and the varying tempo.

TWEWY vs. JSRF: WAKE UP, LEAVE NO HESITATION, WAKE UP, TIME FOR US TO REALIZE, WAKE UP, SHOW APPRECIATION, WAKE UP, TIME FOR US TO REALIZE.
Okay I'm biased, but ehn. Teknopathic is also deliciously funky but I gotta go more pop, and go with Squeenix here.

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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

stop

playing games

There's a certain joy to typing out Naganuma lyrics that's hard to find elsewhere! FEEL the POWER in last year's contest was actually the first song of his that I'd heard in full, at least that I can remember...since then I've checked out a few more like Concept of Love and Funky Dealer, but not enough to be able to point to one as my favourite? I should get back to finishing my Naganuma education because it's always felt like a notable hole in my VGM knowledge!

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Karma
Xepher
Calling

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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Calling

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VIMP
Xepher
Teknopathetic

This version of Xepher is kind of better than the fanmade I nommed in all but one key section; that being ~:46-:59 which sounds much worse and is low-key a deal breaker for me making this the worst version between this, the short, and the fanmade. It's still my #1 song in the bracket however. I kind of feel bad for the Japan Cereal song as I finally started clicking with this song recently.

Xepher [10]
VIMP [8]
Elegy [8]
Teknopathetic [7.5]
Karma [6.5]
Calling [6]

Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

Karma (7.9v - 28th place) / Vast Ice Mountain Peak (9.8 - 2nd place)
Xepher (5.2 - 59th place) / Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia (8.7v - 16th place)
Calling (4.7 - 61st place) / Teknopathetic (6.8v - 47th place)

About VIMP... it's got to have my favorite atmosphere of any PMD track, period. SO many different layers all combining to create this whole new world *_*. I can't get enough of the way the notes are laid out for the constant bell 16ths. This is one of those pieces that's wonderful if you "zone out" without focusing on anything in particular... this kind of thing works better with headphones, of course.

Oh, and yeah, I got a bit of nostalgia listening to Xepher! I heard that track (an earlier arrangement of it) in DDR while playing with friends years ago! I remember some of them try that song on the highest difficulty and get their butts kicked. Can't say I've ever liked the song that much, though.

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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

Karma
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Calling

Okay uh, please understand. I uh... Okay, I just really like Bump of Chicken sorry.

Vast Ice Mountain Peak is not a song that has the deepest understanding of the strengths of the PMD2 soundtrack, but it does nonetheless provide its own answer on how to best encapsulate it. Is it good? Yes. It's not the best, but yes.

tatsh is a composer who makes songs that often trigger pet peeves of mine, while also having been an in-house bemani artist. And of course, this being vgmc post-Endeavour, the songs selected here are ones i very distinctly end up loving aspects of and despising others.

I don't get A High Fiber, Japanese Empire Cereal. A game with no gameplay, no depth to speak of, really just only a single message in mind, but one clearly not designed for an audience other than the author, with questionable value even then. Anyway this song is really good for whatever reason and I didn't really think I'd be able to get it in since I kind of got the impression that others didn't consider it particularly special by his standards which I can understand.

Calling just works.

Meanwhile in Teknopathetic the vocals just don't work for me tbh. It does a few cool things outside of them but it just doesn't really come together.

Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Calling

-(i like karma a lot more than i would have exactly 1 year ago. for some reason ANIME ROCK in this vein often reminds me of "math rock" (genre) which is probably because i listen to too many math rock bands that are specifically japanese like tricot. but as a result i've grown to like stuff like this more than i naturally would without that association. it's a good association... I may be rating this a bit low and it could move up with time)-

-[ah it's "vast ice mountain peak" or VIMP, if you want to use the long name. it is no secret that i like pmd series music and have loved it since among my earliest time on board 8, when i nominated songs like "temporal tower". explorers of sky was even listed as the very top soundtrack on my "Favorite Video Game Soundtracks" list from late 2009. This was among my favorite tracks from it back then. These days it's probably more like "40th favorite pmd2 song" but that's still better than 99.9% of music in the world to me!!! really it shouldn't be surprising that a game with the word "dungeon" in the name features a lot of music that i like with how much i talk about liking "dungeon themes"
~~~~~
I think what i liked about it back then is much different from now, and it's interesting it (and most pmd2 music) managed to remain near the top of my favorite osts list for that long, while the reasons i enjoyed it changed. back in 2009 i was attracted to stuff like the constant 16ths music box sound, and abstract feelings of "epicness" and motif reuse and heroic melodies and stuff like that. These days i'm more fixated on startling chord movements (that make me think of pat metheny group) which this ost is full of. like i always liked "startling chord movements (that make me think of pat metheny group)" because that is exactly part of what made it "epic". but those moments weren't as centric to my appreciation of a given theme as things like instrumentation or "i like how constant 16th notes sound like a computer" or whatever. these days i'm ENTIRELY about like OMG THERES A THICK FAKE CHOIR CHORD that sounds so GRAND because it made the tonal center move at a poignant but unexpected time!!!! idk i could go on about that aspect of this but haste probably already talked about it / haste is probably going to talk about it so i don't need to probably...]-

-{ding ding ding}-

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-(it's castlevania music with no slap bass....oh now it sounds like a rhythm game song because every note is clearly enunciated like an excited cos player. this song is not HAPPY the game name is misleading. i REALLY want to like this because it is "dark" and i like "edm" but i find it hard to get past how phoned in it feels to me and can't take it as seriously as i think it intends me to...i want to but my brain won't let me. i like the contrast between the earlier calmer parts and more aggressive later bits. There's also some pretty cool SOUNDs like the metallicness of once it kicks in around :50. and i like how it is epic and dark and evil)-

-[any game melos han-tani works on is spectacular harmonically even when he's not composing the songs (see: All Our Asias - Innovators Campus, composed by ZEBRA). the chords this starts off are so great and "fez or something", absolutely the right kind of chill for my tastes, anything where the chill comes from "complex chords" because chords like that just sound like the SKY. I'm in the clouds and it's so pretty...definitely one kind of "happy" i can actually get behind, apparently]-

-{happy}-

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-(oh no it is CALLING: I REALLY LIKE THIS SONG. I didn't think i would like this song when i saw it nominated but how the heck did i not notice hoow cool this song was before. The main attraction here for me is all the synth pads, they're exactly my favorite type, especially the timbre of the ones that show up at :37 AAAAAAAH that morphing sweep in is perfect. but
~~~~~
my actual favorite part of the song is all the sections like 0:52-1:07 because the movements in the chords in those backing pads (that sound COOL) there are so PERFECt, i think it's just fifths stacks being chord planed around. not sure it's quite intentional or even a thing others will hear, but i feel an implied flat second (one note chromatically above the tonal center) and i think i've said it in like 90 other writeups at various points in time on this site but for some reason that is one of the most emotionally impactful notes that can be heard to me? it makes my heart EXPLODe. even if you don't hear that "cool note" there that i'm not even sure is real and is probably just my crazy wild imagination...you can still tell pretty clearly parallel harmony chord planing "transpose core" whatever u wanna call it is happening there and that is just the COOLEST NOTES IN MUSIC BECAUSE it sounds like super monkey ball and Natural Life A. AHHHHHHH seriously whenever those chords are happening it SHOCKS a lazer beam into my BODY that rejuvinates my life force and i am almost shaking because it feels so good. now I'm thinking it's just parallel fifths chord planed down in whole steps (in movement unrelated to the actual root enforced by the bass, how very "2005 kimihiro abe-esque, no wonder i like this song"), but i hear the D in the third chord as the TOP note so then i hear the imaginary G that maybe doesn't exist. kinda wanna hear a remix that plays with that feeling a bit more or something but also this song is too perfect so i'm afraid to look at the remixes.
~~~~~
tonality of the vocals is pretty odd too; like it's just F# Minor but it leans heavily towards some unusual notes in the scale to focus on. kinda like that cladun song in the contest in earlier that i pretended was in locrian. ALSO the standard VI-VII-i moments are a great contrast from the slightly more off aspects and are emotionally impactful by their contrast to those bits. and i love the synthwave-esque cyberpunkness of the synth that gets added at 2:06 THIS SONG IS TOO GOOD
~~~~~
anyways "dramatic vocals" check "futuristic synth pads" check "transposing quintals sort of" check "implied note 1 above the tonal center being highlighted so it reminds me of hitoshi sakimoto songs that [emotionally impact me]" check check echkeckhsfghisjrtiaoljmedrsoigja049 I CANT HANDLE HOW MUCH I LOVE THIS SONG]-

-[feel like on paper i'd like naganuma music more consistently, but he's very hit-or-miss with me. his influences make him likely to use harmonies i like, and i like funky edm and hip-hop and sample-based music. anyway i like this more than i remembered. The SONIC ADVANCE 3 (Pso2) synth at :30 is really good and u can tell he is friends with Hideaki Kobayashi who made the pso2 songs and sonic advance 3 songs that have that sound in it. there's some bits that are more "dark" feeling than i remembered and i dig those, 1:18-1:30 feels really really cool with those spooky background chords. Most of this is too "empty" and i don't like the claps and i have a harder time with the sections that aren't as full. 2:54 is COOL i like the super atonal acid synth bass it highlights a lot of the quirks i like about ~90s electronic music at that part. very mixed on this but i like it a lot more than i thought]-

-{mario}-

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Calling (23rd/178)
Vast Ice Mountain Peak (28th/178)
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia (72nd/178)
Teknopathetic (144th/178)
Karma (153rd/178)
Xepher (157th/178)
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Karma
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

---

Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Xepher
Teknopathetic

Karma
Xepher
Teknopathetic

Vast
Nostalgia
Teknopathetic
---

Tales of the Abyss - Karma
beatmania IIDX 12 HAPPY SKY - Xepher
The World Ends With You - Calling

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Pokmon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky - Vast Ice Mountain Peak [8.0]
beatmania IIDX 12 HAPPY SKY - Xepher [8.0]
Jet Set Radio Future - Teknopathetic [7.5]

Tales of the Abyss - Karma [7.0]
A High Fiber, Japanese Empire Cereal - Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia [6.5]
The World Ends With You - Calling [6.0]

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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Xepher
Calling

Adding vocals isn't going to suddenly make me like Meaning of Birth more (the retired track I feel is actually slightly more tolerable).

VIMP is very nice PMD music. A lot of PMD music has that very distinct style, but in a way where it's similar to one another, so it's sort of hard to pick a favorite.

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WOAH XEPHER IS COOL!! I swear I've heard this somewhere before, but in case I didn't, let's just say this is one of my favorite discoveries!

Congrats to Elegy for finally making it in to the contest. This one is kinda growing on me, but Xepher easily beats everything else today!

---

Calling is cheesy, but in a fun way!

Teknopathetic sounds very '90s, yep this is Naganuma.

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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Xepher
Teknopathetic

---

Karma
Xepher
Calling

i love xepher

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Karma
Xepher
Calling

Rise, vocals, rise!

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Karma
Xepher
Teknopathetic

Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Calling

This upload of Xephyr sounds like mushy garbage. I would consider voting for a better upload, but given what I heard... No.
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VIMP
EFOIaN
C

Karma
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Calling

---

Karma
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Calling
---

Karma
Xepher
Calling

5 good songs today, or at least 2 close matches, anyhow.

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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
abstain

Third match has two 9/10s, and they're too close together for me to pick one apart. Might go back and relisten as the day draws on, but I might also just leave it as an abstain, happy with whatever song wins.

Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

oops i am voting against chicken
https://i.imgur.com/xGZdnt7.jpeg

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Karma
Xepher
Calling

---

Karma
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

Tales of the Abyss - Karma
beatmania IIDX 12 HAPPY SKY - Xepher
The World Ends With You - Calling

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Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Elegy For Old Identities and Nostalgia
Teknopathetic

Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Xepher
Teknopathetic

---

I have decided.

Teknopathetic

Vast Ice Mountain Peak
Xepher
*Abstain* (Really REALLY don't like either, again)

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