Board 8 > [VGMC] d48: AGHR Final Boss vs Memories Rushing By, Discovery vs Rave On

(+) Yeah! (+)

Welcome to today's topic for Video Game Music Contest 14, a tournament of the best tracks from games, as decided upon by you, the voters.

Links:
Contest info - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VNrPnFRI7nJ4PqFiURBW0NWqxvXiuasoq8Sn_O169ss/edit#gid=320804650
Bracket - http://www.bracketmaker.com/tlist.cfm?tid=473292
Discussion and results thread - https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/8-gamefaqs-contests/78524521
Bracket playlist - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW9O9mntH1REnVI_W6yELaDP6Zac8b0Wq
ToC playlist - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW9O9mntH1RE-TQMj19D0k5nm-0zeH12J
VGMC compability sheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lpX4faqnn_geI0y4i6MrZ2AXpV6SWXoWrIA6_eyx-yM/edit

Rules:
- Listen to both of the songs. Links have conveniently been provided for both songs. Even if Song A is your favorite of all-time and Song B is from a series you hate... Listen. To. Both. (If I have suspicions your vote is not based on a fair and impartial preference, it will be disqualified.)
- Obvious contest rules apply (no alts, one vote per person, no rallying, etc.).
- Please make your voting options clear, rather than burying them in text.
- Each set of matches lasts 24 hours, even if the new one isnt up by then. (Matches do not begin until at least 10:00 EDT.)
- Always vote on the versions of the song provided, not versions from different sources.
- If you know ahead of time that you're not going to be around and you want to vote in advance, post your choices in the discussion/bracket topic.
- Please do NOT post tallies/score updates in the middle of the match, as this has a tendency to directly influence matches.
- You don't have to vote in all the matches, but it'd be cool if you did!

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Match 1

Aliens Go Home Run! - Final Boss Theme
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=na4gzqkpkTQ

Sole - Memories Rushing By
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV0y3aAhggI

Match 2

Kaze no Notam - Discovery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmrCMF2B_-c

Killer7 - Rave On
https://youtu.be/AJO8uo3UMko

Tournament of Champions bonus match

Terraria Calamity Mod - Servants of the Scourge

-Abraham Lincoln

who cares
whatever
God dammit

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Memories Rushing By
Rave On
Battle!!
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Memories Rushing By
Rave On
Servants of the Scourge

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Final Boss Theme
Discovery
Battle!!

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Final Boss Theme
Discovery
Battle!!
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Final Boss Theme
Discovery
Servants of the Scourge

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Final Boss Theme
Discovery
Servants of the Scourge

MemoriesRushingBy has some pretty interesting bits to it for a piano-heavy song, but AGHR-Final Boss theme might be my #1 for two contests in a row (that sort of feels like a shame no other song was able to rise to the challenge uh oh what will I do if I have to choose between this and my pick for the contest champion Isoleucine, well they're in two different brackets so it might be somewhat unlikely that they'll actually meet up.) Unfortunately for the "Sole" song, "some interesting bits to it" definitely is not enough here.

Discovery feels very distinct, I think I must have first Discovered it in a vgmgg and it left it's mark in my Memories. It's real cool, though I don't like The Girl. Very interesting atmosphere of importance ! Rave On this song , the synth feels like an extremely cheap indie type synth which makes the song feel very cheap to me. Discovery seems to work a lot better.

toc is pretty easy making this last day of the first bracket round set a fairly easy all together match set group

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Sole - Memories Rushing By
Killer7 - Rave On
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country - Battle!!
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Memories Rushing By
Discovery

Final Boss Theme
Discovery
Servants of the Scourge

Pretty meh day in the main bracket, thankfully the ToC match is great

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Memories Rushing By
Discovery
Battle!!

not really in the mood for the other half of the songs right now. okay that's not totally true i still like rave on about the same as usual, i also just get a little tired of it by the end as usual, which it needed to not do to get my vote here. and honestly i also don't really think it's that much a matter of "not really feeling" servants or aghr final boss today, it's just that their... soundscapes, to misuse a pretentious term, aren't really the right ones to also get my vote over their opponents either today. i'd almost even give servants the edge otherwise, if it just didn't have to deal with torna's illegal refined murasaki jazz band. i feel like battle really didn't get the respect it deserved last contest, it didn't really generate nearly enough buzz for a song that made it as far as it did. nobody really wants to talk about just how good it is and i really hope it gets the chance to set that straight. anyway, memories rushing by and discovery are very nice if very different mood-setting songs and the real highlights of today for sure

Final
Rave
Scourge

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Final Boss Theme
Rave On
Battle!!

Final Boss Theme vs Memories Rushing By: Final Boss is spicy although it doesn't develop much. I like the energy though. I liked Memories Rushing By at first but it just slows down way too much after the first half and just gets boring after that. If the song kept the vibe it had in the beginning then I could see these being one of my favorite tracks in the contest,

Discovery vs Rave On: Discovery is alright. Its got those cool breaks towards the end but not a whole lot going on in general. Sad! Rave On isn't one of my favorite tracks from Killer7, but its definitely a banger. It's a very fun track thats catchy as hell. It starts off pretty slow in the beginning but once it hits the 2 minute mark its got me going YOOOOOO. The pay off towards the second half is so good I could honestly forgive the slow start in the beginning for everything that happens after.

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Memories Rushing By
Rave On
Servants of the Scourge

AGHRFBT still pretty solid stuff. This Memories song feels like a piano remix of a non-piano song to me. Like if someone took some JRPG battle theme or map theme and made a piano song or something. I dunno. Is it a credits theme or something? I like it more as it goes on. Close match.

I made a version of Rave On that cuts out the last couple glitchy loops. Not a huge fan of those, but I love the first half of the song. Would always listen to it for a while every time it played in K7. Discovery has some promise early on, but I get tired of it pretty quick.

Rave On > Memories > FBT > Discovery
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Final Boss Theme
Discovery
Servants of the Scourge

Dang, that ToC match. Two of my favourite discoveries from last year.

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Memories Rushing By
Rave On
Servants of the Scourge
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Memories Rushing By
Rave On
Servants of the Scourge

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Final Boss Theme
Battle!!

Final Boss Theme
Rave On
Battle!!

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Aliens Go Home Run! - Final Boss Theme
Killer7 - Rave On
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country - Battle!!

Match 1: AGHR Final Boss Theme is the sort of high-energy chiptune VGM that I love! I usually like sad piano, but this one isn't interesting me at all.

Match 2: Discovery isn't nearly as cool as the other Kaze no Notam song in this contest, sadly. Rave On is still super catchy, this song always reminded me of Zero Stage 2.

ToC: Good match, but XBC2:T~TGC-B!! takes this. There's something about jazzy JRPG battle themes I really love (or maybe I've just been playing too much Trails in the Sky lately ;>_>)

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Memories Rushing By
Discovery
Battle!!

Final Boss Theme (7.5) / Memories Rushing By (8.0)
Discovery (6.0) / Rave On (4.0)

Don't feel like saying much, but 1:35 in Discovery sounds so much like Earthbound! Not sure what track, though, if anybody can help me identify it....

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Memories Rushing By
Discovery
Battle!!

Final Boss Theme is my 117th favorite in the contest! i talked about this enough last time it was in i think, i both like it more than i used to and less than i used to at the SAME Time which averages about to the same level as it started. I'm even more bothered by the forcefulness of the cheesy blues scale's ever-presence here, just way too viscerally repulsed by that scale almost always; also less fond of the instrumentation than i used to be, i still love vrc7 and n163 but the more i listen to this the more i just think about how much i prefer other uses of those chips. but I'm also much more fond of everything else than i was before ! the chord changes and individual harmonies i still find really cool. the progression is yasui-adjacent but actually even cooler somehow, and I think every layer is pretty expressive. stuff feels like live solos but it's inside a computer. lots of detail was clearly put into this and i absolutely respect that.

Memories Rushing By is my 77th favorite in the contest! I like fluffy piano stuff like this! cool minimalist-adjacent stuff(not really that's not what it is or maybe it is who careS). The way this spends so much of its composition in terms of constant 16ths brings a lot of attention to "which harmonies are interesting?" "which chord changes stand out?" "which accent patterns are distinct?" and maybe most importantly "what organic deviations from the constant 16ths stream feel most effective". rubato slowdowns feel a lot more powerful than they would in something more "rhythmic" or "melodic" because of that initial style of constant even spaced stuff. I think all of those factors are things i care about a lot and even if subtle, it places focus on them because of the nature of this style and that makes me happy! So pretty! Listening to this makes me happy! the sprinkled unexpected chord changes are subtle and i only notice them if i'm paying a lot of attention, but when i am there's a pretty powerful emotion evoked and i'm GLAD that there is! there's lots of stuff i could say about this and i could be more clear about what i mean by tagging specific moments, etc, but this is a Very hectic time for me out of nowhere so I Will Not Do That but i like this song and that is all you need to : ) know

77 and 117 if you replace the 11 with the 77 from the 77ths place then you get 777th plaace which is good luck happy sand patrick's day

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Discovery is my 76th favorite in the contest! like I said on solitude i'm still amazed this actually caame out in the 90s like HOW is it not "moderrn thing imitating the 90s". i listen to so much music from that decade and so little of it feels this "modern." this has traits distinct to the era, but it also is just really ahead of its time i guess. this is full of warpy filter manipulation stuff, fading between distant/muffled vs sharp/clean. i love that feeling of sounds transforming from one to another. the way some of these patches are layered gives the illusion of one sound morphing into another and that's just one of my favorite effects. exciting stereo panning stuff is almost always a plus to me. this has a very wide l/r spatial range and i dig that. . rapid descents into breakbeat AAAah. funky epiano. my favorite sounds here are all the manipulations to the chimes, all the "unnatural" stuff done to such a familiar natural instrument: the feeling that they're reversed, or the downward pitch bending on them, just in general the presence of anything with the chimes for SOME REASON helps make this to me. cool chord changes going up and down a half step. love the synth solo stuff. Every time this ends I get sad because I like it too much!!!! and then i just listen again!! HELP I CANT STOP LISTENINg. wow I ranked this way too low wtf 76 what was i thinking. I mean it's definitely "not memorable" to me compared to a lot of the stuff above it but i also don't consider that as bad a trait as most others do, still i'd definitely rank this notably higher than 76th if i did a reranking.

Rave On is my 156th favorite in the contest! this is a track i liked whenever it was thrown around during my earlier presence on board 8. it fit with my tastes then which were far more centric around timbre than composition compared to now, and cliche minor-key stuff was much my thing. i mean it's probably not surprising when i'm unironically excited about the instrumentation that's considered cheesy in ready to shave and stuff for how adjacent to my older taste it was, i don't really consider this cheesy instrumentally for the same reason i didn't consider that cheesy BUT i do think this in particular...extremely Not what i want composition-wise anymore. almost everything about this composition-wise to me is a negative to me other than "i like minor because it is not happy", i guess i kinda like the constant 16ths fast synth bits and some of the harmonies are neat. but really the only thing saving this from being super low is older board 8 nostalgia and adoration of artificial sounds (some of which i actually think are really cool! the faake choir, and pulsating shiny glimmer at like :28). my qualms with this are especially frustrating now that i know the whole killer7 ost and realize this is probably my least favorite song in the game, would've gotten really into the soundtrack had i known the rest of it was so much more my thing than this. still some fun stuff going on, the level of chaos at the later parts is pretty fun, and

hot air balloon!!!!!!!!!!

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Servants of the Scourge (11th/56) vs. Battle!! (5th/56). close numerically, but i do not have any issue choosing battle here because i am the largest fan in the graph system of "polymetric soloistic/improvized elements in 'jazz' genre" and all the post-tonal stuff that sounds like music i like. scourge is pretty great but my favorite elements take up less than 1/3 of the track so i don't get to go to the franklin the turtle high school reunion shell epic dm donkey chord changes i'm happy that dm dokuro is making smart mental health decisions unlike me and i wish the best for him because his spontaneous tonal center changes for 2 seconds that make me fall over have enriched my experience of being alive when you
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Final Boss
Discovery
Servants of the Scourge

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Memories Rushing By
Rave On
Servants of the Scourge
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Sole - Memories Rushing By
Killer7 - Rave On
Terraria Calamity Mod - Servants of the Scourge

For some reason I thought Rave On had retired. Like it had been a few contests in a row back in like VGMC5-8 then disappeared or something. Or maybe I've just embarrassed myself and it was in VGMC13 and I just forgot lol. man have i voted against torna in both matches now. what a path.

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Memories Rushing By
Rave On
Battle!!

Memories Rushing By
Discovery
Battle!!

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Memories
Discovery
Servants

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Memories Rushing By
Discovery
Battle!!

Sole - Memories Rushing By
Killer7 - Rave On
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country - Battle!!

I have to admit in the polls I just click on a random one. The best song from this group is Memories Rushing By

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Memories Rushing By
Rave On
Battle!!

Not the most exciting day to cap round 1.

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Aliens Go Home Run! - Final Boss Theme
Kaze no Notam - Discovery

Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country - Battle!!
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Memories Rushing By
Discovery
Battle!!

-just wanted to mumble a bit about memories rushing by. this is a really pretty, evocative track that I found myself entirely enthralled by back when assembling the 2019 guessing game list. the way the opening piano sweeps in like a gust of wind, really nice chords and expressive use of tempo to give the composition a natural, flowing feel that seems to swirl around the listener. the strings and especially the woodwinds then come in like an organic growth, like an auditory garden springing beneath the listener's feet. I love the warmth they lend to the track. that big sweeping run that comes in at 1:32-- just lovely. the way things slow down, allowing the piano to wander a bit, exploring the space it's created while the strings support it, in anticipation of the next section. if the first section feels like uncertain, anxious questioning, the second section feels like a somewhat melancholy revelation of an answer. once again we see that this track nails the big emotional peaks (such as 3:15) in part because of how it handles the parts that aren't-- the slower, more contemplative sections that establish and build on the musical ideas that those moments pay off. it's wonderfully crafted top to bottom, and lets me know that the composer-- Nabeel Ansari, who appears to be an ocremix alumnus-- is one to watch.

Memories Rushing By
Rave On
-

Might vote in TOC later.
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Final Boss Theme (85th) vs Memories Rushing By (146th)
Discovery (128th) vs Rave On (42nd)
Servants of the Scourge [[[3rd//7th]]] vs Battle!!/Torna [[[8th//17th]]]

THE VERY LAST DAY OF R1 and it's the first one I almost forget to think about voting wow oops i dont really have time to writeup either but yeah final boss very good, rave on VERY good panning synths make me wanna scream, discovery actually way better than i usually think of songs like this, servants vs torna is evil but my preference is clear

Servants of the Scourge > Battle!!/Torna > Rave On > Final Boss Theme > Discovery > Memories Rushing By

Final Boss Theme
Rave On
Battle!!

Final
Rave
Servants

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Final Boss Theme
Rave On
Servants of the Scourge

Discovery sounded alright but was kind of repetitive and also dull, didn't really go where I kept thinking it would.

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Memories Rushing By
Rave On
Battle!!

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Final Boss Theme
Rave On
Battle!!

Final Boss Theme
Discovery
Battle!!

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Final Boss Theme
Discovery
Battle!!

This and Disco Necropolis are really good, if anyone knows other good +TEK songs I'll gladly check them out!
Match of songs that don't sound like vgm, Discovery is cool kinda like a more chill version of Suite Photoconductivity, though I definitely prefer Solitude.
So much fun energy coming from Battle resembling that of Elferia, these songs seem to be on a collision course now oh boy

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Sole - Memories Rushing By
Killer7 - Rave On
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country - Battle!!

MATCH 1

Final Boss Theme is a cool song with some neat chords, but the overall melody's not quite in line with what I want from this song. I still think it's good and a nice returner from last year, but I also think I can say that in some ways, it falls a little short of what I'm looking for to be a really exceptional song. That said, I should note that I would easily take this over either match 2 songs, just to show that there's a good amount of room for me to pick this song in various hypothetical matchups.

I really like Memories Rushing By! It's no secret that I tend to really enjoy piano pieces. With this song, I really like the harmonies in the strings. Everything going on this song makes for a very cool atmosphere. It's a dark atmosphere but, at times, there's also this feeling of wistfulness like at 1:39-2:25-ish. I think the two compliment each other nicely. I guess I enjoy when songs are able to evoke these types of feelings in ways that I can describe; at the very least, internally. Though, I think there's also an element of "do I like how this is executed" associated with whether or not I like songs like this and here, it's a pretty clear yes. Despite what appears to be a significant difference in how much I like the two songs, I think it's a somewhat close match, but Memories Rushing By wins it for me.

MATCH 2

Solitude had a nice relaxing feel to it, but I don't really get that from Discovery, despite being a fairly similar song. Just the overall composition is not really anything I feel one way or the other about.

Rave On's also not really that good, in my opinion. Could definitely do without the song breaking down thing happening at the end. I don't really have any complaints about the rest of the song, I just don't find it that appealing or interesting. I think it's a little better than Discovery, though, so I'm voting for it here.

MATCH 3

Somewhat close ToC match, but I'm fairly confident on picking Torna Battle.

Battle!! > Servants of the Scourge = Memories Rushing By > Final Boss Theme >> Rave On > Discovery

Final Boss Theme [7.0] < Memories Rushing By [9.9]
Discovery [8.7] > Rave On [4.9]
Servants of the Scourge < Battle!!

final boss theme cool yasui type piece crazy
memories rushing by super reich-esque professor layton pianos moving, really takes its title in imagery

discovery tense excited atmosphere but also super calming? really lovely work
rave oni like the dance-y vibe, but it's a little too repetitive and in that sort of edge zone where the mood isn't really something i can get into. basically minor but trying to be fun, leads to an annoying point
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Sole - Memories Rushing By
Kaze no Notam - Discovery
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country - Battle!!

Not much to say today other than it'll be sad to part with Servants again. Expecting Torna Battle(!!) to run home with the gold!

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Sole - Memories Rushing By
Killer7 - Rave On
Terraria Calamity Mod - Servants of the Scourge

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Memories Rushing By
Discovery
Battle!!

Final Boss Theme
Rave On
Battle!!