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

(+) Yeah! (+)

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Tag

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yeah, when is VGMC15 starting anyway?

last year, the nomination topic was up on march 13th.

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current vgmc nom start date is apr15. pre-vgmc topic will be up pretty soon; waiting for deo and i to get slightly less busy with various things (part of why we're not starting until apr15 too)

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Mr Lasastryke posted...

yeah, when is VGMC15 starting anyway?

last year, the nomination topic was up on march 13th.

April 15th!

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nice. i'm hyped!

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Feels like i've already all but locked in a top 3 place overall so that's nice. Comparing my remaining list with kao's I def don't see myself matching that selection from here on in (and i see place has got some killer stuff left too). Seeing stuff like that PSO2 song there really evokes a certain other Mitsuharu Fukuyama song as far as my prospects of challenging that go (and i also don't think i have ANY answer to stuff like mikumo bros if that's as good as i remember it). Still, perhaps because of that humbling realisation, it makes that current sense of security in potentially holding best of the rest a little bit more satisfying, especially when I originally anticipated I'd be thrashed overall with my rushed and gamble-ey picks.

now to lose all my songs immediately because i said this (i feel very lucky to have scraped into the top 100 almost untouched in the first place so i'm just gonna hope for an average of 70th on the rest of them...).

I wasn't expecting my two remaining nominations to be my two best ranked ones! (Well, maybe one of them, but I was actually expecting the other to be my worst or second worst placement!)

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Generic tagging message.
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Toxtricity posted...

current vgmc nom start date is apr15. pre-vgmc topic will be up pretty soon; waiting for deo and i to get slightly less busy with various things (part of why we're not starting until apr15 too)

IMO noms should be delayed until April 28th, because you all should know what comes out April 28th....!

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there's enough time to swap out old uploads with new ones when the actual contest roles around. i've only seen two tracks seriously considered anyway, the first being a non-dynamic cutscene song and the second is likely more popular as the custom mix it is now than the official version would be (and this comes out the end of june anyway)

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Tag

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HasteDeux posted...

IMO noms should be delayed until April 28th, because you all should know what comes out April 28th....!

They might last for 2 weeks.

(Also, what comes out April 28th? I see nothing meaningful on release charts.)

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azuarc posted...

They might last for 2 weeks.

(Also, what comes out April 28th? I see nothing meaningful on release charts.)

a pso2 ost volume

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HasteDeux posted...

IMO noms should be delayed until April 28th, because you all should know what comes out April 28th....!

Look, I'm as excited for "Taiwan Monster Fruit" as anyone else, but we must make haste and not delay the nominations!

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FL81 posted...

Look, I'm as excited for "Taiwan Monster Fruit" as anyone else, but we must make haste and not delay the nominations!

we made haste, and he's the one telling us to delay it

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NFUN posted...

we made haste

Are you the mother or the father?

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azuarc posted...

Are you the mother or the father?

He was born out of the VGMC miasma, as were we all save the primordial vgm elders

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can confirm

NFUN posted...

He was born out of the VGMC miasma, as were we all save the primordial vgm elders

become as BOB

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tag
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Oh, hey, I just realized I'm #2 right now! But I'm going to be dropping on the list FAST from here on out. =p

I never consciously realized it, but... The Wind Never Ceases is probably my all-time favorite SNES track. And I've been compiling a list so that I can finally rank at least 50 of my all-time favorite vgm, and that SoM piece didn't even come to mind until it showed up again this (the previous) topic. Anyway, it's not just the thick harmonies, but also that piano countermelody I'm in love with....

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100st
Game: Final Fantasy VIII
Title: Compression of Time
Composer: Nobou Uematsu
Nominator: @azuarc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l75zjpDpAWs

Visualizer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtsLenGMA6s

i put way too much effort into this visualization for something where i messed up and accidentally ended the oscilloscope part of it slightly early, sorry!

Hi nobobosudgfbnsoithmewopri5mh OK SO HERE WE GO GOT A SONG like when i say ' i dont like nobou uematsu as much as other people do because he is too mechanical and empty' I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT THIS SONG because i love how mechanical and empty this is. It's super cool dark and oppressive almost as dark as drakengard1. this actually barely takes advantage of ps1's sequence format at all, as that can handle like 24 notes at once and this sticks at max 7 polyphony lol, and yet it doesn't need to go above that at all, not to convey the vibe that it conveys. the simplicity is ironically so much of why i find this so cool

harmonically this lingers around chords I really like, implying these chords without ever actually playing any chords. the sus4 (c/f/g) at :19 being the first like ""not dissonant"" set of notes in that main ostinato is really POWERful; just a change in one note;;;;and then it changes back to the original 'dissonant' set of notes but like these initially dissonant c#/f/g notes suddenly sound like ""pretty?!"" and ""Dramatic?!?!"" somehow WOW. idk it's just really cool to me. it's crazy hjow much just a few surrounding harmonies that are more conventional (just straight up minor triads and stuff in the other layers) layed upon that strange tense layer add up to something unexpectedly beautiful in the end. It kinda reminds me of some zzzv tunes that start out with a dissonant implication but recontexualize everything as more harmonious stuff as other layers get added. Later on the harp bit leans mostly toward implying nice pretty 4-voice 7ths chords and stuff and that is pretty and sounds like a 'water fall';

even though there's not really anything like this in the song, what i like is how it makes it so that if there were more melodic layers in the song, they'd have to alternate between two keys every time the tonal center shifts enough. at least to ME the c#/f/g sections (along with everything else) tend to imply f minor (or c# lydian) while the sus4 c/f/g sections imply c minor. that makes for some neat melodic intrigue if one's to add any other layers over this and highlight those differences. I decided to NOODLE around a bit and record a (not that good or interesting by my own standards) improvised solo over it that does a bit of stuff that highlights the differences between those two feelings. it's imo actually tonally ambiguous enough that there's other interpretations that might sound 'better' to people than how i feel the scales, but this is what i hear when i hear this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-X2dLUmkrk

hmm i should've played more stuff that made a big melodic deal about how the next note was either going to be c# or d depending on which scale it was about to shift to next OH WELL maybe next time i noodle on my key board over this song i will do that more

the ostinato at the start has such a creepy rhythmic ambiguity to it, it's alternating between those 3 notes but not in a rhythmically easy to follow way, despite how empty and minimal what's happening is, and that's definitely something i look for! this doesn't really get solidified as having a 4/4 feeling until other layers come in---and even then, it's still tricky to feel that if you're trying, lots of layers focusing around groups of 3, or 3:2 polyrhythms (that go over the barline!) like in the harp bit

emotionally this tune resonates with me a lot; partly just bewcause i love DARK DUNGEON atmosphere to things (and the resultant ""subdued enough to be background music, but rewarded with puzzling intrigue at subtle intricacy if you choose to listen more actively"" i always say i love so much) ,, ,, , but also because of its gradual transition from the initial almost gross sounding series of notes to something beautiful and mysterious.

i think this is a song i would've been even more into when younger, particularly. i had a thing for like ""conventional minor/etc tonality layered beneath something really dissonant that is something else"", and actually wrote a lot of stuff that felt very much like this, tho more edm-y.
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Wee, 4 of my 8 made it to the top 100. I consider that a win.

Also, lmao at that loser kaonashi at the bottom of the user rankings with an average score of N/A. Imagine doing so poorly Mycro won't even include your songs on the list.

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99nd
Game: Braid
Title: Undercurrent
Composer: Jami Sieber
Nominator: @azuarc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dNu2b8GdXA

i probably have some sort of grudge against johnathan blow for saying pretty dismissive things about ""vgm composers""---he's said something along the lines of that vgm composers aren't capable of having the emotional attachment to their work that non-vgm musicians can have (his reasoning for choosing to use liscenced music rather than getting someone to write something original for his games)

regardless of that comment that i'm viciously offended by; i do think that blow does have an adequately cool taste in music, as evidenced in this game. most of the tracks he's chosen are actually quite to my taste! mostly calm acoustic new age-y stuff, but often with some subtle intricacy hidden behind the unassuming exterior. by contrast though, this is actually a vaguely energetic and tense pick. it always stands out as like the SERIOUS tune;;;;you know something BIG is about to go down (like a hard puzzle or something idk). has the psychological effect in-game where if you're in an area this track plays you know it is one of the HARD places; even if it's not, it just feels like it's supposed to be.

actually the most striking part to me is that opening before any pulse or drums start; i think when i've heard this track enough times, maybe even in context of the game, but also just listening to the soundtrack outside of it or even within this playlist---THAT opening is so...evoking of dread? it's like...crying? it feels alive, and displeased, and i feel its pain. I KNOW something serious/dark is about to come next. slooow pitch bends tend to do that; i feel this emotion a lot in dandara tracks regularly too and it works very well.

the instrumenation overall is really cool, those phaser/flanger-y type filters on a lot of long held out layers give this a cool otherworldly etherealness. and the clanky percussion makes it feel like you are in a place that is either ANCIENT or OUTSIDE. sometimes the melodic cello layer doesn't even feel like a cello, it has the vibe more of a synth lead. something about this track feels like it could fit both a glowing red circuitry filled cyberpunk future city, and an intimidating forest never touched by humanity. it's expressive in a way that transcends the boundaries of the instrumentation's traditional implications. what seeps through is the emotion, which is a /strong/ emotion

i never noticed until recently that this actually has a pretty big polymetric section! or at least sort of, pseudo-polymeter anyway. 3:00 has the guitar doing endless groups of 3+3+3+3... it resets sometimes, but not consistently, and that's cool. if this was a TRANCE song it would be by ""zts"" because it has the same motions of disconnect from it's otherwise 4/4 pulse that something like deadangle or even worldenddominator do. something i unsurprisingly like~! very floaty and trippy result depending on what you choose to focus on there. actually i guess the bass loop this has in all the other parts earlier is sorta a foreshadowing of the rhythms to come here. it's almost like this is the chance for that aspect to shine kind of like my favorite part of "umineko worldenddominator at 2:57 to the loo"p where suddenly the 7 against 4 polymeter stops resetting itself every few bars and it's the "emotional "part of the song that is uplifting instead of oppressive. it has the same punch of "freedom from the DARKNESS" coupled with slightly more musical ambiguity and freedom, a thing i thing gives subtly more contrast than if it just followed the same rhythmic patterns from before

i've played this game and really deeply enjoy it. i disagree with jon blow on a pretty high amount of his philosophies, not just the dumb comments about vgm composers, but i'm also at odds with his game design beliefs. i could go on about all his design philosophies i disagree with, it's endless, almost feels like he looks for the opposite of what i do at times. but the end result? it's still something i love. I think it's interesting that his game design choices are informed by values that are so much the antithesis of my own, but the end result is something i'm in love with regardless. I guess it shows that strongly opposing viewpoints on what a game should be, can still converge on the agreement of ""this game is a cool game"" in the end.

Braid is a really cool game and i love the witness too. jon blow just consistently winds up making games i really like despite how much i disagree on why he does what he does in his games. i have to respect him a ton no matter how much his values in what makes a game a good game diverge from mine. Maybe that's even an accomplishment in the deep integrity of his ideas/execution in itself, that he succeeded multiple times at making something i love, even when the reasons behind his choices conflict with what i look for.

sorry that was sorta a random tangent and i don't want negativity about a specific person to pervade here...dogpiled hating on 'pretentious indie art people' is a pet peeve of mine that annoys me to see others do anyway and now i'm doing that with my own target

my memories of this game are very very fond. I found the puzzles fun and engaging, all the time-related gimmicks tickled my biased fondness for time travel/manipulation related themes. and the music choices are definitely tied with my appreciation of the game too. this track being the most memorable, even if not actually my favorite (my favorite is Long Past Gone). it may make it difficult for me to give an 'objective' evaluation of this tune as a result sort of, but i always come back to it happily. it just had the luck of an in-game context (which is mostly ""standing out as [The Intense Song] in a mostly slow-paced ost/game"") giving me more chances to focus on it and get emotionally attached to all the things that make it feel so cool

i'm excited for the next jonathan blow games and i hope they have music choices i like as much as braid's! even if they don't, i'd be surprised if i didn't enjoy the games, despite everything
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Oof, the double drop.

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98st
Game: Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
Title: Doopliss Battle
Composer: Yoshito Hirano, Yuka Tsujiyoko, Saki Haruyama
Nominator: @NFUN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvug9_xljlY

TTYD is a top 20 game ost for me, i would say this is cheating for that reason, but it actually does very little of what i look for from this soundtrack. I'm mostly here for the trippy electronic elements (the reason i'm here for almost any ttyd song).

one thing this DOES do is one of the very reasons i repeatedly cite for how much i like TTYD so much, and that's how it's using what are typically samples/sound sources meant for EDM, but using those sounds in contexts that aren't EDM at all. this was a philosiphy that i know the soundtrack to a game called ""charge cycles"" delibarately took to heart, if you've heard of that. i...appreciate both Charge Cycles and TTYD sound tracks for that same reason. they're like ""What if dance music made in 1999 was actually weird cartoony prog instead and sounded absolutely nothing like dance music from 1999 other than the timbres it sources, which are used in ways totally incongruous with intent"" and that intersection is one of the most important music categories to me.

it's basically the definition of _Quilava at some level. most stuff in there has that mixture. Yasuhisa Watanabe and PSO are like the ethereal heavenly spacey future version of it; TTYD and SPM are the cartoony shitpost version of it. i just live for things that take the timbres of edm and use them in totally ""wrong"" ways that sound nothing like how they're traditionally supposed to be used. it instead creates a Whole New World (Full), a totally new world where there's no longer this stylistic divorce where jazz or prog or whatever have to be played by guitars or saxophones, they can be played by Best Service XX-Large Club Edition 4 chord stabs instead! it creates a world that evokes bizarre/surreal/cartoony/futuristic/fantastical/[insert adjective] atmospheres that just can't come to exist without this style-instrumentation 'mismatch', a 'mismatch' that seems to only be allowed in video game music and never outside of it for some reason. thank you video game music.

so like ok you have that sample that sounds like a rave stab at :06, but it's not really used as an energetic rave stab, it's just there to be fucking weird and it's so good. the weird zippery acid-like synth bass :34 sounds a bit more like actual dance music, but it's still doing all these things that evoke more ""some obscure latvian cartoon from the 80s that gamebop would watch"" than edm. i love the end of that synth bass phrase every time it goes rapidly up it's so COMP""UTER

REVERSED spooky chords that fade in and then instantly disappear as a swell before the next section [CHECK{} (checking off the list of things i list as things i like in songs). that actually happens a weirdly high number of times and i think i filter it out because i like the feeling of the punch that sort of anticipatory reverse gives things SO MUCH

this is definitely a bit more straight up CHROMATIC CARNIVAL and [halloween] with cliche tropes used to enforce your intepretation of this song as such; and i think that's why it doesn't speak to me as much as other songs in the game. BUT at the same time that sorta fits totally perfectly with Doopliss's personality? like he's so childish and phony and hokey and fake himself, if he was good enough at music to make a song, it would sound exactly like this. he would just slam you with artificially spooky cliches and it's honestly actually pretty perfect at hamming up that vibe in for the character. so i respect it all anyway. i probably wouldn't if it didn't fit TTYD's super specific aesthetic mold, but it actually does fit itself into that synthetic made-by-aliens hole pretty perfectly so i can appreciate everything it does tbh

i am GLAD that I like AUGMENTED CHORDS more than I used to, thank you Zan-zan-zawa-veia for making me decide that i actually like augmented chords a lot instead of thinking that they are "cheesy". This song would have been composed by Zan-zan-zawa-veia in the alternate universe where the composers that composed these songs were Cryptovolans, Chimeratio, Zan-zan-zawa-veia, nys, jangler, gotoandplay, sleeparrow and Savestate. a window into that alternate universe is listed here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qIWq94v8guvHt8Dt5zkk-7xtNb1WoKF2qcyvz9OdkKo/edit#gid=0
(shooting through the stars is supposed to be "Cryptovolans" but it is blank in the spreadsheet by accident)

there is definitely a reason this is one that out of that list of artists zzzv is the most likely to have written tho, and it's basically the spooky minor functional harmony faux-classical nature of it, which zan actually thoroughly explores even if in typically weirder ways than this song.

also as you can see from that spread sheet..... nys wrote the original super mario bros ost except for the castle theme which is zanzan; for similar reasons
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Doopliss Battle was one of my very, very early VGM faves - long before VGMC. Even now I occasionally go back and listen to it (and others like Rawk Hawk) for the nostalgia.

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i wonder if i can finish this topic before vgmc noms start
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Toxtricity posted...

i wonder if i can finish this topic before vgmc noms start

I believe in you!

only about a year left before vgmc noms start...getting close, have to hurry up!
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Nope because Wario Land 4 will retire this year

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I will PROBABLY get back to this once i finish the bracket. i could make writeups here while that's still in progress but then people will get mad at me because i'm doing this instead of the thing holding up the much bigger, less self-centric event
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MycroProcessor posted...

WHERES THE BRACKET ALREADY

dude vgmc16 doesn't start until 2022, calm down
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i thought you were talking about the vgmc17 bracket

97st
Game: Kirby's Return to Dreamland
Title: Snowball Scuffle
Composer: Hirokazu Ando, Jun Ishikawa
Nominator: @Mr_Lasastryke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbUEtAPdW-g

feel like kirby songs where the specific composer isn't known of these two are rare to come across; but apparently this is one of those where we dont know which of the two it is. my guess would be that it's ando because of the pace and chords/progressions feeling more ando-style than ishikawa-style to me. it's so melodically floaty in a metheny-esque way (and i have that reaction to confirmed ando stuff way more often than confirmed ishikawa stuff). like i know lasa has gotten on my case about how i compare literally everything to pat metheny group but i feel like he has to see what i mean here. just imagine that melody line on lyle mays's distinct hollow square synth lead, imagine everything else as if on guitar or piano, etc. It's that unpredictable destination in chord changes that makes me enthusiastic the most out of anything in music, and pat metheny group is the non-vgm artist i associate most with that so that's why i compare so much music that i love to him.

one thing i'm noticing right now: I often talk about when i like these sorts of floaty progressions, how i like that it forces the melody line to change what scale is being used, what notes are allowed diverge and no longer fit over the previous chord. This song is nOT like that actually, despite having the same sound, and that's actually really cool!! It's more like what i like about the melody to g-darius kimera ii, the melody is actually extremely extremely simple. it's the same thing basically repeated a few times for the first 30 seconds, but the chords around that repetition change and make it /feel/ like the melody is playing different notes when it's not (since the function of the same notes being repeated, changes with different chords surrounding it). This is still among the forms of melody/chord interaction i'm most emotionally enthused by, so i absolutely welcome it here. It makes the bits a bit after where the melody's scale /does/ change (:28 - :43 especially, probably my favorite section of the song) way more impactful

it make me FLOAT IN THE AIR which is fitting for an enthusiastic pink sphere that inhales very many things and rides on top of a star sometimes. it feels like a dream. just like kirgby. just like KLOPNOA (this song reminds me a lot of one of my favorite klonoa songs, hey...you nominated a song from this game!!! maybe you just like PAT METHENY DREAMS; he has to have like, at least 5 songs with the word dream in it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpzHBwG1DSs

back to kirby: I LOVE OBOES (the klonoa song has an oboe in it too)

i like how i don't really see Snowball Scuffle as particularly cartoony, even though it is in the kirby series, and yet it still fits right alongside all the more in-your-face goofy kirby stuff. I think it's because the composition style broad stroke traits shared between most given kirby songs (complex chords, the recognizable melodic styles both ishikawa and ando each use, fast fluttery constant 8th or 16th layers...and also the instrumentation) threads together the consistency in sound, while still being able to evoke a variety of different moods and emotions, within those constraints.

i said not long ago (and within this very topic series i'm pretty sure) that Kirby is my favorite ""popular series"" for vgm. but i'm not sure that still holds true. it really depends on where you cut off the threshold for popular, and if it's inclusive enough there's plenty of things i like more. and honestly i probably like zelda music more these days BUT I NEVER STOPPOEd liking kirby music anyways. it's great. for all the reasons i described, the lead duo of ando/ishikawa just loves going for slightly jazzfusiony or proggy composition traits, even if the exterior is more synthetic and cartoony than either of those categories. everything from the happiest fun song to the slower more emotionally diverse stuff still feels like ""kirby"" in 99% of cases. and i value that, a lot. I love when the music to series can sound like [series] and you know exactly what it's from so instantly

with kirby though, unlike (say. touhou), i think there's a lot more diversity. every kirby song feels like a new song, no matter how much they keep these distinct ""this is definitely a kirby song"" traits insistently ingrained in their sound. no matter how much they recycle themes and melodies from older kirby games. no matter how much they reuse instrumentation. every kirby song feels new to me, there's so many different emotions it can evoke, no matter what the surface pink happy exterior may mislead you to believe. all while still being recognizable as what it is.

""I love complex chords"" - very first line said by Hirokazu Ando in an interview once
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dum pink ball

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Toxtricity posted...

like i know lasa has gotten on my case about how i compare literally everything to pat metheny group but i feel like he has to see what i mean here.

uh... did i? i usually agree with your pat metheny group comparisons! i do remember saying that i didn't agree with you comparing id (purpose) to pat metheny group... but i totally get that comparison now (even if "pat metheny group" still isn't necessarily the first thing that comes to mind for me when listening to id [purpose]). but yeah, snowball scuffle certainly reminds me of pat metheny group, as well as other jazz fusion stuff. i love pat metheny group and fusion so that's probably why i love this song so much!

anyway, i put this song in the "???" category in my predictions, so i'm pleased that you put it this high, i guess! my rationale was that it was obvious that you enjoy kirby music (see: the mycro VGM in irregular time of the day tumblr page having tons of kirby stuff) but you're also known for disliking "happy music." that claim is something i DO get on your case for, btw - i feel like the "happy music" you dislike is usually "condescending"/toy keyboard happy music but that's really just one kind of happy music. i would say a lot of pat metheny group music is extremely happy sounding and you just said that's the music group you associate most with. and you just ranked a happy kirby song high! so... yeah. well, it's not so much "getting on your case" as it is disagreeing on semantics, i guess.

also, "what's your favorite video game series of all time music-wise" is kind of an impossible question for me, but i would probably answer "kirby."

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you've mentioned a few times that you found it really confusing i compared something to pmg hahaha. I remember it with "glass" from zakuzaku actors as well
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ok fair enough! i do understand that PMG is a reference point you inevitably return to often, given how fond you are of them. i'm sure i do the same thing with zappa haha.

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I only just saw this. Didn't know the old one got sacked lel.

Tag.

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man one of the top 10 songs in this has grown to be just like...a "top 10 song" just like, in general, out of all music, for me. i can't wait until i am allowed to talk about that one lol
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i have not forgotten about this! i was busy with "vgmc stuff" like figuring out the loop points of every song which was a lot more work than you would imagine, but i finally got all the loop points marked. with the hardest parts of that out of the way there's more time for my "doing stuff related to board 8" time to be focused here.

anyways here is a pretty song i have been enjoying lately : )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq2omzp6MhY
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second-to-last page? time to ^

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vgmc writeup taking priority over this is done

i'm pretty busy for the rest of this month but i'll get back to this soon,,,,
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i am not busy anymore so finally back to this probably
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96nd
Game: Secret of Mana
Title: Into the Thick of It
Composer: Hiroki Kikuta
Nominator: AndywoodCubeGmr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqd09mRVm8A

i have always loved the secret of mana ost; and this track always felt like the most "iconic" track in my eyes, the track that starts playing in my head when someone says "secret of mana music"; it's far from my favorite, but certainly something i always eagerly come back to within the ost

alex jone high shchool OK this also has the thing "hiroki kikuta chords have lots of notes in them" yeah. like see look how close together all the intervals are to each other on the picture! some of them are right next to each other on the piano!!!!! but they sound "chill" instead of "dissonant" and that is because "jazz" or something i think(allan). that sequence generates a lot of "chill chords" like 7ths and sus chords and i like those ones.

i think importantly to my older music taste: this is very based on a repeating loop . and that loop is like "cool" and constant 8ths so it's like it's made by a computer but it still evokes nature somehow like the cover art of secret of mana which is the color green which is good and cool.

oh yeah and the melody is harmonized in a cool weird way at :34 ahhhhhhhhhhhhh. in general at times it can be hard to determine which layer is meant to be the "lead melody" which is honestly fucking awesome. there's just...so much room for interpretation in this short little song. i hear it as a completely different song every time

this song is so overstimulating for what's only like 8 notes and not even having drums in this version it's just like...every 8th note there is a new block of sound from that main loop, and then also all the other layers sometimes too. like the fact that the lead has EVERY note in it have a new choir chord underneath it at :24-:27 is SO COOL it is like impossible to follow beyond the abstract feeling of that it sounds really cool.....

theres just so many layers. choir chords, melody, plucked loop from the start, other cool sequences that pop in and out, and every time i listen i can focus on something different and get something different out of the song.

i definitely like the typical 90s jrpg nature world sound, and tend to point to Chrono Trigger more often than SoM, but honestly Secret of Mana is like even more "interesting" about how it evokes everything it does than CT imo. like there just aren't many other games of the era with arrangements as dense and 'intricate' as this and stuff. if you pause at any individual moment there's SOME cool harmony going on, but the next second of the song will be an entirely different cool harmony. and somehow every note of the song is just a constant of this, without sounding literally overwh5elming; and instead sounding beautiful and MAGICAL just like disney world

right now i'm skimming through the ost for the other versions of this song like "Did You See the Ocean" and stuff, i'm honestly not sure which one i prefer most. this one's certainly the most melodic but it's less energetic than the ones with drums

man i always complain about like when vgm has like "every note the same volume" with no nuance and stuff (main reason i can't stand banjo kazooie). that in-your-face fakeness can be a detractor. but Hiroki Kikuta just ALWAYS makes it work perfectly to my ears somehow? I think it's because it has a mystical feeling kinda like Joe Hisaishi, and it's not necesarily trying to imitate an existing musical genre; it's just being its own thing. so like if this was trying to be "swing jazz" i would think the artifice feels really hokey and hard to take serious, but this is just its own world...there's not really any other "real music" that sounds quite like this

joe hisaishi is about the only other composer i can think of where this overt fakeness somehow works perfectly to sell mystical natural atmospheres and here are some examples (i'm pretty sure this parallel is on purpose)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO0TOY9lopo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSLlX4czsZA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5tJImwhchc

(i was going to link a bunch more from ghibli animes but they are hard to find on youtube because of copyright strikes it seems but there are probably better examples from like 80s ghibli than what i posted here)
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Toxtricity posted...

this track always felt like the most "iconic" track in my eyes, the track that starts playing in my head when someone says "secret of mana music"; it's far from my favorite

As the resident SoM fanboy (except when Raka's around,) this is an indisputably accurate assessment of Into the Thick of It.

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95st
Game: Transitor
Title: _n C_rcl_s
Composer: Darren Korb
Nominator: @Raetsel_Lapin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMyoI-Za6z8

darren core ; ; ; ;wow i just realized someone wwho was my boy friend was named ""darren"" at one point which makes transistor music feel ""weird"" now (that person would absolutely not like these games and probably not their music tho i actually know he hates hades lol)

uhh so I had actually no clue this version of In Circles existed until Raetsel nominated it for this topic!! I've always at least moderately liked the track, and this is certainly a ""weirder"" version of a song i already loved, it takes away some of my favorite elements of the original though, but it adds an entire layer of aesthetic distinctness that i LOVE so i can't really complain too much.

Mostly the changes here that i'm not as fond of are that it makes the rhythms very gridded; and half of what i liked about the original was the bouncy, intersecting different grids from each other layered on top of each other. (the backing here has like this CONSTANT gated 16th filter, which makes it rhythmically ridiculously standard and with only one thing at once possible to focus on. while the other compares like swing with a gated triplet feel instead layered on top of each other, which i'm much more into because there's more possible things to latch onto at once I guess.)

but the changes I LIKE here are the vocals now being vocoder particularly, i've always had an attachment to artificial incarnations of voices...blatant in-your-face auto tune ala eiffel 65 has always been one of my favorite sounds, but this is more like ""Alan Parsons Project - The Raven"" which i like even more! It makes me think a lot of one of my favorite albums called ""Metamorphosis"" by Jean Michel Jarre (actually i'd recommend this album to Raetsel in general, knowing her taste. tho some songs might be too thumpy edm pulse for her, it's definitely like ""pop except too weird to actually be pop""--which is different from Jarre's usual style, but lines up with stuff I know raetsel enjoys!!!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9FwrjATqYU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8FN8vfqy_U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWgWWdSThHs

i guess a good way to put what i like about the changes in _n C_rcl_s are entirely things that are timbre-related. because everything electronic about the original is amplified here in a way that just sounds COOL.

the jarre comparison feels really strong because of the really moody almost classical-like composition that feels like it could be in ""umineko"", like this FEELS like something jean michel jarre would have /composed/ AND arranged. and well, jarre was basically my favorite musician from the whole range of 2000s or so (close with tangerine dream and orbital though), i think partly a mixture of his successful dark emotinoal tingling with his crazy synthetic sounds all around. this is just one of the only other things i've heard to capture that feeling so it makes me retroactively nostalgic for when i was younger.

also i guess i can't complain too much about the not comparing swing<->triplets really because it actually does instead compare triplets<->16ths at the end and quietly throughout in a few other places, it's just not the focus of the track the way it is in the original. this is still in 5/4 and 6/4 and stuff anyways at least

one other comparison i can make that i feel VERY positive about, is Radiohead - Idioteque
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svwJTnZOaco

i used to not get/like radiohead at all, but at this point i'd consider thom yorke one of my favorite vocalists; and the band...well i don't know them well enough to say they're among my favorites actually (still need to listen to everything), but i love the majority of what i know at the same level as other artists I consider favorites. and Idioteque is absolutely one of my favorite songs of theirs. Liking Radiohead is a recent appreciation that started around the time I made this ranking topic actually, so this version of In Circles that reminds me of this specific Radiohead song so strongly, it was exactly what I needed to hear and was looking at the time i made this topic!!! The ""atmosphere"" is exactly the same, a mechanical synthetic pulse made out of sounds that aren't even drums, and crazy unusual sounding pads, and haunting strange vocals. you know, i always mentally associated idioteque with imagery that's pretty reminiscent of what you see in Transistor, suddenly these parallels all make sense
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