Board 8 > VGMC] Day 27! Big Ride / Heavy Arms / One Last / Distant Sky / Desert / Anka

(+) 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 @Toxtricity, or post your absentee vote in the discussion thread!

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Matc

The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

Heavy Arms
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

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where bracket

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The Big Ride
To the Distant Sky
Desert After Tears
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Heavy Arms
One Last Trial
Anka

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Heavy Arms
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

Heavy Arms
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

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Heavy Arms
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

Pretty good day, I thought all matches were fairly close.

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Heavy Arms
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

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Heavy Arms
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

Heavy Arms [9]
Desert After Tears [8.5]
One Last Trial [8.5]
To The Distant Sky [7]
Anka [6]
The Big Ride [6]

Gundam Wing: Endless Duel - Heavy Arms
Skygunner - To the Distant Sky
Ys IX: Monstrum Nox - Desert After Tears
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The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Anka

Matches 1 & 3 are close, especially #3.

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The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Anka

The Big Ride (9.5 - 4th place) / Heavy Arms (4.5 - 64th place)
One Last Trial (9.4 - 5th place) / To the Distant Sky (9.1v - 8th place)
Desert After Tears (6.8 - 46th place) / Anka (7.7 - 33rd place)


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The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Anka

Heavy Arms
To the Distant Sky
Desert After Tears

heavy arms blew me away? probably going to end up as my favorite song in this bracket

Heavy Arms
One Last Trial
Anka

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Big
One
Anka
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Heavy Arms
Distant Sky
Anka

muzak

mortal kombat

sorry

yes

YeS

actual muzak


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The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Anka

Heavyarms is an old "obscure favorite" that was outsizedly popular in more than one community I was in like fifteen years ago, so listening to it always makes me nostalgic for the mid-to-late 2000s. These days I like it nowhere close to how much I used to, but I still gel with the SNES '90s dance music vibe quite a bit

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The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Anka

-(hey look it's a smiley face : ) this song makes me very happy! todd baker has cool sounds in his songs...always full of mallet percussion overdose which is my favorite!!! the blips of vibraphone validate my commonly stated statement "vibraphone is my favorite instrument" and makes me happy : ) to say that is what i like listening with my aura on the space big little planet. I LOVE those vibraphone chords when they get held out they feel so "fresh", and the breakbeat and guitar in the mix just meld this into a perfect song...this doesn't compositionally sit in my memory or enthusiasm quite as well as a lot of other stuff by this composer, but i'm in love with the instrumentation combination choices)-

-[i know i always say i like 90s dance music; and i certainly have a higher tolerance for any given composition if that's the instrumentation, but this track tests my limits lol. i definitely used to like this one a lot more when i was all about stereotypical minor bVI-bVII-i esque patterns but i've definitely cooled on them. my bias for the era and style luckily prevents me from hating this completely--i would probably abhor this composition applied to any other instrumentation these days (also i had to laugh out loud, seeing this as 64/64th place on haste's ranking is about the most predictable thing ever). anyways this is not "bad" at all, especially because of the format it's for, honestly wish i was more into it given how much i like the 90s edm-ness]-

-{big}-

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-(oh my god i love every single sound in this song.......these are the types of chord changes that make me so happy, total modulations all over the place that feel like "shmup music". THis uses that one (i think distorted reality but also in omnisphere?? i need to re-figure that out) sound that is in that one tangerine dream song called "The Comfort Zone" that i love a lot, it's also in one of my favorite kimihiro abe songs, anyways if you look up the song "The Comfort Zone" by Tangerine Dream you will know which sound i am taljking about. it is one of my favorite recurrent presets from 90s-00s electronic music
~~~~~
WHY DO I LOVE 90s synths so much...they are just the perfect sounds...thank you deniz and hagane for using them even though it is 2024 already. and yet it feels like 2093. it's lijke idk 90s was so optimistic about the future that they drenched everything with the coolest ideas...and we still hold onto those ideas! though honestly not many soundtracks go for the specific brand of instrumentation and tone crosscode dooes.
~~~~~
I feel like...compositionally? this is possibly my favorite crosscode song (close between a bunch though), and favorite song by hagane. It's just the best of GOD i love all those stabs at like :30-:42 they are so hard to follow and it feels like the unpredictability of a FIERCE FIGHT. like erratic clashes of the weapons. and then there's all the chord changes that are fucking weird and unexpected that i love for exactly the same reason except also on top of that "floating in the sky" whatever. this song is forcefully shooting me into SPACE with all these unexpected chord movements. I was going to list a bunch out but it's honestly like that the whole song. when you hit an anvil and slow time...the metallic clanks...AAAAAAAAAHH. why is this the best song in the world. 3:09 OMG all these floating chords...it my favoorite type of tension, you can tell it's tense, but it has a dose of chill to it texturally PERFECT MUSIC IT FEELS SO COOL i wish i could enjoy this song without having a mental breakdown)-

-[i remember liking the synth pads in this song, i don't remember there being a "fantasia" 90s synth bells in the song though (i like those sounds). i also don't remember being bothered by the mixing having a bunch of clunky limiter/compresser stuff that feels like the song is 1% underwater, every time one sound gets too loud all the other sounds get too quiet at the WRONG SPEED and it feels like i am on an airplane where my ears pop. that could appeal to me in some settings but in a song as pretty as this one i REaLLY want clarity without that getting in the way. anyways this song is really pretty and the actual composition is wonderful and i especially like the synth pads : ) they're so happy! This song makes me think of being in the sky, and i tend to like that feeling, considering how often i say "this makes me float in the air" or something whenever i like notes in a song, fitting with thes ong name and game name]-

-{eric persing made my favorite parts of so many video game songs....}-

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-(oh no it's the big Y who is so dangerous ANTIBODIES which "probably composed by mitsudo sing" and youre so fucking too lloud......i definitely prefer "Probably (definitely) Unisuga" when it is an older year so that way he sounds like chrono trigger and uses older synths that i like more. those funny boys like to talk about "dynamic range" well i'll show you dynamic range LOUD quiet...his centerpiece fuck you. and i think about the daily grind with my shut up prog organ i love you. the parts that sit the most happy in the mix to me are the strummed clean-ish guitars because they sound like a desert )-

-[what a CONTRAST. this song is actually like a telephone. i think i was eating beer pretzels in real life while listening to this in the "name that tune" 11/8 genius of. and i like the glitchy beep it starts with and the "brass" which is a real instrument that wants to beat me out of the Pokemon Gun Version with music composoed by tatsuya yano which, by the way, is an excitement. this makes me feel like i'm listening to jazz music i like that is in odd time just for the "joke" kinda like my old hat favorite (pat methane) there's so many distortions and noises that distract you from how cool the song is because they're even cooler than the song. i dont know where to rank this because it is TOO NEW to my consciousness, but i will put it higher than some of my "old favorites"]-

-{guitar match}-

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One Last Trial (7th/160)
Anka (30th/160)
The Big Ride (48th/160)
To the Distant Sky (72nd/160)
Desert After Tears (138th/160)
Heavy Arms (154th/160)
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Heavy Arms
To the Distant Sky
Desert After Tears

The Big Ride is kinda whatever

Same thing HidekuniHorita said about Heavy Arms, except that community is B8!

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Cool steel plus song vs somber anime theme, closest match today

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Very not-close-at-all 3rd match

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Heavy Arms
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

Big Ride is kinda boring. Not much going on there. I don't think there's any good reason to have Heavyarms coming back year after year but it's pretty good, so whatever.

Oh ya go my horns and bells. TtDS is fine.

DAT is one of the better Ys 9 songs. Very good! I think this is the first time this contest I've been sad that a song is too short. Anka seems like it's going to get interesting a few times, but it never does, whoops.

Desert After Tears > One Last Trial > Heavy Arms > To the Distant Sky > The Big Ride > Anka
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The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

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Heavy Arms
To the Distant Sky
Anka

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The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Anka

The Big Ride (127th) vs Heavy Arms (7th)
One Last Trial (79th) vs To the Distant Sky (52nd)
Desert After Tears (168th) vs Anka (226th)

GO GO HEAVY ARMS WOOOO also match 2 is super rude why cant distant sky get a break :(

The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

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Heavy Arms
To the Distant Sky
Anka

Heavy Arms
To the Distant Sky
Desert After Tears

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Heavy Arms
To the Distant Sky
Desert After Tears
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The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Anka

The Big Ride
To the Distant Sky
Anka

heavy arms is still "a bop" as some might say but big ride is very cool too

one last trial is a distinctly high tier hagane song and hagane rules... but, also, i can't shake the overall sense that it's just not quite the same style as crosscode in general and doesn't share all of its strengths, so i'm not really sure how to feel about it. anyway, distant sky managed to grow on me even more now so i'm not sure if i'd have ever flipped

banshiryuu posted...

why cant distant sky get a break :(

yeah that's a ys song i guess. yeah that's a... ok

still no ranking updates because i'm 2busy4rankings

The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Anka

The Big Ride
To the Distant Sky
Anka

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The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Anka

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The Big Ride
To the Distant Sky
Anka

The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

The Big Ride
To the Distant Sky
Desert After Tears

Gundam Wing: Endless Duel - Heavy Arms
CrossCode: A New Home - One Last Trial
Ys IX: Monstrum Nox - Desert After Tears
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Heavy Arm
one last trial
Anka

second and third matches super close.

i wish people had dropped their singa hate long enough to support marionette, marionette instead. best ys 9 track not even close. No such thing as a bad track with "desert" in the name, but i'd be voting marionette over Anka right now.
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Gundam Wing: Endless Duel - Heavy Arms
Skygunner - To the Distant Sky
Ys IX: Monstrum Nox - Desert After Tears

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The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Anka

this is MUSIC pt. 1. The focus of this track is much more rhythmic than melodic-- something that shows up a lot in the tracks I really like in this year's bracket. The playful melody played by the sorta lo-fi lead at the start groups loosely into four-note patterns but the downbeat emphasis happens on the third note in the first half before shifting to the first note in the second half. Combined with a breakbeat that doesn't line itself up conventionally (until 0:31) and a vibraphone line that does likewise, it keeps the rhythm of the track a little unexpected and off-balance in a way I think is wonderfully fun. (It also makes those moments where things do line up, like 0:31, more powerful.)

The above is one way to hear it, counting from the first kick as beat 1 of bar 1. After the 0:54 solo, you might find your sense of the rhythm has shifted-- the kick drum actually comes in just before the beginning of the beat, and so the instruments feel like they all come in at just before the bar in 1:45 (though it's the same musical phrase as before!)

That's what I find so cool about this track-- its way of expressing playfulness through great intrumental choices and rhythmic feel. (I actually find the 0:54 solo to be the least compelling part of the track as a result! But its setup of the next section is really cool.)

I have a soft spot for the Gundam Wing property-- reminds me of my high school days, recalling how this actually made it to North American cable television, the way it took itself extra seriously, the theatrics, Trowa's ridiculous hair (as in the video pic). 1:17 feels like it's Techno Syndrome, to the extent where I wish someone would yell 'MORTAL KOMBAT' at that moment. This feels like the kind of track I'd go off on back in the day about how it's boring; I still don't think it's super interesting but its specific old dance music aesthetic feels a bit more purposeful than I'd interpreted it in the past.

this is MUSIC pt. 2. The CrossCode EX soundtrack feels like HAGANE channeling Deniz Akbulut's specific style in CrossCode, and I think this particular track nails it. It opens with a sort of Chrono Trigger feel-- a little Corridors of Time, a little Undersea Palace-- but by 0:22 you can really feel the HAGANE chords. The big synth stabs to get the main part of the track rolling, very cool! Even as the track feels like it's reiterating a melody, it's making changes to have it feel different each time. But the real highlight for me is the chill break at 2:20, which hits one of my favourite 'airy' moments in the contest. The track is a perfect setup for this really elevating moment, and the moment is a perfect setup for the more active section that plays after it. 3:10's introduction of uncertain urgency just before the loop-- wonderful string chords, that skittering harp synth-- is also an awesome moment, and the way HAGANE changes the kick beat underneath the synth stabs to signal the loop is a nice bit of detail.

I feel like the degree to which I enjoy To The Distant Sky has varied over time. Right now, I think I like it quite a bit-- I think it introduces itself very well, a happy song that's slightly wistful, something that goes wonderfully with shots of smiling characters standing in meadows holding onto their hats in swirling wind carrying flower petals backed by blue skies. To that extent I find the instrumental bridge to be a bit of an intrusion, albeit a brief one. That slight variation in the melody at 2:09 tickles me-- I think it's great.

I was talking to Tox the other day about which Falcom music I enjoy that's more in that specific Falcom rock guitar + violin arrangement style (and the compositional style that tends to follow with it)-- a style that I've often said I wasn't fond of. The apparent answer to the question was 'Unisuga', basically (the specific example I cited was Spiral of Erebos). I think melodically this has a few moments I like in a similar vein (the modulation at 0:50, for instance). Something about the way this sounds bothers me, though-- the guitars, or the way they're present in the track, feel heavy and overbearing. They fill my ears when I don't want them to. There's always a sort of noise floor that's present. The violin feels a bit more stilted. It's not a surprise that the sections with more acoustic elements are the ones I gravitate more towards in this track.

this is MUSIC pt. 3. I love how this opens with a sort of musical modem sound. Steve Pardo and Skewsound mentioned how he wanted to combine a folk and jazz sound with electronic elements, as a way to express the settings you visit in the game, and I think this does a really great job of that. the 11/8 groove is noticeable and cool but it's also not token-- the groove of the track is built around it. It's a track whose feel I love, homey and inviting but also curious. The way the guitars show up with little melodic lines to adorn the groove, the trumpet adding strength to the melody without dominating the track, the mostly acoustic percussion that's somehow slightly understated despite their prominence, the electronic elements that seem to merge with everything seamlessly; all of it feels effortless, extremely comfortable, but not complacent.

The Big Ride
One Last Trial
Desert After Tears

Heavy Arms
To the Distant Sky
Anka

Heavy Arms
To the Distant Sky
Desert After Tears

GOD I've flipped on this second match a ton - both songs in styles I tend to like that aren't mindblowing but still very enjoyable.

Desert After Tears has almost the (well, an) opposite problem of Singa stuff - the drums are REALLY LOUD and the leads actually feel too quiet at times. I still like it a lot and it's not Unisuga's worst offender (I could barely hear the leads in Erosion of Madness at all on my old computer) but still a bit odd for something so melodic in style.

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The Big Ride
To the Distant Sky
Anka

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Heavy Arms
To the Distant Sky
Anka

Heavy Arms
To the Distant Sky
Anka

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The Big Ride
To the Distant Sky
Anka

certainly didn't expect to vote against a HAGANE song, feel like this is one of his least interesting works out of what I've heard