Board 8 > [VGMC] Day 43! Genesis Beyond / Final Voyage / Legacy / The Final Showdown...?

(+) 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 li

Genny Cream ~ Beyond the Beerginning
Angelic Azure

whats wrong this this uploader? I think he's actually mentally unwell.

Too atmospheric. The ratio of cool things:things I don't care about is too low for a song like this, and it wholly lacks the emotions that 14.3 Byr has, whose name I had to look up because it has an outdated number smh

wow has anybody compared this music to PMD? honestly, I didn't fully grok the comparison until now, where the similarities are hitting me like a brick to the face. I credit my mental exercise of trying to imagine Gates songs with PMD2 instruments. minute in is totally hamauzu though

song.

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Final Voyage
The Final Showdown...?

Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Treeshroud Forest

when the fal is com
pee emm dee. I do like Final Showdown but yeah no chance here
wait I guess we arent doing the other two matches. Should have had a bonus match smh

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy
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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy

Ys Origin - Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Donkey Kong '94 - The Final Showdown...?
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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy

Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Final Showdown...?

Final Showdown...? [8.5]
Genesis Beyond the Beginning [8]
Legacy [6.5]
Final Voyage [6]

Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy

Genesis Beyond the Beginning (110th) vs Final Voyage (256th)
Legacy (182nd) vs The Final Showdown...? (142nd)

Words are unnecessary!

Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

good music

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy

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Final Voyage
Legacy

Genesis Beyond the Beginning (7.0v - 41st place) / Final Voyage (7.4 - 37th place)
Legacy (9.8v - 1st place) / The Final Showdown...? (7.6 - 32nd place)

Option 2 in the poll, obv. Dreams in a Pie for the championship! (but ok, I'm actually partly serious) Not sure how I gave GBtB a 7! I tried to find something in it to warrant it, but I failed. The second half of Legacy is sublime.... I really love 7/8+6/8! Can't say for sure if it's still my #1 in Bracket D, though. I'll have to listen to the others again.

Hbthebattle posted...

Treeshroud Forest

Treeshroud Forest WAS on my potential future noms list, but then I decided to remove it since it's like Legacy but not quite as a good! More specifically, It sounds like a mix of Treeshroud and FF5's Fate in Haze to me.

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy

Heck yeah Genesis. Another song that has a bit of the Cold Steel feel but executed in a much better way. Final Voyage is enjoyable, other than the weak ending.

Legacy is pretty alright. Final Showdown's as terrible as ever.

Genesis Beyond the Beginning > Legacy ? Final Voyage > The Final Showdown...?
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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

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Final Voyage
Legacy

Match 2 is very close for me!

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Final Voyage
Legacy

Hoo boy really liking Final Showdown today, I guess RoboCop Title was a good primer for more catchy Game Boy melodies over friendly chord progressions. Weird final battle theme though, I swear it would fit right in as a Pokemon Game Corner theme instead...

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banshiryuu posted...

Words are unnecessary!

Okay Depeche Mode

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

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Final
Final
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Final Voyage
The Final Showdown...?

I expected myself to vote for the other 2 songs going in

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Final Voyage
Legacy

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

Final Voyage
Legacy

Match 2 was more painful than it should have been

Final Voyage
Legacy

genesis and final showdown have definitely been favourites of mine in the past and i still think they're pretty good/great but yeah i didn't have much difficulty picking here (final voyage/final showdown might've been close at least)

Final Voyage
Legacy

-(oh no it's the loud violin song!!!! Help JACK IN THE BOX get to the job schon e the guitar explosion just before :20 is cool and reminds me of "chick corea elektric band" the one guy who does the thing like that who invented it and thinks he is all that. i never noticed the background synthy layers at :42 but they're cool and the crystally keyboard leads that go along around there are great too~! I love those sounds!!!! THE CHOIR is being SO FUNNY just like metroid prime and i like the harpsichord it's just like a castle)-

-[i have "no words" for final voyage but it's a good example of how i can be a lot more "mood" focused as my reason for liking a song than i might come across in how i talk. on this song i have about 0 focus on anything to actually do with its composition, or even much to say about technical details of the sound design. only the picture painted in my mind and intensity of emotion i feel from it is what matters to me. these constant 16ths on the synth are so simple and that's all they need to be, a sequence that puts me in a trance and pulls me into the black hole of PppsphspdfghpijisihgfjSFGXFPGgbofgponxGfnnxn....a;;;aaa;''BZB_++||| (list of letters ranked by how tall they are) and the sudden cut off at the end is POWERFUL. i always come out of a listen to this with shock especially because of that FINAL moment.]-

-{loud song vs quiet song that has a loud ending!}-

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-(Reject the beginning...And behold its non-existence. Gaze upon the end...And behold its existence.
~~~~~
Originally for legacy i was going to do a very lengthy "serious topics" post in the vein of my post for Axis Pillar, but i think i got most of my fix for that sorta thing out on that one, even if i had more to say that i originally wanted to spill out here. Legacy has similar personal meaning to me the way axis pillar does, I got into it at around the peak darkest time of my life. I could go into more detail but i think you get the idea if i just say the role this track fulfills in my life is very similar, for similar reasons. the title has always felt meaningful to me..."legacy". So often I spend a ton of my time digging through things like wayback machine in a futile struggle to unearth Lost Media (as most of abe's midis are, as i said on obstacle), and it's just a poignant thing to think about that this song somehow naturally evokes feelings of a lost past musically too. the same feeling of loss applies to life itselfTHIS Has nothing to do with the song or game (though the game does touch on related topics) i just get a lot out of such a basic song title, but it's because its the title of music that feels as emotionally powerful as this composition happens to be for me
~~~~~
honestly most of the praise i have to say here is redundant with what i had to say about obstacle; i just love abe's style in this specific time period (well, in every time period, i'm not even sure which period is my favorite), where like ok yea you can say "midi-era abe sounds like pokemon mystery dungeon 2(chrono trigger)" by which i mean his melody/chord interaction style is cool because it changes key every 2 seconds just like Pat Metheny Droup. this song is in odd time but in a kinda fluffy floaty way that feels like im inside of the cloud and despite it's straightforwardness about its odd-time-ness, never feels even close to forced to me. the all piano section's "13" is--in terms of information intake--in this cool zone where it's just constant 8ths so any rhythmic divisions don't matter too much in how i'll perceive it, which gives it a lot of freedom. It's a lot like my favorite part of Seraph (haha) the Traitor from monster train, except much more consonant in this incarnation. EVERY TIME there's a chord change it's a "good one" in this song, lifts me up with crazy intense emotions, the melodies feel so g ood!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
~~~~~
i like oboes, and clarinets...and all the instruments in this song...you can just read the list of instruments in the midi file visualizer in the video ha ha. though my favorite way any instrument is used is the piano, and i didn't think until nfun said it that hamauzu would be a comparison that made sense but now i understand that so now i can think of this song as being like dance of the dogs howl except inside of a midi file.
~~~~~
oh yeah, for some reason kimihiro abe's midis from this period have the time signature data desynchronized from the actual music. even here it's like that. it might not be obvious if you're not paying attention but the timesig changes listed in the "beat" counter in the video are all actually like two bars later than where they make sense to be based on what the music sounds like, like 1:08 should be instantly alternating 7/8+6/8, but the counter still lists it as 7/8 for 2 bars before switching, and stuff, and the whole song consistently has the timesig data list everything exactly 2 bars later than the music is for some reason. I have no idea why that is, probably just some quirk of the way whatever software he used at the time exports to midi. it doesn't change the way the midi sounds at all, and the bpm isn't impacted (which in how midi works /would/ change the way it sounds), but for some reason this timesig data is all misaligned.
~~~~~
still can't believe the coincidence of me showing Place this song irl; running the midi through the yamaha xg-based synth they'd gotten and wonderfully let me keep it (thank u for this very cool present, honestly becoming one of my favorite synths to mess with). er. why i said thats coincidental is because place's reaction to this song when i played this midi through that was like WHOA THIS IS SBEAUTIFUL SO COL but then i never shared it again or anything or said what it was called (partly because i was planning on using it in a guessing game lol but that never happened). but instead i nominated it for VGMC and then place supported it without knowing it was the same song!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WOW; after what was probably like a year gap
~~~~~
Anyways one thing i felt like saying. I posted this song before and recommended it to anyone who liked the pmd-like aspect of obstacle, as imo this is even more in that vein:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZVdjzD9YIk
~~~~~
but one thing i'm struck by is the description of that song. It says it was written as a tribute to his favorite composer: hitoshi sakimoto! but this would've been like 6 years before he joined hitoshi sakimoto's company called basiscape! I find it very heartwarming to read this description that many years before then, follow your dreams.............or something
)-

-[i used to be a lot more into the final showdown, but lately it's hard for me to get over how clunky/unexpressive certain bits feel to me. but i still have a good deal of respect for the fairly expressive lead. sequenced beep guitar solo imitation at parts like 1:01 is pretty fun. the bouncy 6/8-ness is kinda cool too, one rhythm going like 1-34-6 in a shuffly way, while another goes -2-4-6 at parts like :30. suddenly realizing that's probably the element i used to focus on more in ~vgmc3-7, and why i liked it more at that time, and maybe if i focus in on that element more again i can get more into this. taking a shuffle or swing-feel rhythm, and mathematically slicing it up in various ways to make it possible to hear in either 3+3 or 2+2+2 is always a fun pretty simple thing you can do to make neat funky tempo perception testing stuff]-

-{whoaa!!!!! both of these songs are songs that are on a computer}-

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Legacy (3rd/252)
Final Voyage (88th/252)
Genesis Beyond the Beginning (207th/252)
The Final Showdown...? (230th/252)
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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy

Final Voyage
The Final Showdown...?

Final Voyage
Legacy

Final Voyage
Legacy

Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

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Genesis
...?

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Final Voyage
Legacy

That poll confused the shit out of me, considering it names songs that I was pretty certain hadn't gone yet.

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?
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Outer Wilds - Final Voyage
Donkey Kong '94 - The Final Showdown...?

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?

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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
Legacy

VERY pleasantly surprised by Legacy.
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Final Voyage
Legacy

falcom music = good. wow what a daring and completely unusual opinion.

i am quite honestly surprised to see such an atmospheric track make it to the bracket. i tend to value atmosphere a lot really, probably more than half or even most here? (i don't like assuming things, but i've heard folks say atmospheric stuff doesn't do well here) i wish it's competition wasn't falcom, which i feel like is the kind of music that is safe, but also engaging. this is one of those decisions where i chose to weigh in whether i valued the technical achievement more than the emotion and mood.

i ended up listening to both of these bad boys twice!

legacy reminds me of that rpg mythical forest aesthetic, which is very much a selling point in my eyes. i always see a lot of (what i presume to be) zoomers in the comments of gamecube and n64 music like "is it possible to feel nostalgic for a time you weren't alive for / a game you've never played." and idk if i ever really understood any of those comments. well i guess i am the big fool now because this song is that for me. and yet it also doesn't feel particularly derivative either, or "cheesy" if we are using toxtricity's definition of that word.

i love how this song ends in a question mark it's like the funniest shit to me. it's pretty odd to me how the "fake" nostalgia song is something i feel more than the "real" one. i know this game. i even know this song. it's pretty impressive for game boy!

Final Voyage
The Final Showdown

second match too close.
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Genesis Beyond the Beginning
The Final Showdown...?