dyssebeiawashere

[dyssebeiawashere]

Yes, this loops. Yes, it features a few little surprises. It was a struggle to get back into my schedule but I needed to post something sooner or later. I've had a few variants of this song somewhere but none of them seemed worth the trouble considering they were old and dusty, so I started over fresh for this version. Also here's a poem! A forest drowned in desert dunes Like bones their broken trunks extend Among the shifting sands are held A thousand things time could not mend Now to me ranting about this game because I do that: Stratum 4 in Etrian Odyssey is one of the most bleak and barren landscapes within the series. The only greenery here are the people themselves, hidden away in a desiccated forest jutting out of endless dunes and dust. Spoilers Below: - - - - - It's important to note that this is probably the first and last time the series would ask your adventuring party to do something quite this awful in order to progress the story. The Forest People are certainly written as some form of noble savage stereotype, but the wholesale slaughter you are tasked to perform against them is anything but subtle. it is a genocide, pure and simple. Kill them, kill their god, kill their home. If this wasn't your clue that the operation of a for-profit adventuring economy by the local government of Etria is fundamentally flawed the subsequent reveal of what was at the heart of the Yggdrasil Tree was one of the biggest wake-up calls of the series: Mankind is not so powerful as to end life itself, but the environments and cultures it knows and recognizes can very much be destroyed by our carelessness and greed. Whatever new world that grows from the ashes will not be our home, it will not remember us. While there will be many victims and countless dead, the survivors will be the ones who must endure the consequences and find a way out of the labyrinth those who came before created. - - - - -

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The MOTHER series gets extra points for the fact that it celebrates the ritualistic power of self care. That a mundane but simple gesture of self love is a magical power in and of itself. Take a break. Listen to some music. Maybe even dance. Sit down and make yourself a cup of tea or coffee. Maybe even take a long shower. Untangle that tense and knotted ball of stress you've become. The past and future aren't here right now, but you are. Ground yourself and appreciate what is, and not just what was or what may come to pass. You might just find a different person standing in your shoes afterwards.

[dyssebeiawashere]

There's been a lot of buzz about Mike floating around lately. This past week especially has had me busy trying to dodge spoilers and slack off from my usual schedule, so I had to get something in and I figured it might as well be semi-relevant:

This is Mike. They're a unique character in the Parodius series (a parody of Konami titles, by Konami) The Parodius games are in the fashion of Gradius, but with comedic elements in the level design and aesthetics that draw from a large number of other Konami titles from Twinbee to CastleVania to the dating sim Tokimeki Memorial. Huge Moai Heads and little blue penguins are recurring enemies, with themed stages that have little to nothing to do with space and more often will appear as fantastical depictions of schools, city streets, or even disco parlors. It's wacky, it's fun, and it's absurd by nature. Jikkyo Oshaberi Parodius specifically has this really bizarre element to it as well where there's a Television Host Guy (Voiced by none other than Jôji Yanami) shouting and cheering for you as you play. It's almost as if you were in some sort of game-show made up of a ton of old nostalgic videogames. It's that sort of wacky charm and weirdness that you don't see all that often. Musically, the series is pretty strange. The soundtrack consists of various remixed Konami tunes fused with royalty-free classical music and the periodic appearance of other songs like Paul Mauriat's El Bimbo (a song from the 1970's that also wound up being referenced in Earthbound as well) I can't really put to words why I specifically bring all this up in relation to Mike. He's just a cat?

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More from the Conspiracy/KGB game. It loops, it beeps and boops, it might even ban critically acclaimed science fiction novels (Hopefully not though) I just love the particular sound Picq captured with this title. I don't even know how to put to words how fun some of these tracks are.

Might as well post a double since I have a few extras laying around. This track has a totally different energy going on but I'm not complaining. Fun Fact: Donald Sutherland was in this game. And yes, he has a goofy accent for it. It's no Tim Curry in Red Alert but it's something noteworthy.

[dyssebeiawashere]

Something I really love about Etrian Odyssey V's Soundtrack (SPOILERS AHOY) you've been warned

Okay so, first off, this is spoilers for the game's main storyline: There are actually references in the soundtrack that hint at the true nature of the games setting. The first I'm aware of is the Boss theme:

Battlefield - Roaring Sky, Shattering Land Around the 1:38 mark we get something that sounds right out of a John Williams STAR WARS theme. Now, I know what you might be thinking: That's not 100% guaranteed, it's coincidental and that sound isn't trademarked, there's similar sounding music in other media! And sure, I'd be willing to let it go... if not for the really obvious one:

Battlefield - Challenge of the Stars

The theme for the 5th stratum major big bad boss of the story has this really imposing theme that's exceptionally dramatic and slow to start, but the important moment here is the 3:05 mark. It's the friggen 2001: A Space Odyssey bit from Also Sprach Zarathustra. It's A SPACE ODYSSEY I can't get over that!? It's such a great moment!

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More Donkey Kong Country 3 for the GBA. There are just so many of these tracks that have such fun melodies to them. Maybe one day I'll attempt some of the SNES classics for 1 and 2 as well, but the GBA title really needs the love.

[dyssebeiawashere]

I've mentioned this before, but David Wise actually remade the entire soundtrack for DKC3 when it was re-released for the GBA. The SNES version is totally different, so it gets kind of confusing looking them up. As a result many of the people who grew up with the original trilogy probably overlooked the GBA versions. Why buy the same game twice? Which is a shame because I'm gonna come out and say that the GBA OST for Donkey Kong Country 3 is actually better than the SNES's. Wise did a much better job after getting much needed break from the games. He came back with a fresh head and some great new ideas that set the groundwork for an absolute smash hit of a soundtrack that would carry over into the new Donkey Kong games that we'd see in the years afterwards. I just love this track, I had to give it a whirl and then share the result with everyone so people could be made aware of the SECOND, COOLER Donkey Kong Country 3.

[dyssebeiawashere]

Okay so, a lot to unpack here. Firstly: Age of Empires was my very first video-game I ever owned as a little kid. I remember leaving from WalMart with that sucker and being so excited on the ride back that I took out the manual and read it furiously before letting my parents know something astounding: "this game has 'Babylions' !" They informed me it was pronounced 'Babylonians' and went back to focusing on the road. But MAN WAS I STOKED for this game. Hell, the installation was even entertaining. The guys with the hammers slowly assembling some huge monument bit by bit. It probably took hours and there I was staring at the screen like it was a cinematic masterpiece. An interesting and somewhat odd feature of the Gold Edition for Age of Empires was that upon installing the Rise of Rome Expansion it actually replaced some of the older tracks with the new ones. This track was one of those that would vanish upon installing 'The Rise of Rome'. So If you ever wondered why the soundtrack suddenly changed for you after installing the expansion, that'd be why.

Secondly: This game has a really weird role in my developmental phase. I really love learning about history, and this was a stepping stone for me on that journey... but I have to immediately come out and say I was AWFUL at these games and RTS games in general for a very long time because I was more interested in building aesthetically pleasing cities than actual resource management and strategy. There's another aspect to Age of Empires that is worth discussing, but to preface: Most adults are semi-media-literate and can read between the lines and get the bigger picture, not so much with kids. Kids get gut feelings about things at times, but with limited vocabulary / knowledge they have very little to work with and have less confidence to voice those feelings out loud as a result. It shouldn't be surprising that when kids are playing a game about powerful historic empires wiping each other off the face of the earth some of them are going to get a little too into that aspect of it. The Venn Diagram of Interests that helped me meet fellow nerds who enjoyed Age of Empires games also exposed me to some really unsavory types who truly believed that what made a country important was how many wars it would win and that all of history was just one long-running gauntlet of various nations running along with the torch of military supremacy. It's important to note that most of the countries depicted in the games were from Asia and Europe. Adults who know about making games may understand that with limited time and budget you can only fit so many things into a game before launch and the rest will have to come later. I'm not going to imply that glossing over huge swaths of the world was an intentional choice by Ensemble as part of some malicious scheme when there are nicer, reasonable explanations to be had. Unfortunately, I knew people who used the omission as confirmation for their own biases. In their logic: "The countries that are in the games are the most important ones, which is why they're in the games at all. The civilizations not present in the games are therefore unimportant or uninteresting." This is obviously a terrible line of thinking and it made me question if I had made a horrible mistake in becoming so invested in the games... Thankfully greater minds prevailed! The Age of Empires II community ultimately made a point to add more DLC that would help give representation to historic nations from Africa, Southeast Asia, the Balkans, and countless other regions that received little attention within the American school system I grew up with. Countries and people that had been described as victims by teachers and books in my classes were now being depicted in their finest hours alongside all the others, as great nations and not dead and defeated cultures. Just like the "Babylions" I was so excited to see as a kid. The fact that an old game that can be played online on almost any computer, anywhere in the world, chooses to become even more inclusive over time is truly wonderful.

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Okay, first things first: This is the only upload I have done so far that required me to go and compress the MP3 file afterwards. It was in fact that large.

Secondly: This is a simple modification to the song Dancing Mad It includes the first three acts as well as the finale, but instead of each act looping twice as with the actual SNES original each plays once before transitioning into the next, which reduces the duration from the whopping 17 minutes down to a more manageable 9 minutes long. This wasn't just part of my failed attempt to keep the file size down, but to keep from having to scroll too far on the JummBox UI because it's less than stellar for very long things like that. Third: This is pretty bare-bones as a result of the attempts to compress and shrink the files, as with many of the VG musicians I admire I actually had to recycle and work with minimal resources for this due to the constraints this website puts on me. Perhaps in the future, if I revisit this song, I would split each act and the finale into separate projects and simply upload each as it's own MP3 file to be played one after another on one post. ANYWAY: Kefka's Laugh at end of song, title explained. Enjoy this little grief project where I learned my own limitations for working with the Beep/Jumm/UltraBox format to make MP3 files for uploading here. Perhaps I should have used UltrosBox instead?

[dyssebeiawashere]

Look, I love this song as it is... but it's so damn ambitious and the channels don't get enough love in the original for whatever reason (Possibly connected to how we didn't get a 6th stratum battle theme for III until the HD re-release came out a few years ago) This arrangement seeks to remedy many of the issues I had with the original track, add some new sounds and structure without altering too much, and make a theme that's probably satisfyingly fresh but also immediately recognizable (once you get past that intro segment). I'm definitely attempting Big %!@$ing Hero energy here. I also think it loops fairly well even though it's not perfectly 1:1 to the original. This is the battle music you'll hear fighting your very first enemy (possibly even a rotten durian fruit at that) and Koshiro made an absolute banger theme you'd expect from some finale to a big anime fight scene where everyone is showing off their awesome moves. It's just so good. I have no idea why he went so hard on this track but I am HERE for it and this is my attempt at trying to add some extra fluff to a track that's got an awe-inspiring frame with too few instrument channels to do it justice. Does this make it even funnier to imagine fighting a rotten durian fruit to? Maybe! I think that I did a pretty good job here. Perhaps I'm even a little smug about having finished this between so many interruptions in basically just half a day. I guess you could say that this version has been living in my head for a while now, too, so that explains some of it.

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This is literally the only Final Fantasy game I've ever played. I don't know if it's the aesthetics or the poetics of your brief visit to the capitol city of Vector, but there's a clear parallel to other fiction that I'd been engrossed in over the years that had me captivated by just how dark and horrific this depiction of industrialization was. Not to mention the aftermath of this arc had me witness possibly the most depressing fishing minigame of all time. I'm not sure why The Devil's Laboratory is so catchy to me. It's not the theme song of the primary antagonist. It's not a cool world-map exploration theme. It's not even really a cutscene song. It's just an area theme that stands out from the rest of the soundtrack in how it's built to be part of the scenery itself. Having those mechanical sounds built into the song as you travel by conveyor belt around sinister and arcane machinery really just sells the idea that you've truly entered an area so oppressively artificial that even the very atmosphere here is tainted by it. It's great! I knew if I was going to make an arrangement of this that the percussion and sound effects would be the primary element rather than secondary... ...I may have gotten a little carried away along the way, but I know I had fun working on this either way.

[dyssebeiawashere]

I couldn't not do this track as well considering I did the night variant. There is MORE bass now. Yuzo Koshiro's music can be pretty bass-forward at times. The more time I spent working on this in ultrabox the more I realized that it needed extra because what was already there was getting stale towards the end of the track. Town2 Theme1 sacrificed it's bass so that other songs in Eo3 could have more, thankfully I have the power of musical fanfiction to restore those huge basses to the masses... uh ...Basses to the Maces? Gladiator will like that, at least.

[dyssebeiawashere]

Initially planned to be one single game on the N64, Golden Sun would eventually be redeveloped into a GBA title. It was even shown at Space World! A familiar story to be sure. Golden Sun was ultimately split into two separate but complimentary games that could be linked together. The first game (Released in 2001) put players in the shoes of the protagonists, while the second continued the story but from the perspective of their rivals. Magic could be used both in combat and to solve puzzles outside of combat, and various different paths existed across the two titles to allow players some freedom of choice in how they would complete the story. It was a rather ambitious concept but it paid off and earned it a respectable position within the RPG's of it's era. Camelot Software Planning had previously developed the Shining Force series upon which they drew some inspiration for Golden Sun. They were also the developers of Mario Tennis. Yes, they unleashed Waluigi upon an unsuspecting world. As one might imagine the Mario Sports games were a much more reliable and frequent source of work and it's no surprise we didn't get a third Golden Sun title until 2010. This song was fun to work on. I'm always happy to put some new paint on an older game, particularly GBA titles as they often suffered from the sound chip on that system being a little fuzzy.

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Rare was one of those videogame titans once upon a time. A respectable company that played a major role in how things shaped up back in the 90's. But man oh man did they succumb to their own hubris with this one. Battletoads Arcade was a great arcade game. It was ambitious, it was cool, it was MIGHTY. But it was released after they had released a ton of battletoads games for home consoles and by that point arcade machines were on the decline and arcades themselves were not in the market to buy expensive new machines. I guess Rare assumed that the popularity of Battletoads at the time was going to be enough to convince people to go back to the arcades just to play this special release. Given what happened to Rare in the end, I can't laugh at an earnest attempt to make a solid game for the fans backfiring and killing the franchise because it was released for the wrong format rather than whatever happened with Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts. David Wise didn't slack off on this title, though I still think that if we really wanted to talk about his underappreciated tracks I would bring up how the GameBoy Advance re-release of Donkey Kong Country 3 has a completely new soundtrack from the SNES original courtesy of him going the extra mile to compose a whole new set of songs that would be the prelude to his work on the DKC reboot a few years later. Thank you, David Wise, for giving us your best even if we don't always get to play the games you compose for!

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As a Forward: A lot of this was done by ear. It's not perfectly 1:1 and Beepbox can only do so much in terms of certain SFX. Could it be better? Yes. But this is already a feat for me so I'm putting it out here now! Okay so, F-Zero GX was probably one of Nintendo's best racing games ever. Really though, it's hard to explain just how damn cool that game actually is. With a team like the one they had (Sega and Nintendo's best) is anyone actually surprised they managed to make an insanely fast-paced Death Race game with solid framerates, unique aesthetics, and an astoundingly cool soundtrack with dynamic music? The world of F-Zero also opened up considerably in GX. It has an animated story mode and character cutscenes for every racer. Have you ever wanted to hear someone sing a ballad about Captain Falcon? GX has that. Have you ever wondered if Captain Falcon has literally gone on a herculean quest to travel to the underworld and race the devil himself to claim the title of grand champion of both the realms of the living and dead? Find out in GX. Wanna see Captain Falcon rip his damn pants trying to save a baby from a speeding train? GX has got you. It Oozes charm in a setting I could only describe as Wacky Races meets Cowboy Beebop but with a costuming department that came right out of Power Rangers. While Daiki Kasho is pretty well known for making Gran Turismo music I feel like most people today recognize Hidenori Shoji from the Yakuza game series. Both of them totally cooked with this game, every single track and racer having their own themes really highlight how much the game wants you to have a favorite racer or track that you'll fight to get good at (The skill ceiling for this game is nuts, I won't blame anyone for giving up after harder difficulty settings obliterate them due to the insanely low tolerance for mistakes) It's just one hell of a neat game. I love it, and I hope that it's upcoming re-release helps people understand that there's more to Nintendo's legacy of racing games than Mario Kart.

[dyssebeiawashere]

Etrian Odyssey's Claret Hollows hold a special place in my heart. As in my heart warns me to never replay that stratum again.

I realized that on it's own the music for Claret Hollows is sort of unusual in that it does NOT follow Koshiro's general rule of thumb for other stratum themes and as such needed something a little extra to tie it all together. This song has a loopable variant, but I wanted to just have this particular MP3 end where it started: The beginning of an adventure. I hope all of you enjoy this one, as it took me almost all of today to get it tied together and it's definitely something I'm proud to get an opportunity to arrange all the pieces properly.

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First of all. Rest in Peace Geoff. I still can't believe we lost you this month last year. Secondly, can we talk about PLOK! for a moment? There are actually two sets of brothers behind this game. The Pickford Brothers, who made the game. The Follin Brothers, who made the music. And guess what? They both lived in the same apartment building at the time*. That always blew my mind. Anyway: PLOK! was one of the wildest games to come out for the SNES, It started as an arcade machine game dream project and then got stuck in development hell for almost ten years only to release on the SNES out of nowhere. Part of it's near mythical status stems from a legend that goes something like this: When the Pickford Brothers sent the final version of PLOK! to Nintendo HQ to be evaluated so they could get a green-light on distributing it Miyamoto and his sound engineers were allegedly convinced that the cartridge had been modified in some way because the opening screen music sounded like nothing they had ever heard from an SNES title up to that point. This sounds silly, but if you know how the Follin brothers operated, it's downright reasonable. The Follin brothers have a reputation for crazy good sounding music for old console games specifically because they would tinker with the hardware settings and find shortcuts and tricks to get even more out of them than was possible normally. Ironically, this meant that many of the games they made music for would have a better soundtrack than gameplay experience. This is often joked about by fans because of how startling it can be to have an absolute banger of a tune pumping out of your audio for the NES Pictionary game. It was eventually revealed in an interview the Follin Brothers were rarely told WHAT they were making music for, much less any sort of description of how or where the music would be used. This was apparently somewhat embarrassing to them and while they did take pride trying to make the best with what they had it's important to understand that neither of them were particularly happy working in the dark like that. Thankfully PLOK! is just an all around fantastic game, music or not. It's charming, surreal, goofy, and unique. If you can handle playing an older sidescrolling platformer that plays out like an arcade game (Minus the coins) then give it a whirl and enjoy the Pickford-Follin dream-team masterpiece! (PLOK! Totally should have been in Smash Bros, fight me) * I may be misremembering this, I had been listening to a few long interviews at some point last year and have not been able to double check on this so if I am wrong I won't be surprised.