Really in the throughs of detailing now, it's quite the bizarre design so I've not had to detail anything like it before, outside of a visible spine from a skeleton I drew for dnd
I really don't know what it is, but I woke up earlier this week with Black Parade (MMX Remix) specifically stuck in my head. I guess that's a disadvantage to running this blog - in writing, I tend to listen to the rip in question on repeat to get a good feel of the tone I want to go for, and in the process get tunes stuck in my head (Raft Ride, for instance, has still not left my innermost thoughts ever since The Incident.) But althesame, getting a Mega Man X arrangement rip stuck in my head got me fervently looking for more like it - because really, I think it was just my brain's way of telling me that it misses listening to Mega Man X music. It was through this that I wound up stumbling onto something big, a rip I'd entirely forgotten about and one that's STILL lacking a ripper credit even five years later - Guardian of the Ride Chasers, with no attachment to its origin or its ripper, fucking OWNS.
Mega Man X2 has a pretty different sound to the original Mega Man X in a way that's controversial in a lot of ways, yet the ripper has leveraged those differences to absolutely incredible lengths here. You can TELL that the guitar samples used are different, in some's eyes "whinier" - yet they lend themselves to the dramatic flair of the arranged track ever so well. So then...what is that arranged track? Funny enough, it's a source of music I was only made aware of through a SiIvaGunner project later in the same season - Guardian of the Former Sea, or the theme of the Desert Scourge boss, from the Terraria Calamity Mod. The game is as far away from my area of knowledge as you could come - I've hardly ever even touched the BASEGAME Terraria - but its legendary composer, DM DOKURO, was a name I got very familiar with entirely thanks to SiIvaGunner. Remember the King for Another Day Tournament? Yeah - amidst many other guest arrangers, DM DOKURO lent his incredible skills to a bevvy of arrangements for the event, including one I've covered on here before - September!
And like, that was how I was initially introduced to the Terraria Calamity mod as a whole! I've talked numerous times about how following SiIvaGunner has given me exposure to so many things I wouldn't have checked out otherwise, be it with Aphex Twin Snakes, Plantasia 2, Owner of a Mahjong Board or countless more, but its an entirely new level of cool to discover a composer through their guest contributions on the channel. As I mentioned before, Guardian of the Ride Chasers was already bound to work for me as someone hopelessly attached to the specific sound of the SNES Mega Man X games, but the rip only works as WELL as it does due to DM DOKURO's incredible work with the original track. I love how Mega Man X2's more varied sound in particular compared to the former and latter game resulted in the track being adapted pretty differently, in particular using the particular plink-plonk sounds from Bubble Crab's theme for a lot of the track to give the rip some really nice texture. It can be easy for a banger melody to be lost amidst samey instrumentation, a lot of lower-quality "but in the (blank) soundfont" have shown me just how bad it can really get - but the ripper went above and beyond in making the entire track sound absolutely brilliant in the conversion here.
All in all, Guardian of the Ride Chasers was a two-for-one kind of rip - both being an incredibly cool rip to listen to in its own right, and helping spread DM DOKURO's exceptional work outside of his target audience. Hopefully in making this post, you as the readers will now ALSO be reminded to go check out the other music from the Terraria Calamity Mod, or the other stuff by DM DOKURO in general - this rip is truly only scratching the surface.
More art of my girlfriend Cal. I love her so much. This is just my personal head cannon design for her. I screwed up the lighting, but this is from like June last year, so idc.
Just finished my umpteenth re-playthru of a handful of Mods I Really Enjoy, & I think I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I think that these ones are My Most Favoritest to play together & I highly recommend them to folks playing on tmodloader 1.3 to try them out sometime if y'all haven't yet already-!