8GR8 #04: Seiken Densetsu 3 (Supersized Edition!)

Time for another installment of 8GR8, the feature that takes eight awesome pieces of video game music that tie around a certain theme and put them together in list form. This time, we're looking exclusively at one game: Seiken Densetsu 3, the excellent sequel to Secret of Mana that never got released (officially, anyway) outside Japan.

Normally, in 8GR8, we look at a wide array of different games. But sometimes, it's fun and also timely to narrow the focus. Not only are we examining a single game today, but we're also looking at more songs from it—twelve, to be exact, rather than the usual eight. The game on the docket is Seiken Densetsu 3, an adventure in all ways superior not only to its predecessor, Secret of Mana, but to many (if not all) of the games in the series that came after it as well. Seiken Densetsu 3 claims the honor of being my favorite JRPG of all time, and the 20th anniversary of its release falls on September 30, and so there's no better time to take a look at its excellent soundtrack, composed entirely, like Secret of Mana, by Hiroki Kikuta.


1. "Little Sweet Café"

Kicking off with one of the town themes, probably the most relaxed one. There's a moment in games of this scope where you realize you're inhabiting a quaint little pocket of peace before some universe-bending stuff goes down, and it's tempting to want to stay in that pocket. And technically, you can—I mean, it's not like there's ever a time limit in these games, despite the pressing issues at hand. Sometimes, it even prevents me from finishing games. You could probably pipe this into a Starbucks and no one would bat an eyelash. Actually, how about you go save the universe? I'll just sit here nursing this venti caramel frappuccino.


2. "Nuclear Fusion"

I'll admit that Seiken Densetsu 3's oddball sound design is an acquired taste. The drums resemble nothing so much as a Street Fighter punch connecting with an opponent's jaw, and intense melee combat often sounds like jelly monsters having a slapfight. But if you can get past the former, you'll find it gives a huge adrenaline boost to many of the soundtrack's drum-heavy songs. This is one track I think benefits greatly from it, and it contains a callback to "Meridian Dance" from Secret of Mana to boot.


3. "Splash Hop"

Following the "bigger is better" credo, Seiken Densetsu 3 features not one travel buddy animal, but two. Flammie the white dragon shows up later in the game, but before he arrives, you get Booskaboo, a turtle in a snorkel summoned at certain shores by the Pihyara Flute. Booskaboo is a laid-back kind of guy, and his theme, a loping reggae tune, reflects that well. Back in the 90s, you couldn't swing a cat by the tail without hitting a VGM track with steel drums in it, but I love the bouncy breakdown featuring them here, as well as the effusive followup phrase that ends the loop. Few tracks in the game are as whistle-able as this one.


4. "Harvest November"

"Sultry" isn't generally a word that comes to mind when considering desert themes, except when playing this (and possibly a Shantae game). The heat of Navarre isn't of the oppressive variety. As deserts go, it's actually a pretty relaxing, pleasant, and fertile place. (The game saves its scary licks for the Valley of Flames, nestled deep within the desert.)


5. "Different Road"

The theme that plays while traveling the Path to the Heavens, a series of winding caves and rock bridges that culminates in both the meeting of Flammie and a view that by Super Nintendo standards is absolutely breathtaking. I like that Kikuta managed to bake such a sense of urgency into an otherwise steady-tempo'd track; it comes early in the adventure, but there are still things to be done, a world to save, and no time to waste.


6. "High Tension Wire"

Seiken Densetsu 3 has a number of different boss themes, many of which correspond to a certain type of boss or circumstance. "High Tension Wire", my favorite song on the entire soundtrack, plays during bosses that fly, like the harpy-esque Tzenker and one of the god-beasts[1], Dangaard, a two-headed griffin, whom your party fights while aboard a soaring Flammie. It's not enough to just post the song; this one has to be witnessed in the proper context. The first time I entered that battle, it literally took my breath away for a few seconds.


7. "Faith Total Machine"

Another boss theme, this one playing during bosses that are ghosts, like Gorva on the ghost ship and god-beast Lightgazer. This one was a grower for me, as I originally preferred the Dolan-battle-exclusive "Black Soup", but over time the arrhythmic drums of the intro to "Faith Total Machine" plus its overall tempo have given this one the edge over it.


8. "Three of Darkside"

Most of Seiken Densetsu 3's soundtrack either gets your adrenaline pumping or massages your brain, but Kikuta can unleash the creep factor when he needs to as well. I love it in RPGs when characters enter the void, and the party in this game does so in spectacular fashion, getting sucked into the nether to fight with the eighth and final god-beast, Zable-Fahr—a frightening jester-demon of two heads (later three)—after your ragtag group finds the fabled Mana Stone of Darkness just prior to its destruction. This is a song that makes you feel really hopeless—like no matter how leveled-up you are, the thing you're up against is just too big, and you're not getting out of the Phantom Zone alive.


9. "Angel's Fear"

If you listen to this one for even just past the intro, you'll recognize it as the intro theme to Secret of Mana, and if you know the names of songs that appear in video games, you might have even guessed that before you heard note one. This is a much more melancholy arrangement, however, plucked out on only a piano and an acoustic guitar, both samples sounding totally amazing on that Super Famicom sound chip.


10. "The Sacrifice, Part III"

The final final boss theme of the game, which comes roaring in after the most perfect pregnant pause where you're not sure if you killed it or it's entering its final phase. (Spoiler: it's the latter.) The major key ensures that you flex your muscles and give that boss—whether it's the Dragon Emperor, the Masked Mage, or the Dark Lich[2]—all you've got, while the minor bridge reminds you how far you've come and reins you in, making sure you give the battle the gravity it deserves. If this song doesn't make you fall in love with those wacky punch-noise drums once and for all, nothing will.


11. "Farewell Song"

Songs like this are why I hate beating long games that allow me to get invested in the fates of the characters. The first time I beat this game, I legitimately got misty the first time I beat the game and the Mana Goddess reveals that Mana will be disappearing from the world, but exhorts the heroes to "remember me ... [and] make sure your children remember..." because Mana magic will return to the world in a thousand years. Some of my not playing many RPGs is because I don't have the time to invest in them or I didn't get into them at the height of their popularity, but if I'm being totally truthful, a substantial chunk of it is I don't like saying goodbye to them.


12. "Return to Forever"

Despite the title of the track, this is unfortunately not Chick Corea and his band of jazz fusion masters sitting in for the final track. Nevertheless, it still makes for an excellent end to an incredible quest. Watching Booskaboo and Flammie travel the world thinking, "Well, what are we gonna do now? I guess just hide out for a thousand years" ties up a loose end I didn't know I wanted tied. What I like about the video for this song is that it allows ample playtime for the loop that "ends" the song. Almost half the video's runtime is devoted to that loop, and nothing says "it's over, man, turn it off, go do something else" like four minutes of that. Though I could sit and listen to it for much longer.

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[1] Or "benevodons", if you prefer the official nomenclature.

[2] The game gives you a different final boss and penultimate dungeon depending on which of the six playable characters you choose as your main one.

8GR8 #03: I Am Woman, Hear Me Score

Welcome back to 8GR8, where we take eight video game songs that have something in common and we group them into a playlist. Despite the steps we've taken in our society to put women on equal footing with men, it's still very much a man's world. And few areas in the private sector are more inhospitable to women than the video game industry. GamerGate and its constituents have really made life grossly and unnecessarily difficult for the lady folk. So today, we're celebrating video game music composed by women.


1. Mario & Luigi Dream Team, "Victory in the Dream World"
Composer: Yoko Shimomura
Platform/Year: 3DS, 2013

Can't hardly have a list devoted to compositions by women without including the First Lady of VGM, now can we? Shimomura's golden touch has given us a lot of incredible soundtracks—Street Fighter II, Legend of Mana, and the Japan-only RPG Live-a-Live, to name just a few—but I thought I'd go with one of her more recent works for this one. Nintendo loosens up and gets delightfully weird when they put their flagship characters in RPGS, and I've personally always found the Mario & Luigi flavor more appealing than the Paper variety. I have to say I was a bit surprised by this game's difficulty; its bosses really start to show some fangs as one approaches the midgame. And there's a hard mode on top of that! The dream world parts of the game allow the soundtrack to get a little more wobbly, but this track blends a suspenseful edge with a spirited battle-readiness to great effect.


2. SimCity 2000, "Subway Song"
Composer: Sue Kasper
Platforms/Year: PC/Mac/Amiga, 1994

This game has come out on more platforms than you can count on both hands, but because I mostly played it in grade-school computer labs that were stocked with Macintosh Classics and PowerPCs, I've always largely considered SimCity 2000 to be kind of a Mac "thing". I think the track I used above approximates pretty closely how it sounded on a Mac of the time, but I can't say with much certainty. The sleekness and modernity of SimCity 2000's structures definitely adds to that Mac feeling; I would be lying if I said I still don't daydream from time to time about living in an arcology.


3. Snailiad: A Snaily Game, "Area 2 (Spiralis Silere)"
Composer: Crystal Jacobs
Platform/Year: Browser, 2011

Even though snails move at a glacial pace, this one probably managed to crawl across your radar without leaving any slime trails. It's a cute, enjoyable game, a compact Metroidvania that doesn't take very long to beat and fully explore. As Snaily, a snaily snail, you set out to figure out where all your townmates have disappeared off to. You get to crawl up walls and eat plants and fire projectiles and basically have a pleasant time. It's not going to set your world on fire like, say, Axiom Verge, but you'll have fun. You can play it here.


4. Donkey Kong Land III, "Mill Fever"
Composer: Eveline Fischer[1]
Platform/Year: Game Boy, 1997

In their day, the Donkey Kong Country games were widely considered astounding graphical achievements, but the aesthetic didn't translate so well to the Game Boy, where they mostly just looked like the toner cartridge exploded while they were making Xerox copies of the Super Nintendo graphics. Both versions of this song heavily tease "Can't Buy Me Love"[2], but on the SNES, the melody is muted somewhat by the jungle echo of the xylophone it's played on, whereas on the Game Boy, the piano sound leads the way with gusto, with a strong square-wave bass backing underneath, making it the more enjoyable variant.


5. Breath of Fire III, "Even the Sun's Happy"
Composers: Yoshino Aoki, Akari Kaida
Platform/Year: PlayStation, 1998

Two ladies for the price of one song! This track plays during a fishing minigame, but it sounds like the kind of thing you'd hear in a super-cartoony 40s-style Toontown type of place. Everything bouncing up and down to the beat, even the buildings, and you look up and there's Mr. Sun, smiling down at you, giving you two scoops of Raisin Bran! Yeah! Fiber! All right! It's a rare thing when this song won't lift my mood at least a little bit. That toe-tappin' honkin' horn that barges in after the breakdown is the epitome of a smile in music form. Wipe away that frown! Even the sun is happy!


6. Legendary Wings, "Stage 3"
Composers: Tamayo Kawamoto, Manami Matsumae
Platform/Year: NES, 1988

Another track with four X chromosomes behind it. The former is an erstwhile member of Taito house band Zuntata, and the latter is probably best known as the composer for the very first Mega Man game and, more recently, contributor to a few tracks on the Shovel Knight soundtrack. If you're a fan of that proto-Man sound (see what I did there?), you'll get it in spades here. Both the NES port of Legendary Wings and Mega Man 2 came out in 1988, but the sound of Legendary Wings hews more closely to the military-industrial vibe of the series originator's soundtrack.


7. Ys III: Wanderers from Ys, "Frozen in Time"
Composer: Mieko Ishikawa
Platform/Year: PC-Engine, 1991

Ishikawa was one of the more renowned members of the legendary Falcom Sound Team, second only to Yuzo Koshiro. I've unfortunately never gotten around to playing an Ys game, but the music I've heard from them has been uniformly excellent. There were several versions of this soundtrack, but you know what a sucker for CD-ROM and Redbook audio I am; this one far and away takes the cake. I especially enjoy the way more and more staccato keyboard stabs are gradually added to the main riff in the second "verse".


8. Plants vs. Zombies, "Graze the Roof"
Composer: Laura Shigihara
Platforms/Year: Various, 2009

Laura Shigihara has ascended to fame as an indie darling of sorts on the strength of a handful of Minecraft-related compositions and tracks like "Everything's Alright" and "Jump". These are good, but "VGM with lyrics" isn't a flavor country I'm terribly fond of visiting. In my estimation, this is her highest-profile work to date—this game was flippin' everywhere for a while on every console and platform imaginable, and even had a Game of the Year edition. The song starts off stellar, but it's when the DJ scratches and fat bass start in that the song kicks into another gear altogether.

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[1] Fischer was her surname at the time she composed this soundtrack; she is now Eveline Novakovic.

[2] "I don't care too much for Kiddy / Kiddy was the lamest Kong"

8GR8 #02: Training Day

In 8GR8, we examine eight excellent pieces of video game music that are loosely connected by a theme of some sort. In this installment, we look at music from train levels.


1. Clockwork Knight, "Train Boogie"
Composer: Hirofumi Murasaki
Platform/Year: Saturn, 1995

Why don't we start with a ripper right out of the gate? Clockwork Knight was one of the first platformers with enough 3D to be called 3D, a side-scroller that used sprites rendered from 3D models in a manner similar to the Donkey Kong Country games, but with fully polygonal levels and bosses. Even though the harmonica driving this piece is pure cheeseball MIDI, it'll get your heart racing regardless. As a bonus, it moves significantly faster and with greater urgency than the actual level it appears in, making it ideal for standalone listening.


2. Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, "The Cattanooga Iron Horse"
Composer: Matt Benardo
Platform/Year: SNES, 1993

The first Bubsy game is one I will defend to my grave. (The others can get bent.) It received fairly positive reviews in its day, but its legacy was so badly tarnished by the legendary awfulness of Bubsy 3D that as a result critics these days tend to throw out the Bubsy with the bathwater. Despite the one-hit death mechanic and the headaches caused by its parallax scrolling, the first game encouraged exploration, provided plenty of extra lives in the early levels if you knew where to look, and had a vivid color palette with excellent animation. Bubsy also regularly takes it on the chin because he talked a lot, and most of that talking consisted of either puns or hack comedy. I think puns can be wonderfully illustrative of the flexibility of the English language, but apparently they're considered a "low" form of humor by lots of people. Well, those people can suck eggs.

This piece plays in the first half of each of the game's desert levels, which took place, naturally, on a train before seguing to a canyon full of far more perilous platforming. It's a short loop, but one with a great spirit of adventure.


3. Wild Guns, "Armored Train"
Composers: Hiroyuki Iwatsuki, Haruo Ohashi
Platform/Year: SNES, 1995

I don't know too much about this game. It was developed and published by Natsume, it's set in the Wild West but there are robots and giant mechs, and the cartridge is really rare and usually goes for around $200 on eBay (even more if it's complete in the box). I just kind of like the way this song pulses along, like being on the inside of the train and feeling all the bumps in the track along the way. For something so low-key, it's pretty awesome, especially when the warbling oOoOoOo synth starts in.


4. Sonic Triple Trouble, "Sunset Park Zone, Act 3"
Composer: Yayoi Wachi
Platform/Year: Game Gear, 1994

The Game Gear was never a great portable, but Sega occasionally threw it some decent exclusive bones. The title is a reference to its three antagonists: the usual Dr. Robotnik, Knuckles the Echidna (still in his crayon-breaking nuisance phase), and treasure hunter Nack the Weasel. Somehow, the intensity of this level is enhanced by the fact that its name doesn't appear at the beginning of it; the beginning of Act 3 is the end-of-level sign from Act 2, and it's straight into autoscrolling train action with dive-bombing foes before the usual showdown with Dr. Robotnik.


5. Railroad Tycoon 3, "No Time to Lose"
Composer: Jim Callahan
Platform/Year: PC, 2003

I've never played any Tycoon game, much less any of the Railroad Tycoons. Neither business management nor real-time strategy is my gaming forte. But that doesn't matter to the mostly indiscriminate VGM thrill-seeker in me. More sumptuous harmonica action here, this time much more realistic-sounding, hitting that sweet spot just beyond "really good" and just short of the soulless mega-talent of a John Popper type.


6. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, "Disco Train"
Composer: David Wise
Platform/Year: SNES, 1995

The DKC2 soundtrack is one of those that is uniformly excellent from front to back, but this is a piece from it that tends to slip through the cracks. It's driven by a bass line that has the wompiness of dubstep years before that was even a thing, and it packs frightening (and well-sampled!) screams and pensive, glittering moments in equal measure. It's probably my favorite song on the soundtrack, to be honest, handily beating out the likes of "Stickerbush Symphony" and haunting tracks like "Forest Interlude".


7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, "Metro Train ~ Karai's Theme"
Composers: Kazuhiko Uehara, Hideto Inoue, Harumi Ueko
Platform/Year: SNES, 1993

In retrospect, it's kind of amazing how many fighting games featured original casts of characters during the fighting game boom of the 90s—though, considering how not-great TMNT: Tournament Fighters was, maybe it was best that most developers didn't latch onto preexisting properties. At the time, Karai was an obscure enough character that many thought she had been created for the game, though she had appeared in the Mirage comics prior. Currently, she plays a prominent role in the Nickelodeon cartoon as the Shredder's adopted daughter. Karai was the final boss of both the SNES and Genesis ports, and had a reputation for extreme difficulty that persists today.


8. Batman Returns, "Red Triangle Circus"
Composers: Paul Gadbois, Brian Howarth
Platform/Year: Genesis, 1992

Batman Returns was one of the few games I owned during the brief period of my childhood where I owned a Genesis. I never got far enough to hear this song, because Batman Returns was spine-shatteringly hard, but thankfully, the Internet allows us to behold wonders we were never able to reach as children. Both the SNES and Genesis versions were brawlers, but the SNES version was more of a traditional beat-em-up, while the Genesis one was more of a standard platformer that happened to include punching. I prefer the Genesis one, however, since it used in-game action with no dialogue for its cutscenes more effectively than the SNES used its ugly compressed static images with walls of slow-scrolling text, and its music was much more appropriately Gothic and creepy.


Excluded for being too obvious: Final Fantasy VI, "Phantom Train"; Secret of Mana, "Did You See the Ocean?" (plays in the Grand Palace on the buried yet still operational train car overrun by zombies—Subway: Eat Flesh!); anything from Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time, "Bury My Shell at Wounded Knee"

The Pixelated Jukebox: Street Fighter EX3, "Strange Sunset (Guile's Theme)"

So goes the meme: Guile's theme goes with everything. But does it go with ..... Guile's other theme?

The Street Fighter EX games are primarily notable for not being made by Capcom. They were published by Capcom, but developed by Arika, nowadays probably better known for their 3D rereleases of classic NES titles on the 3DS eShop, as well as being the engineers of torture behind the Tetris: The Grand Master series.

To date, Street Fighter EX and its sequels remain the most significant deviation from popular Street Fighter norms. Although the fighters still fought on a 2D plane, Street Fighter EX marked the first time Street Fighter had ever been rendered in three dimensions. Arika introduced loads of new original characters that were never seen outside the EX games, and gave returning characters new musical themes that sounded nothing like the iconic tracks laid down by Yoko Shimomura and Isao Abe for the arcade and SNES versions of Street Fighter II. In some cases, the results were pretty mindblowing—for example, Dhalsim's theme. Prog metal with sitar? Sign me up yesterday!

Then there's ..... this. Don't take the ellipsis as hesitation to endorse it; it's a great song. I can't rightly say, however, that the type of music that comes to mind when I picture an all-American military hero with, in the immortal words of Grandpa Simpson, a haircut you can set your watch to is synth-driven smooth jazz following by some of the most brain-massaging lounge piano you've ever heard.

It takes about a minute to get hype, not to mention turn in a pretty thumpin' bass line, but all of it is great (especially the guitar solo at the end). Even if it all adds up to something that doesn't feel very "Guile" as we know it, it's an interesting track, and definitely not the sort of deep left-field direction a game in such an established series would take today; video games today blur the lines between past and present so much that the choice to use the iconic SFII theme in any Guile-related adventure would be a nearly inevitable one.

I've heard the "regular" Guile theme a billion times, so I tend more toward this one these days. It's a great listen for when you're feeling more at-ease than attention.

6 Overdone Video Game Songs

To date, Cheese and Pixels has been far more Cheese than Pixel, albeit even then not that much of the former. I personally don't think I'm obligated to keep myself bound to one or two narrow lanes of interest, but really it's more because the only video game I've played in earnest of late is Rogue Legacy, and I haven't been able to collect my thoughts on that game in a cohesive fashion beyond "I liek dis", and so I've been filling C&P with other things as they come to me. I do mildly regret that I'll be kicking off my thoughts on the wide world of video games with a pile of hot takes that will earn me zero friends and fewer page views, but I doubt I'll lose sleep over it.

I fancy myself a connoisseur of video game music, insofar as I listen to it even when I'm not playing games and I listen to songs from games I've never even played before. So I've been listening to it for a good long while. And there are some songs that keep cropping up, that you can't get away from no matter what you do. They're good, oftentimes even great, but they're very surface picks, and people just never seem to get tired of them. Maybe I'm just human, but I sometimes get tired of things I hear over and over, and I also sometimes have an urge to say something about it. I don't hate any of these songs (not that that will stop anyone from thinking I do), but I definitely wouldn't be opposed to retiring them, or at least shelving them for a decade or so.

1. Super Mario Bros. — World 1-1

If you're my age (30) or so, there's a good chance this was the first video game song you ever heard. It's as catchy as classics come. If you're my dad, however, it's also the only video game song you've ever heard.

My dad hates video game music. There were very few games he ever deigned to play in the first place, and when playing those he did, he turned the sound off. Those six notes, however, remain stuck in his craw. Until the day I moved out, there was no occasion in which my dad walked in the room while I was playing a video game that did not result in him going "doo doo doot doo-doot doot!". Video games were the Pavlov's bell that made those six notes come from his mouth. It did not matter what I was playing. It always happened. One time I wasn't even playing a video game. I was watching Law & Order.

Because I hate being a curmudgeon for too extended a period of time, I'll try when possible to counter my awful hot takes with a version of the song under the guillotine that I enjoy listening to. In this case, you get two! Both from OCRemix (longtime slogan: "Where Production Values Matter More Than Having Fun").

The first is "Dirty Mix", which samples "Ring of Fire" and is responsible for why I sometimes repeatedly say "noodles" in a terrible Brooklyn accent for what appears to be no reason:

And second is "The Life and Death of the Mario Brothers", which makes me wish I wasn't too old to use the word "molly" without being laughed at by kids who haven't eaten enough:

2. Super Mario Bros. — World 1-2

You know a game has reached legendary status when it has two songs you're tired of hearing. This one has an extra layer of annoying because no one ever sings it correctly. They always sing the doo-doos on the downbeat and stress the first doo in the couplet, when you're supposed to space them out a little more and stress the second doo. It's difficult to demonstrate in writing, but accept that I'm right and we'll move on.

There is an absolutely fantastic version of this song called "Plumber's Cave" that was supposed to be in Wario Land: Shake It! for the Wii, but didn't make the final cut. I recall reading that the song was omitted because the developers didn't feel like it fit the style of the rest of the game. Evidently the style of the game wasn't COMPLETELY BADASS, because this song gives you your 100 percent daily recommended allowance of it. I mean, listen to that jazz flute! LISTEN TO IT!

3. The Legend of Zelda — Overworld Theme

How many times can they make an orchestral version of this song and not expect me to fall asleep within the first five seconds? Straight-up orchestral music is the most boring VGM. I can listen to classical music any time I want. I'm showing my age and era bias pretty flagrantly here, but I don't care and I don't really want to have an argument about what "real" video game music is.

No fancy remixes for this one, more of a simple re-arrangement: the version that appears in Link's Awakening. The fourth Zelda adventure is for me a heavy sentimental favorite, because it was the first Zelda game I owned and really had a chance to dig into, but I like the mystical yet more heroic turn that it takes in the second half of its loop.

4. DuckTales — The Moon

People are always going on about how great this song is. Once again, I can't dispute that it is an excellent piece of music, and its massive popularity is proof that licensed video games, considered terrible so often that there's a word for games that add to that mountain of failure, are capable of adding meaningfully to the mythos of a property. But it's not the best song in the DuckTales NES game. It's not even second. Most days, I would place it third, and depending on how I'm feeling about the Transylvania theme on a given day, I might even slip it in at fourth. 

This is borne out in the fact that the Moon theme isn't anywhere near the best part of the DuckTales Remastered soundtrack either. As spotless a reputation as it has, you would think it would have gotten the most love and attention. Not so much, as it turns out. It barely gets an update at all—virtually no changes to the melody with only a short almost ambient jam that goes nowhere. I'm not asking for an OCRemix-level reinterpretation, but that's seriously weak. Compare the Amazon theme, which you can tell by its interpretation has captured so much more of Jake Kaufman's heart. Listen to how happy those bass and flutey synths to be in there. I'll even take dubstep Transylvania over the limp-noodle Moon remaster.

5. Mega Man 2 — Dr. Wily's Castle, Stage 1

This one, I actually get the fuss about. Mega Man 2 was such a huge improvement over the first one that at least some of its component elements, if not the whole game itself, were bound to become emblematic of the series. In fact, it probably represents the biggest-ever improvement from one installment of a video game series to the next outside of Super Mario Bros. 2 [Japan][1] to 3. But people just refuse to let go of this one. There are so many other tracks from other games in this venerable series that I'm inclined to reach for first, and as for this game, I'm more of a funk lord, so the Crash Man theme is my jam.[2] Mega Man is such a wide-ranging series with so many great pieces of music that it seems a shame to keep slobbing this one song's knob over and over again. It all reminds me of the time I was eating at this wing joint and they were playing Nickelback and Finger Eleven and other similar bands over the speakers, and when the song ended, it turned out they were on satellite radio. Like, why pay all that money for Sirius/XM when you're just going to tune the dial to the same stuff you've heard a million times everywhere else? Are you feeling me here?

6. Final Fantasy VII — One-Winged Angel

Maybe I should cut this one some slack. There are now so many Final Fantasy entries of such wavering quality that it's important to separate the wheat from the chaff. I think only trolls and the truly hateful would argue that VII should be in the latter category. But given the choice between this track and "Dancing Mad", are you seriously telling me you're not going to take "Dancing Mad" every single time? "Dancing Mad" is one of the easiest 18-minute songs to listen to, with its operatic prog-rock sweep and gradually increasing intensity, whereas I can barely stand one minute of Latin chanting in "One-Winged Angel" and that seven minutes feels like an eternity. It's that combined with the fact that Sephiroth seems like a bit of a ninny compared to Kefka. Also, this game used to be everywhere all the time, even well into the PS2 era. Final Fantasy VI never got to be everywhere all the time. Maybe I have a complex about this. Or perhaps I've just been listening to too much Axe of the Blood God.

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[1] We're all aware of the fluke that is Super Mario Bros. 2/USA, and the prospect of of yet again rehashing the most basic facts of its genesis is exhausting. Suffice it to say that since it's so much its own thing, I don't consider Super Mario Bros. 3 a natural outgrowth of its mechanics and style, and I really doubt anyone else does either.

[2] Until just now, I thought this song was lost to the mists of time, but if you go to vgmixarchive.com and listen to "crashman jam working title", you'll get a six-minute slice of fried funky gold, and it even has that oh-so-90s "pssh come on!" sample in it. Was pretty sure it used to be called "Crash Beat Boombox", but I'll take it in any form I can get it.