Here’s a post which I didn’t write ahead of time and now have to prepare while SGDQ 2024 is going on, love that for me. It’s time once again for me to pick out five tracks I’ve already written one sentence about before here and show how much I love them by writing an additional sentence about them. Often longer than the first one!
Two of the tracks I’ve selected here are very dark ambient, so I considered going all-in on that and alienating everyone with normal ears for my own amusement, but I really, really need to post a track from Side Order that still four months later makes me completely explode every time I listen to it, so we’ll settle for a half-ambient theme this time 
FINAL FANTASY VII REBIRTH – “Village of the Gi”
Composed by Mitsuto Suzuki & Nozomi Toki
Arranged by Mitsuto Suzuki
A haunted piece for a haunted place, with percussive sounds and deep bent echoes leading to decayed audio artifacts in the second half
Palworld – “Brutal Strike”
Composed by Tatsuya Yano
This soundtrack is the most consistently unleashed prog nonsense that Yano has delivered since he left Gust a few years ago, which is great for me because that’s my favorite side of his music. This has the kind of propulsive orchestral rhythm I like with some fun piano and mallet percussion mixed in.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (Switch) – “Fahr Outpost (Outskirts)” (unofficial title)
Composition Lead: Yoshito Sekigawa
Composition: Kazuki Komai, Fumihiro Isobe
Originally composed by Yoshito Sekigawa, Yuka Tsujiyoko, and/or Saki Kasuga
One of the very few tracks from the remake which I like more than the original, the wetter sound design of the original track has a little more idiosyncratic character but I love the spooky outer space sound with crunchy effects in this too. The tipping point for me is that new pad chord at 0:32.
Splatoon 3: Expansion Pass – Side Order – “je2ting”
Sound by Toshiyuki Sudo, Shu Tamura, Toru Minegishi, Ryo Nagamatsu, Tomohiro Imura, Shiho Fujii, Kota Okumura, Yumi Takahashi, Kairi Hamada, Isami Yoshida, Asuka Hayazaki, Masato Ohashi, and Yuki Ito
My favorite sequence of room themes in the game goes from Mario desert theme in the first version to Contra/Eirik Suhrke-style FM prog in the third version, with this theme unhingedly splitting the difference and disjointedly doing both at the same time. The rhythmic writing reminds me quite a bit of my favorite track from the Splatoon 2 DLC, “#4 dunno.” Absolutely incomprehensible piece of music.
Surmount – “Celestial Summit (Zone 4)”
Composed by Ryan Yoshikami
We climb a mountain in the first half before pondering the view underneath the night sky in the second. Love the thing it does a few times where the phrase length gets subtly extended from 6 beats to 9, 10, and 11
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