OCR03959 - Metroid Prime 2, Zelda: OoT, MP3 & Zelda 1 "Enantiodromia"

[Liontamer]

What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix.

[Souperion]

This deserves an extensive applause. Not merely because I have a deep-seated Metroid bias, but because the scope of this achievement: to cohesively weave together an evocative and rich piece from so many sources, to pay homage to two great game serious, to blend the many instrumental elements, all to produce a stunning work that is long enough for a listener to sink their teeth in. I congratulate The Respawn Collective, and hope to see more products like this in the OCR library. Thank you for this song!

[Phonetic Hero]

I love this track, especially the Metroid Prime noise sfx in the opening - you guys nailed the vibe.
Re-inspired to work on my MP patch bank for Serum.  Excellent stuff.

Edited August 23, 2019 by Phonetic Hero

[LamanKnight]

So, now I'm glad I clicked the link from the YouTube video and read all of this. Wow. I feel like I've just experienced a thrilling story. No joke, it gives me that same satisfied feeling of playing a video game with an emotionally touching narrative. And as someone who is infamous in certain circles for leaving long, sometimes overwrought comments on things, I have to say, I approve of the depth to the explanation of this remix.

Oh yeah. Here's what I started saying when I watched this on YouTube:

"There came a point where I knew I recognized the tunes, but couldn't remember why. And then I recognized, 'Wait, that's Zelda music!' But that's an excellent way to incorporate Zelda into Metroid. It fits so nicely, and sounds great with that instrumentation. You know, I should just finish making this comment on the OC ReMix website. I'll do that in a bit."

Now, for the rest of it:

The connection between Dark Link and Dark Samus is ingenious; both the characters themselves and their respective music are so thematically similar, this just makes sense. For a remix about two antagonists whose names literally contain the word "Dark," this remix sure is brilliant.

(Darn it; I was doing so well at avoiding puns. Ah, well.)

[gravitygauntlet]

The only real glaring bit of this to me is that the guitar segment at 4:16 doesn't sound like it was interpreted too much (I know for sure that the Dark Samus remix in BadAss III - Twisted Rebirth - uses the Dark Samus MIDI off VGMusic because the guitar solo is lifted verbatim, and it sounds like this track uses the same one) but it's at least easier to get lost in it with the backmasked kicks and piano and everything going on in addition to it. Everything sounds fantastic otherwise, and the production was clearly given a lot of attention as far as achieving a Metroid Prime-esque "low fidelity" feel to some of the instrumentation while still clearly feeling intentional and without sacrificing sound quality.

[Apollyon]

Let me begin by saying the three of us are delighted to see this made it onto the site and have collectively laughed our collective arses off at the idea of writing a deeply analytical submission email for six minutes of flatulence. I believe NuPharazon in particular suggested we could still submit such a ReMix under the title "You Asked for It", although I'm not sure I'm willing to put in the amount of effort it would take to craft a lengthy piece of music from tuned flatulence.

Souperion: We're quite pleased you like the ReMix, and pleasantly surprised by the positive reception it has received in general. You're pretty much the target audience here, as we put it together primarily with Metroid (especially Prime) fans in mind, although I also believe Twilight Princess in particular indicates that the tastes of Zelda fans are more diverse than many people (and Nintendo in particular) estimate.

PhoneticHero: I'm relieved that you (and presumably others) can pick up on the noise elements in the final export; we did a lot of production contortionism to try to keep them perceptible but subtle. The final export was over a year ago and my memory's a bit hazy, but I believe I ultimately put more time into sound design and post-production than composition/arrangement elements, because that's just appropriate to Yamamoto's work in particular. I'd be thrilled to see a Prime-themed patch for Serum, or indeed any plugin I can affordably get my hands on; as much work went into this, I'm not entirely satisfied with certain of the elements we created (particularly and especially those damned alarms), and there are parts in which I would rather have had something more authentic and directly derivative.

LamanKnight: I'll admit I didn't expect djpretzel to include the entire (excessively comprehensive) submission email, but as we included it mostly to provide context for fellow intellectuals (who comprise the majority of the OCR community, from what I've observed), it's certainly gratifying to know that people are getting something out of it. Also, I love linguistics in general, half of Nu's planned ReMixes began life as clever wordplay, and Yargami eats, sleeps, and respirates puns. You're in good (or possibly deranged) company. ;)

gravitygauntlet: We actually don't use preexisting MIDIs; while I'm sure there is plenty of talent in MIDI sequencing, I'd rather trust my own ear and interpretation over that of someone whose music background I can't know. That being said, you're spot-on about the guitar solo being as close to the original as humanly possible - I basically plopped the Echoes sound file into a track, cut out some of the frequencies I didn't think contributed much to the solo itself, sequenced a guitar part over it with Ministry of Rock 2, and then mangled it a bunch in post-production. As Yamamoto writes a fair amount of industrial noise music, we collectively decided to treat the atonal elements from the original as carefully-selected compositional elements, particularly the guitar solo he reused (albeit almost inaudibly) in Corruption, and thus we were much more cautious about altering them than we were with the much more easily recognizable melodic elements. I do share your (and several of the judges') misgivings about that part of the song, though; it actually took the three of us quite a few iterations to reach a consensus on how it should be implemented, with Yargami suspecting I had put too much focus on the gated pads, mangled string section, and atonal choral work (the latter of which is regrettably quite inaudible in the final product as anything more than, well, excessive sound compression) and NuPharazon being concerned that our early exports excessively buried the guitar solo (her favorite element) amidst the rest of the very flooded soundscape. That being said, we're glad you can appreciate the rather nonsensical production methodology we ended up with, which was also a subject into which we put a lot of thought; industrial music is all about raw, visceral, in-your-face crunchiness, space music is about saturating the soundscape as much as humanly possible, and thus combining the two basically means accelerating two mutually exclusive philosophies at each other and hoping something interesting happens when they collide. I suspect that works better for CERN than it does for us.