ReMix:Street Fighter II: The World Warrior "The Path of Heaven" 4:11

Sometimes I forget how many different melodic hooks Ryu's theme has - it's really rather catchy & solidly-constructed, and one of the more elaborate SF2 compositions. Neblix (Nabeel Ansari) makes excellent use of that material with this hybrid EDM + orchestral ReMix off Apex 2016: I Got Next - album director & Ansari sibling DarkeSword writes:

"Nabeel and I played a lot of Street Fighter back in the day; mostly a lot of 3rd Strike on our Dreamcast. Street Fighter's evolved and changed a lot since then, but the core remains. The same can be said for Nabeel's music. Lots of strong ideas that have become more and more refined over the years. "The Path of Heaven" is just the latest in Nabeel's evolution as an artist; a fantastic tribute to the evolution of the FGC's most beloved franchise."

I'm gonna take a second to say something because I'm not 100% sure I've said it anywhere else, but even if I have it's worth repeating: it's really damn cool that Shariq & Nabeel Ansari have both made their mark on OCR, contributed so much, that they both have similarly impressive aptitudes for programming, arranging, and composing, etc.... they're different people, with different personalities, but it's awesome that so many of their talents & energies are shared. Nabeel writes:

"I've been doing the Street Fighter Apex remixes every single year. Street Fighter V came out this year and I really like it. I feel like they've really honed in on making the game as deep as it is accessible, with tons of mechanical improvements over the last games.

I saw a video that cut between across all of the Street Fighter games, splicing the same exact fight across the footage from different games (for example, Ryu would start his super in Street Fighter III footage and finish it in Street Fighter IV footage) to create a sort of unified montage that shows the growth of the game over the years.

I wanted to honor that growth this year and do more of a general Apex Street Fighter tribute. I chose Ryu's theme (I see him as the face of Street Fighter) and pulled from both his original theme and 3rd Strike theme. I also worked in my Apex motif from my last Apex remix ("Girl from Another World" at 1:29), which was a set of melodic string lines that I reorchestrated and developed further for this mix. Apex is under new management this year, and it continues to grow as well.

In parallel, this mix also shows how far I've come as a composer/arranger, pulling from different styles and really starting to hone in on a voice. So this tribute works in a lot of ways, the growth of Street Fighter, the growth of Apex, and the growth of myself. I hope it's as evident to everyone else as it is to me!"

Neblix's previous mixes have been pretty damn solid, so if I had to differentiate this piece from those in terms of growth, I'd focus on several things:

1. General employment of restraint - pulling things back more often, letting them simmer, etc.
2. A little more experimentation/variety; I dig the vocoded section, in particular.
3. MOAR STRINGS... effectively employed here, with more foreground presence, and a wise decision to end the mix with them more exposed.

At least, those were some of the highlights that stood out for me; this has the feeling of a tribute to Ryu across his many incarnations, as Nabeel describes, and does a wonderful job of taking the melodic ingredients the sources provide and playing them off one another - great stuff!