ReMix:Final Fantasy VIII "Witch Hunter" 5:07

José the Bronx Rican is an amazingly talented video editor and it means a great deal when he susses through our albums to help construct his exciting trailers. Gario's energizing EDM upgrade of "The Man with the Machine Gun" has the José stamp of approval as the very first thing you hear to get the senses primed in his Final Fantasy VIII: SeeDs of Pandora trailer, and the track's intro was an immediate highlight for judge DarkSim:

"Interesting vocal treatment for the intro - the high vocoder and autotune sound quite sinister with the string drone behind them, then the flute lifts us out of that uneasiness, and leads into the pumping bass with accompanying sine arp."

Real recognizes real, with respect shown from one judge to another, but Gario actually had his original arrangement *rejected* by the Js more than a decade ago. As noted in his comments, Gario took advantage of his skill bump since then to resurrect it for the FF8 album and successfully get it past his now-colleagues on our pesky judges panel:

"Always enjoyed this source, so, when the opportunity came up to arrange this one for the FF8 album years back (before even the excellent Darkflamewolf took control of the project), I jumped at the chance to give this another shot. While it's remade from the ground up, there is a lot of material from that old arrangement that I used to pull the track together (which folk can still listen to here, if they're curious).

As one of my favorite tracks of Final Fantasy 8, I've had the idea of blending the "Succession of Witches" themes and vocals to Laguna's battle theme for a while. Having learned how to use Vocaloids for a separate reason recently, it granted me the opportunity to actually incorporate the lyrics of that song (with vocals done with the program Alter/Ego). It led to a really slick arrangement that builds into a story of Laguna discovering and hunting witches, because the thought of Laguna huntin' witches is obviously cool. Honestly, the blend of themes turned out better than I thought it would and got something pretty dang cool finished for the FF8 album; here's hoping the audience agrees that Laguna is a good fit as a hunter of witches and sorceresses. Hope folk enjoy it!"

Though I never played the game, Beatdrop's version of "The Man with the Machine Gun" was what put the theme on my radar as just a VGM fan way back when. It's a PS1-era classic for the entire FF franchise, and one of the themes fans made a bee line towards when listening to SeeDs of Pandora. With all the urgency of the source tune retained and then some, along with the combination with "Succession of Witches" and the more liberal tweaks to the lead & countermelody throughout 2:22-3:47, Gario's got a strong contender for the abum's coolest theme treatment coupled with the best fanfic origin story!