Puyo Puyo "So Good!" 3:16

TheMan's a one-man show this time, overflowing with pleasure, adrenaline, delight (read: messy, manic energy) in TheManPF's sugared-up spin on Puyo Puyo!

"This is an EDM arrangement of "Brave" and "Final" from the Sega Mega Drive version of the original Puyo Puyo. This arrangement was originally released through Dwelling of Duels in April 2024, in a competition where it came 11th place out of 28 total tracks.

This is more of a recent one. Dwelling of Duels was doing their Sega Genesis/Mega Drive month and I was in the mood for doing something very high energy, poppy, and happy, mainly because I was listening to Babymetal. After looking through several soundtracks (I never played a Genesis game, surprise surprise), I found the soundtrack of the original Puyo Puyo for the Mega Drive, and, boy, does it fit exactly what I wanted to make.

This ended up being quite EDM-ish, trance-ish, Eurobeat-ish-ish? I don't know, I'm not familiar with electronic music subgenres, but I was mostly chasing the sound of Babymetal's "Iine!" (which literally translates to "So good!" in Japanese), so, naturally, I also add a lot of electric guitars, and tried to have a pulsing sidechained beat with the rhythm guitars for a great groovy effect. I can't sing kawaii vocals though, so instead I settled on something more akin to Eiffel 65, live but heavily processed, to add more to the electric feeling.

For this, I constantly change between different sections of both "Brave" and "Final", purposefully ordered in a way that makes sense as a pop structure. I wrote original lyrics for it that would hopefully present the same cheesy feelgood-y vibe that "Iine!" has, and I also played the original guitar solo from "Final" note for note (and, yes, it took a lot of work to learn). This is also a solo project, and while it placed 11th in DoD, I was pretty happy with it.

Resubmitted with several small tweaks including more varied drums, harder-hitting kick and snare, vocals more front and center and less grating, small edits to the glitch effects, and overall volume balancing."

Man, oh man, quite the inspirations there, both potentially very annoying in a silly, earwormy way! :-D You can absolutely hear how the style of the initial verses of "Iine" are reflected in here, as noted by judge Emunator when he reviewed the initial submission:

"Yeah, super strong vibe from the rip. There's a ton of energy present here, I feel the Babymetal influence even though this is definitely more synth heavy. [...] The lead guitar ramps up the energy significantly when it's present, and those moments are definitely a highlight for me."

Yo, he's not kidding, the guitar from 1:26-1:39 underneath the lyrics was my personal highlight, it sounds so good! (I promise I wasn't TRYING to play off the ReMix title... but I will now!) This one's so zesty, it also had judge prophetik music party till the morning:

"from an arrangement perspective, this is a super fun take on the original two tracks. they're both very high-energy and this keeps that, and there's some neat dovetailing in how they fit together - i'd never have known that they weren't the same song without the original youtubes to listen to. [...]

this is a significant improvement over the last version. the vocals fit into the mix way better than before in terms of EQing. they're still super fast and hard to understand, but the song itself is fun enough that i found myself looking past that at all the fun stuff going on in the background."

It's evident in tons of music -- and TheManPF already proved this with his OCR debut -- that when it comes to lyrics, it's much more about the vibe and the delivery than how discernable the words are. There were some critiques of the prosody, but this is literally supposed to have a kind of robotic, locked-in timing that contrasts with the instrumental's sense of speed. In other words, nah bruh, I feel over the moon, this vocal delivery is so good! I also love the synth runs underneath the lyrics that really push that frantic feel, and the guitar and SFX add nice grit & color respectively. I fully agreed with proph too that you wouldn't have realized it was a pair of sources at all without checking it, the combination of the themes flowed so good! Let go your cares away faster than you can say [Puyo Puyo SFX], and use quick reflexes and rapid movements to snag this one from TheManPF. :-D He may not be a Japanese idol, yet the sight, the taste, the touch, the smell is overflowing with kawaii!