Ninja Gaiden "Ninjan graali" 4:20

Happy 4/20 Day! Time to blaze forth and cheekily celebrate with 4 suitably appropriate tracks, depending on your state of mind. :-D (If you're a stick in the mud, just call them quirky and leave the rest of us alone.) Second up, Eino Keskitalo's seemingly time sig-challenged fusion of Ninja Gaiden and Knight 'n' Grail will leave you feeling like you've been thrown for a loop! As Keskitalo's done in the past, he's not tripping, he just revisiting distant memories by picking up old tracks and glossing them up:

"Another oldie but goldie. This was my piece from KNGI Game Duels Vol. 1 EP, that I've touched up for the OCR submission. Which has now taken me from 2012 to 2025. I did take a 10-year break somewhere in there though. Thanks to Guifrog, Rozovian, the WIP VIP Hemophiliac, Dj Mokram, pixelseph, and the panel (and others!) for feedback during these years!

There is some story behind this track! KNGI Game Duels was an EP of mash-ups... I think it was the brainchild of Dj Mokram back in the day on the KNGI forums, after a few other album projects were hosted there. It had a cool theme of every arranger pitting two character types out of three against each other in a single arrangement. I picked a couple of games I had played recently. To represent ninja, I picked Ninja Gaiden Sigma on the PS3 that I played through with a friend around then. The aquaduct level music stuck in my mind as being pretty cool. It turned out to be quite challenging to transcribe and arrange, but today I think I did a pretty good job! To represent warrior, I picked a homebrew C64 game, Knight 'n' Grail... which by now is about 15 years old? I'd played it a bit and enjoyed the mood & music. The Ninja Gaiden source tune is from the original Xbox version. I think the Sigma version is a bit different, but maybe I couldn't find a reference source for it, so I went with the original.

Having gone through the gauntlet of varying feedback, this somewhat strange arrangement is now pretty different when it comes to the mixing, and a bit different when it comes to structure towards the end. So, this is definitely an alternate take to the EP version by now! It was especially interesting to really tone down the bass after the panel feedback. Hopefully, this is decent enough to pass now, so that this particular ghost can stop haunting me..."

A ghost, eh? Either Eino was caught in the throes of a bad trip or he's listening too much to "Somebody's Watching Me", but I digress. :-) This one actually split the panel, with even new twin judges Pixels & Paradiddles even falling on opposite sides. (I KNEW I liked Josh and hated Seph!) I was worried the NOs had gotten a contact high, but thankfully a slim majority were on board for this strong piece of business. Speaking of business, even though newly-minted judge jnWake himself was also confused with Eino's time sig trickery, he still had the wherewithal to make the right call:

"You surely picked a challenging source with that Ninja Gaiden theme... After listening to the other 2 sources I have honestly no idea what to expect from this!

K, so we begin with the arpeggio from the Ghost Castle source, I like the patches used here. There's a brief tease of Ghost Castle melody before some percussion elements enter... Here things get tricky since you shifted the arpeggio somewhat unexpectedly to 7/8 (or /4? Whatever). Soon after, the melody from the other Knight 'n' Grail joins and I'm surprised that it actually fits well! A similar vibe continues until 1:16 where we finally get a clear presence of the Ninja Gaiden track. [...] I like that you somehow kept the Ghost Castle arpeggio as background despite the change in chords. Focus returns to Ghost Castle around the 2 minute mark until there's silence and a neat transition at 2:40, which continues the Ghost Castle melody actually. [...] Eventually, the title melody returns and eventually the song ends. [...]

On the arrangement side this is pretty cool, you do a great job mixing the sources, especially the 2 from Knight 'n' Grail. Ninja Gaiden is much less present but I'm not really surprised since that source is extremely odd. I also like that you changed the time signature for your own personal touch, something like that quickly makes the cover "your own take". Structure of the arrangement also flows well, slowly adding more regular percussive elements and using recurring themes in a smart way. [...] Overall, this is a pretty cool track!"

With such a hardline j00jsplit, even OCR poobah DarkeSword weighed in on the side of the angels:

"I really like the texture of this entire track. [...] It's transformative, and the contrast of industrial sounding percussion with a dreamier, synthy-er sound on top is nice."

There's a significant amout of things going on within a narrower dynamic curve, mostly from the textural changes. Nothing about the rhythms and time signatures was throwing me off either, as the busyness of this ultimately feels grounded. I'd recommend looping this more and familiarizing oneself with the flow; it's a solid, trippy mood piece!