Suikoden II "The Madness of Luca Blight" 4:06

Y'all ready for some marble madness...no wait, wrong game! Though you may lose your marbles over this one, as it is utter madness. Mel Decision brings us a dark drum and bass track of Suikoden II focused on playing with time and a lot of time signature changes. Mel writes:

"Some time last year, Ronald Poe was noodling on a remix of "The Chase", and that conversation made me think about how fun (read: ridiculous) it would be to mash up that song, which plays during the Luca Blight group boss battle fights, with "Mad Luca", which plays during your 1:1 duel with Luca Blight, one of the main villains of Suikoden II. Luca Blight is the prince who slaughters a brigade of his own child soldiers, blaming it on a neighboring kingdom as an excuse to break a peace treaty. He only gets worse from there, personally slaughtering innocents by the hundreds and laughing about it. I wanted to arrange something that showcases his evil.

Musically, I was inspired by artists like Sub Focus and Camo & Krooked. "The Chase" is a banger and felt like it lended itself to drum & bass, but "Mad Luca" is just absolute musical insanity. (Appropriately, given the character.) MIDI of "The Chase" existed, but as far as I could tell, nobody had attempted to transcribe "Mad Luca" before. I was in luck, however; I suggested it on 8BMT's Patreon and he included it in a video on Odd Time Signatures, which meant he also made the transcription available to subscribers. (I'd recommend watching the video, it's a really good breakdown of the source.)

The cacophony of time signature changes made the idea of trying to do a really integrated mashup complicated, so I opted to use "Mad Luca" for the break, trying to show Luca Blight's descent into madness through the arrangement. Then, I circled back to the B section of "The Chase" to bring it all home. It's not an entirely traditional arrangement because the break is more of a mental breakdown, but I think it provides the necessary whiplash to express just how bananas Luca Blight is.

As always, thanks to the great community in #workshop on Discord for their reviews and critiques."

Judge jnWake, who is no stranger to using a lot of time signatures in their work, said:

"On arrangement I think this is great. The first minute is a nice build-up to lead into the "Mad Luca" section. [...] I think the chaos of it, the constant changing of synths and never having a constant beat is a really cool effect. The transition back to "The Chase" is also great so that helps...

...Overall, I really like this! Arrangement is fun, production is great. Source treatment is generally conservative but the genre switch is transformative enough for this to fit OCR IMO."

Judge Chimpazilla, who is no stranger to drum and bass and other electronic genres, added to jnWake's thoughts:

"I like this tons right out of the gate! [...] What's here is cool but on the tame side. Lots of creativity here though! I really like how you've meshed the two themes together. I agree with jnWake here, I love the chaos of the arrangement, that took some skill to put together with Mad Luca in the middle but it feels really cohesive with the two source songs together, nice work on this arrangement."

Success from chaos! All of the judges were in agreement that the arrangement was excellent and highly creative. I have to say, book-ending the wild time changes and drum parts that "Madness" has with more "regular" dnb in the beginning and end worked very well to create a very interesting contrast. If you're unfamiliar with the Suikoden 2 sources here, I would encourage you to check them out. You'll get so much out of it if you compare the two side-by-side with Mel's sweet, high-energy D&B! This is rad and unique. Enjoy the madness!