I have the faintest memory of this for some reason, though I can’t recall ever actually playing a game
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owned 
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I’m playing Harmony of Dissonance, my first Igavania since SotN, which frankly I thought was over-rated (but still good). This game has been keeping me entertained quite well despite awful music and an awkward overworld (so many dead ends) but hasn’t been anything amazing BUT two moments made me laugh out loud. First, the following scene which feels so ludicrous:
And then the punchline waiting for you at the top of this “elevator”:
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The music in HoD kicks ass though…
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Give Sykel time. I thought Harmony’s music was bad too, for years.
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The original Klonoa is an ok game, but it’s honestly shocking how dark it gets at the end. A clown murders your grandfather in cold blood and Huepo reveals to Klonoa that their friendship was built upon a lie, all his memories are fake and he used Klonoa for a specific purpose only to be discarded once he beats the final boss.
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HoD soundtrack rules.
Some good chords up in there for sure
The crunchy instruments don’t entirely help but I’m not sure I like arrangements as clean as:
There’s got to be a middle ground, right? The instruments are really straining against a limitation, it seems like, rather than embracing limitations. The drums in particular sound “only okay”
I think this would have sounded better on the Famicom VRC6 chip thingy
Oh wait I just googled it and here’s a version of that:
Well, at least in this arrangement, I was wrong, the original is better.
Here’s another one:
Original is still better. I think the only problem I have is that the drums somehow sound cheap rather than a good forceful sound. But it really shows how much this soundtrack was composed around the available resources. In other words, in the course of writing this post, I’ve changed my mind. Oops.
Yeah, there’s an acclimatization where you interpret the characteristic GBA fuzz as bad until you realize it adds aggression to the song and it’s good again.
Unfortunately not many GBA games work like this (or DS, for that matter, which has only-slightly-less-fuzzy sound output).
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Speaking of harmony of dissonance, the halfway point where you realize that you’ve been switching between two castles the whole game really blew my mind at the time. I still think of it as a better reveal than even SotN’s upside-down castle reveal.
I’ve spoilered that for Sykel. Everyone else should read it
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Basically they could’ve and should’ve just dropped the drums
God does this sound awful (and it’s inevitably Fuentes’ stuff that people link to when they want to ‘prove’ that the problem with Harmony’s soundtrack is the ‘synths’). You can’t just straight convert these compositions to MIDI and have it work. Gonna relink these VRC6 arrangements: Entrance / Clock Tower / Chapel / Castle Treasury
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I wish I never said anything
But you prompted a discussion about the [good and cool] music in Harmony of Dissonance!
Yeah that was a good discussion
sitting down with your girlfriend to watch to kill a mockingbird in full in The Darkness.
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Obviously the video doesn’t exactly show the first part, but at one point during this tutorial mission you keep spinning right. A console pops up and the team send a patch to your mech. It was a pretty cool moment, as is breaking out of the place when things go wrong. Rest of the game is pretty average but fun enough.
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The guy who does the suffering did in an interview a long time ago where he talked about the reason he did videogames - and made the suffering in particular was because videogames + horror are a double whammy of things you can use to talk about issues you couldn’t do in a more popular and mainstream type of media.
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I loved the Suffering, do you have a link to that interview?