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There had been some recent rumblings in the GaMetal community that we were lacking mainline Mario songs…. so to help with this matter, I held a mainline-Mario themed GaMetal Discord Request Battle to determine what exactly the most requested mainline Mario song is and get it done.

In the end, it came down to Super Mario Galaxy’s Buoy Base Galaxy and Super Mario Odyssey’s Break Free (Lead the Way), with Buoy Base taking the victory with 59% of the vote.

For this arrangement, I also merged in parts based on the “In Water” version of Buoy Base, to complete a full on Buoy Base In Your Face remix.

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We’re back in the realm of Shovel Knight to take on one of the series’ most requested songs: High Above the Land!

This one also features the alternate Propeller Knight stage arrangement, A Cargo of Fineries, from the Specter of Torment campaign. The Cargo arrangement isn’t too different from the original, with the major differences being some changes to the rhythm section, and a small new section later on in the song.

For shovelry!

 

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With every new Mario game that comes out, we’re reminded of the wickedness that is the almighty King Bowser and his villainous ways. But do you remember one of his wildest schemes?

It was to melt Antarctica with hairdryers, thereby flooding Earth. Which means that Bowser was trying to end the very world we live in.

Thus, we’re officially dubbing this maniacal incarnation of the Koopa King: Apocalypse Bowser.

This arrangement features both the NES and SNES versions of the final battle theme from Mario is Missing! (and of course the MS-DOS version, which uses the SNES song). On top of that, I’ve thrown in several references to other Bowser-related songs. Can you find them all? I’d tell you what all of them are…. but it’s more fun this way!

Oh and if you don’t believe me on that whole story… go play the game. Or you could look up the story too, that might be easier. 😜

 

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BATEN KAITOS REMASTERS COMING LETS GO!!

If you’re a fan of Motoi Sakuraba soundtracks, the Baten Kaitos series holds some of his best work, so I highly suggest you check it out if you’re not familiar with it. Think of Golden Sun with guitars.

This song was already banger so I didn’t really change a whole lot around here. I extended the guitar solo section a little bit, as it felt just a little bit too short in the original.

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(End card acoustic short coming soon!)

 

 

 

Hey, it’s that awesome SNK RPG that was on the NES… Crystalis!

This is one of my personal favorite NES titles. If you’re a fan of classic top-down Zelda like games and haven’t played Crystalis, it’s on Nintendo Switch Online’s NES catalog… so go play it! It’s one of the best NES games around.

On top of being a ton of fun, the game has a wonderfully composed soundtrack. Wild Fields (which I’m pretty sure is a fan name, but it’s known well enough that we’re gonna roll with it) is the main overworld theme. But this arrangement is a little bit more than just a Wild Fields remix. I’ve thrown in a few nods to some other Crystalis tracks as well. The most obvious one being the Cave 3 theme for the guitar solo section, but there’s a quick amalgamation of 3 others I used for the intro: Semia’s Theme, the Title Theme and the Main Menu Theme.

Go play it, I’m serious. 😶

 

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Get ready to ROCK with this GaMetal remix of Rock Star from Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards! Because you’re all Rock Stars!

And because apparently I don’t do enough Kirby stage themes, according to some folks (the Waddle Dees on my desk).

This is one of those Kirby stage songs that I always forget is really good. Actually, the whole Kirby 64 OST is really good. Well… the whole Kirby discography. But I digress.

I’ve also gone the extra mile and included the Rock Star Select (Map) theme in the middle of this arrangement.

Enjoy, Rock Stars!

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It’s time to Double Megamerge!

You know I’m always up for showing some underappreciated spinoff love here and there. I’ve done a couple of ZX/ZXA songs in the past (Misty Rain and Trap Phantasm), but those are both pretty old at this point, so I’m bringing us back to the ZX series with this arrangement of Determined Eyes from ZX Advent.

This may just be a cutscene song, but it’s a badass one. I had planned to use a little bit of gameplay footage in case I ran out of cutscene footage (shoutout to SolarZero for getting both), but lucky for us, Aile’s cutscene lasts a whole 2 hours longer than Vent’s 5 second transformation scene.

Only kidding of course. Aile’s cutscene is supposed to pay homage to the ‘magical girl transformation’ style, while Vent’s is Kamen Rider style.

This arrangement is mostly based on the ZXA Tunes arrangement, which adds some new guitar solo work. This version fades during the last new lead guitar bit though, so to make things a bit different, I extended the song beyond that section.

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A GaMetal tribute to the Nintendo GameCube. Get into it!

All songs featured in this medley:

• 00:00 GameCube Startup
• 00:05 Opening (Super Smash Bros. Melee)
• 00:52 Hyrule Field (The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess)
• 01:22 The Great Sea (The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker)
• 01:48 Delfino Plaza (Super Mario Sunshine)
• 02:15 X-Naut Fortress (Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door)
• 02:50 Divas (R: Racing Evolution)
• 03:20 Streets (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2003)
• 04:00 Multiplayer Theme (Metroid Prime 2: Echoes)
• 04:40 Professor E. Gadd’s Lab (Luigi’s Mansion)
• 05:06 Aparoid Queen 1 (Star Fox Assault)
• 05:48 Bowser’s Castle (Mario Superstar Baseball)
• 06:27 Creature Montage (Pikmin)
• 07:02 Checker Knights (Kirby Air Ride)
• 07:44 Won’t Stop, Just Go! …for Green Forest (Sonic Adventure 2 Battle)
• 08:28 Blazing Internet (Mega Man Network Transmission)
• 09:04 Captain Falcon Theme (F-Zero GX)
• 09:39 Fatalize (Tales of Symphonia)
• 10:25 World 8 – Clock Tower (Super Monkey Ball 2)
• 10:59 Baby Park (Mario Kart: Double Dash!!)

As with all of our console medleys over the last several years, this medley was assembled by GaMetal Patrons (hey you should become one https://www.patreon.com/jonnyatma ), who submitted almost every song that appears here. We then drew several random songs and I hand selected a few from the list that were from key games I wanted to be sure to include.

So this was technically supposed to be our second console medley last year, but as the end of the year got closer, I decided to do some other songs instead (like Team Star Boss) so I didn’t feel like I had to crunch at the end of the year as I’ve been doing in recent years. Medleys use up a lot of creative energy!

I’m really happy with how this medley came out. I put a little extra emphasis on having songs transition as smoothly as possible (only using hard transitions in a few spots). Opening (SSBM) was one of the drawn songs, and being from arguably the #1 GameCube title, it was a shoe-in for the opening spot.

No Zelda songs were drawn, so I was deciding between including either Twilight Princess or Wind Waker… I couldn’t make up my mind, so I just did both!

My personal oddball selection for this medley was definitely Captain Falcon’s Theme. No F-Zero GX song was drawn, and I wanted to include one. There’s a few that could’ve been included, but I thought this one would be most memorable.

Stacking with my playfulness of the Captain Falcon pick was my pick for the medley closer. Baby Park, with it’s constant escalation in tempo and franticness, fit the bill better than any other. I’ve always wanted to do this song in some way, and it made for the perfect GCN Medley closer, imo.

There’s always a game or series that might have missed the cut in these medleys (I can only do so many songs in a medley project before I go insane!), but I feel we’ve touched MOST of the important bases here. Besides, there could always be another medley in the future.

Enjoy this tribute to the Nintendo GameCube!

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Happy Valentines Day!

Every year I make an arrangement specifically chosen by my lovely wife Sharice. This is yet another song she’s selected from the Sonic 2 soundtrack, this time we’re hitting up the Special Stage theme!

As a classic Sonic fanatic I knew this song very well, and it’s always been one of my favorite special stage themes. It’s a bit on the shorter side, so I tried to give it a little extra length with a small new section mid-song, and a key change towards the end.

Also, we gave Tails some redemption in the gameplay footage here: instead of constantly hitting bombs, this time he avoids them!

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Hey! Do you like guitar solos? What about synth solos? Well, do I have the song for you! But one question:

Are you the boss?

Or are you just a +1?

If you’re a fan of Treasure games, you’re most likely familiar with Silhouette Mirage, the side scroller with an interesting mechanic where you use different types of attacks (Silhouette or Mirage) based on which direction Shyna (the protag) is facing.

And as with Treasure games, its accompanied by a really great soundtrack. This is the games boss song, and it’s chock full of zany whammy-filled guitar leads and synth leads. I also noticed while working on this: in the original, the synth lead is panned to the right, and the guitar lead is panned to the left. Not sure if that was supposed to be a way to acknowledge the Silhouette/Mirage attack mechanic of the game, but if it wasn’t, it’s definitely a cool coincidence.

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In a world full of rival themes, team themes, and champion themes… it’s nice to have something a little bit different for a change. Enter PWT Final Round! from Pokémon Black 2 and White 2!

I wasn’t really familiar with this song till recently, and my initial thought was that it was really cool and I was surprised I never heard it before. It grew on me even more as I worked on and finished this arrangement.

Honestly, it’s pretty typical Pokémon battle theme fare, but that doesn’t take away from it’s feelings of intensity and determination.

Plus, it seems the Pokémon community has determined Gen 5 was actually one of the best (if not THE best) Pokémon generations, right? 😜

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For the second year in a row, I bring to you another song for the Chill GaMetal playlist: Light of Nibel from Ori and the Blind Forest!

(Last year it was Cave from Willow.)

I don’t really have a whole lot of notes for this one, I just did my best to pick out and play what I heard going on in the original. The vocals heard in this arrangement are from the Vandria and Ethera libraries.

I did something a little different with the video: I ended this song with an acoustic bit, so I used it as the end card acoustic as well. Just thought it’d be a cool thing to do!

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This one was intended to be the 2023 premiere, but when Two Planets Approach the Roche Limit needed some more time in oven… it had to be this way.

This song has been creeping up the GaMetal Song Ballots from the past couple of years. In 2021, it placed at #25 overall, and helped bring the Metal Gear series as a whole up to the #7 most requested new-to-GaMetal series position. In 2022, it grew ever stronger, placing at #8 overall (song), and Metal Gear as a whole placing at #2 most requested new-to-GaMetal series (we haven’t gotten to #1 yet… maybe later this year!).

Most years, I put together a shortlist of songs to choose from for the end of year finales and beginning of year premieres. This wasn’t the first song I put on the shortlist (in fact it was probably the 4th or 5th), but when I was choosing what to do after Roche Limit, I knew I had to go with something extremely hype, and It Has To Be This Way fit the bill more than any other.

Even though it was probably the most difficult song to put together last year, I was really happy with how The Stains of Time turned out, so I was looking forward to putting this one together. It’s arguably one of if not the most popular song from MGR:R (thanks to, you know… the meme, lol), and is actually a far ‘easier’ (I say that very lightly as it still took a ton of work) song than TSoT. I didn’t add too much, just repeated the chorus section and sent the second chorus straight back into the ‘bloodstained sands’ section, but with the lyrics changed to ‘it has to be this way’.

Plus, I was able to provide you with this, and that’s always fun:

 

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Enter 2023! This song was intended to be the 2022 finale, but it ended up being much more complicated than I had anticipated (seems to be a thing with these Kirby final boss themes lately). Even though Two Planets Approach the Roche Limit is a lot shorter than Suite: The Star Conquering Traveler (Void Termina), it was a lot more tedious to cover/arrange because it hardly ever does the same thing twice, unlike Void which has that one melody it plays with in different ways throughout most of the song(s).

On the night of Dec. 30th, I was listening to my first draft and felt like it needed a lot more work to sound the way I wanted, so I decided to go ahead and move it to the 2023 premiere spot instead. Live & Learn had been doing pretty well, so I think the decision was for the best.

After sending news of the official delay, I took my time with it a lot more and came out with a far better product than what I had at first! This one is just about as prog metal as it gets, again, it rarely does the same thing twice.

My very early plans didn’t include A Full-Speed Farewell from the New World, but it felt sort of empty to end Roche the way that it originally ends, even if I had added an original outro, I felt like AFSF would’ve been a far, far better way to end the track. So that’s exactly what we did!

To bridge the gap between the two tracks, I used the first part of The Fate of Two Worlds (which is the same as Chaos Elfilis Intro, but the the TFoTW version adds a small loop of additional music afterwards), which plays in the cutscene between the phases/songs in the game.

Kirby and the Forgotten Land was a huge performer in the 2022 GaMetal Ballot (4 forgotten land songs placed in the top 10!), and although I was a tiny bit late to the party (as is my style 😜), I wanted to make sure you all got your fill of KatFL music as soon as I could get to it. We’ll get back to the forgotten land in the future for sure, but for now it’s a full-speed farewell and on to other games/songs!

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2022 is almost over… we’ve lived… we’ve learned… and now we’re hangin’ on the edge of tomorrow for today’s GaMetal arrangement: the highly requested Live & Learn from Sonic Adventure 2!

Coincidentally, Sonic tied with Mario for the #3 most requested series spot from the 2022 GaMetal Song Ballot. Requests were scattered among several songs, but the most popular request was everyone’s favorite Sonic jam, Live & Learn.

For this arrangement, I took a lot of inspiration from the recent Sonic Symphony version, which added… you guessed it, symphonic elements (Strings, Brass, etc). There are also a few small changes from that version that I’ve incorporated.

It seems a lot of people think I’ve done this song before but… I never have! I was still living and learning, apparently. I think this might be our first official GaMetal Mandela Effect.

I know some of you have requested this one for YEARS, so this one’s for those of you that continued to hold on to what if!

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Winter has officially arrived… so it’s time for another GaMetal wintertime special! This year, we’re visiting Kirby and the Forgotten Land’s “Northeast Frost Street”.

I saw a lot of folks talking about this song on the GaMetal Discord, so I gave it a listen and put it on my (very) short list of Christmas/Winter special contenders for the year. After much consideration, I decided to go with it.

This one has a bit of a different feel from the last two winter specials (Cool, Cool Mountain and Frosty Village / Walrus Cove), while those two are a lot more cheery and upbeat, this one is far more laid back, and as some have called it, ‘cozy’ sounding.

There aren’t even any sleigh bells! A winter special first.

I hope everyone celebrating is having / have had an amazing holiday season so far. Cheers!

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It’s not every day I do songs from games that JUST came out, but I felt like since it’s the season of giving and all… eh, why not?

Since the release of Scarlet/Violet, I’ve seen a lot of requests for the Team Star battle themes. All three of them… the normal, boss, and leader. So I decided to go with my favorite of the three: the boss theme. It’s this sort of fun mix of Pokémon, Xenoblade, and Splatoon wrapped into one song.

This song does have some sort of vocal track, but it sounds like indistinguishable bowser vocals random gibberish, so I just tried my best to sound similar.

I’m certain a song or two from these games will pop up around the top of next year’s GaMetal Song Ballot, but we at least got one of them out of the way!

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Over the years, there’s a question I always get whenever I do Q&As: are fan game songs up for GaMetal consideration? My answer to that question has always been: if a song were requested enough, sure.

Enter CutmanMike’s FPS Mega Man fan game Mega Man 8-bit Deathmatch and it’s amazing tracks “Thy World Consumed” and “For Everlasting Peace”, the two songs that make up the final boss fight. This one ended up #3 most requested on the 2022 Song Ballot, tying with Kirby and the Forgotten Land’s “Sword of the Surviving Guardian”, which says a ton.

There’s been a lot of Mega Man this year, and I feel like this is a great way to cap off 2022’s Mega Man GaMetal content.

PS: Get Mega Man 8-bit Deathmatch for free over here at the official site!

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We’re wreaking havoc in the sky with today’s remix from one of the greatest new VGM soundtracks of all time, here’s Panic in the Sky! from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge!

Getting to record the guitars for most of Tee Lopes’s TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge soundtrack is easily one of the highlights of my VGM career to date, and it was made even more special when he asked if I could do the vocals for a song. It was made EVEN MORE special when it was the song used in the official release trailer!

Panic in the Sky! was supposed to have that classic “fun rock song from 90s shows” feel to it, and I believe it encapsulates that perfectly.

You can consider this arrangement sort of an ‘extended’ version, with a repeat of the chorus section and a new guitar solo section at the end. Fun fact: the first part of the ‘new’ solo was part of an alternate unused solo I recorded for the original!

Sharing some early TMNT #ShreddersRevenge guitar stuff with ya! (with @TeeLopes‘ permission of course 😅)

When I track guitars for others, I sometimes record 2 different guitar solos and let them choose between them. These are the 2 original solos I laid for “Panic in the Sky!” pic.twitter.com/Ul1FHX0IEy

— Jonny Atma (@JonnyAtma) June 27, 2022

There are quite a few songs from this soundtrack I’d love to arrange, but this one has been the most popularly requested from folks since the game’s release (including Tee himself, who brought this song up first when I was discussing remixes with him). If you haven’t played this game yet…. do it! It’s an absolute blast, especially with friends, and the soundtrack is extraordinary!

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You didn’t think I’d FORGOTTEN about Kirby, did you?? Here’s the #3 most requested song from the 2022 GaMetal Song Ballot: Sword of the Surviving Guardian, the Meta Knight battle theme from Kirby and the Forgotten Land!

I couldn’t go the whole year without doing a KatFL song, could I? Of course not! Kirby music came back in full force this year with Forgotten Land’s release, Kirby’s first 3D adventure, with a soundtrack chock full of bangers.

For starters, we have this whole new Meta Knight theme! It’s an extremely clever mixture of three iconic Kirby Super Star songs commonly associated with Meta Knight: Vs. Meta Knight, Taking Over the Halberd, and My Friend and the Setting Sun.

There’s probably another reference or two snuck in there that I didn’t quite catch, but it’s all there. It’s also really nice to have a Meta Knight battle theme that doesn’t sound so much like Ridley’s Theme from Super Metroid.

This song already had a ton going on, but I did bring back some of that original Vs. Meta Knight for the solo section, I thought it’d make for a cool addition. But then it got compared to Ridley again. All my fault!

Any way, don’t worry, Forgotten Land songs will return. But when? Only time will tell…