Hey everyone, belated holidays to you all, things have gotten super busy for me since grad school started so I haven’t had time to update the site at all. I don’t expect I’ll be able to update the site much until the summer or so, so expect things to keep pretty slow around here.

Anyway, OCRemix released another Christmas themed album and you can find it here. One track from the album is by Rozovian, who I’ve mentioned before in a few updates (he’s heading up the secret SD3 album, more news on that soon… possibly). It’s a remix of A Cold Beat from Heroes of Mana, and it’s the first HoM remix I’ve heard myself. Check it out! Don’t forget to check out the rest of the album too.

Into the White – Rozovian – Heroes of Mana

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Tool Assisted Speed-runs are those done with the assistance of programs that allow the player to re-record segments, edit them, time actions on a frame by frame basis to manipulate luck, and all sorts of other funky things that wouldn’t strictly be possible when playing normally. The aim of these is to get to the end of the game, from a clean state, as quickly as possible, though sometimes speed is sacrificed for entertainment value.

While very often this is seen done for platformers, it isn’t limited to that genre alone. In this case, SD3 has finally been TASed, and completed in just under 3 and a half hours by praetarius3. You can watch it on YouTube here, or download from the tasvideos.org page here. Also, if you want to understand some of the things going on a bit better, check out the author’s comments here.

When watching the video, turn on closed captions in YouTube to get some background as to what is going on, as this plays on a non-patched version of the game.

So, in my determination to study up for a test I have tomorrow I neglected to put up the MMM update at a decent time today.

And that’s how I picked this track!

If you can put up with the Rising Sun bits you can really enjoy the Fighting Arena and Endless Battlefield bits of this piece. I really like how it starts out all happy and carefree as the Rising Sun appears over the story and then suddenly you can imagine the Hero of FFA and his hardships fighting for Dark Lord’s enjoyment in the Fighting Arena. Then he escapes out onto the Endless Battlefield with a mission to save the world, and another Rising Sun appears because a new day has begun in his life. Yeah that’s pretty deep right? Ok maybe not, but I’ve always thought this album could use a Fantasia-esque animation to go along with the music. The only problem I see is that it kind of covers a lot of ground once you get to the Parting and Decisive Battle track.

Anyway, hope you enjoy!

Chapter 1: Determination – Kenji Ito – Seiken Densetsu – Let Thoughts Ride on Knowledge
Arranged by Takayuki Hattori

Today’s track comes from the new Seiken Densetsu arranged album called Re:Birth / Seiken Densetsu.

Just click on the youtube video to get to the other songs if you want to listen, but I’m putting this one up because it’s my favorite from the album. I absolutely love the original version of this track, and I think the vocals added for this arrangement are really great.

The Endless Dream – Kenji Ito – Dawn of Mana

Thanks to nick912012 from the forums for telling us where to find the music on YouTube!
If you’d like to discuss the album with us on the forums, come on in!

It’s Monday again, and I’m busily working on finishing an essay. Today’s track is a nice relaxing one to help you get through whatever you’re working on this week!

Longing – Kenji Ito – Children of Mana

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Also has anyone ever noticed that music tracks from GBA or DS have a certain distant sound to them when listening to them on headphones? I’m not sure if that’s the way to describe it, but they just sound very different to me if they’re not coming out of tiny speakers. I wonder how much work goes into making them sound good from tiny speakers. Stuff like that is so interesting, unlike the paper I’m writing! Woo!

Thanks to Zergrinch, nick912012 and Kassidy for figuring out the different tracks used!

00:00 Rising Sun (FFA)
00:59 Running Towards the Future (SwoM)
02:16 Bridge with Decision Bell (SD3)
02:30 Meridian Child (SD3)
04:00 Meridian Dance (SoM)
05:07 Bridge
05:24 The Thunder Emperor’s Aloofness (CoM)
06:05 Bridge with hints of Rising Sun moving into The Truth Behind the Mask (SD4)
06:36 Feelings Not Forgotten (SD4)
07:28 Bridge with Southern City Polpota (LoM)
07:38 And Thus Fate Becomes Cruel (HoM)
08:45 Bridge
09:02 Fiery Castle (LoM) (Complicated Destiny and The One Who Waits… do follow the same leitmotif, FC is the closest)
09:52 Bridge
09:57 Rising Sun (FFA)

Since the site rebuild a number of pages were missing from the Soundtracks section, primarily relating to the Fan Doujin Albums and original composer solo work. These pages have now been restored, and a number of broken links fixed (whoops!).

These will hopefully be expanded upon not long from now to include more recent Doujin work, a few additional compilations in which SD music appears, and the upcoming Arrange albums from the original componsers (Itoken’s one is already there).

Thank you for your continued patience with the on-going restoration.

I’ve had a real urge to play Legend of Mana lately, but I don’t have a Playstation or the game on me! Maybe I’ll have to get a PSP and get the game on PSN sometime. It’s my birthday tomorrow so maybe I’ll treat myself to something nice like that soon!

For today’s music I’ve picked a little bit of a short one, but this is a song I could listen to over and over again. For me, this is the music that instantly comes to mind when I think of Legend of Mana. It’s so nice and calm and full of happy memories.

Places of Soul – Yoko Shimomura – Legend of Mana

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There are times when I can’t quite avoid scratching a hole in my head out of sheer amazement at how bizarre TV commercials can be. This, my good people, is one of those times, and it’s a commercial for Shinyaku Seiken Densetsu, aka Sword of Mana:

Now for the part where we link this back in to MMM: here’s the track from SwoM that plays during the action scene in that commercial.

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At this point there aren’t any solid details, and I’ll be looking further into this to see what I can dig up, but rumour has it that Hiroki Kukuta and Yoko Shimomura will also be releasing arrangement albums for their contributions to the Mana series, in the same way that we know Kenji Ito is doing with Re:Birth. Watch this space.