I was exercising earlier today. It's crazy, I know, but all those physical education classes keep telling me it's for my own good in the long run. Honestly, I think all it's good for is a reminder of how painful smoking is even when you're not doing it. Regardless, I was on the treadmill, and when you're on one you really need a TV program going to keep your mind off of how much everything hurts. Now keep in mind here, I haven't really watched TV since in about eight years.

The reason why I bring this up is because I saw a pair of commercials I recall seeing back when I was in elementary school, around six or seven years old. I'm well into college now, so this means it's been over a decade, and some company somewhere is still selling videos (scratch that, they're DVDs now) about trains and magazines about animals. Don't get me wrong, I had Zoobooks as a kid and I thought they were awesome, but these guys are still offering the bonus tiger poster for free, and they're still making money off of it. I even checked Wikipedia and Zoobooks hasn't had a new publication since 1990. The advertisements themselves are so blatantly a decade out of place, it's a wonder that anyone is beguiled into ordering these things. But hey, I guess kids are easy to dupe, huh?

Okay, let's shift gears entirely, seeing as this is a blog about video game music and all.

Over the X number of years that I've been listening to video game music, there's a trend that's been bugging me an awful lot. I imagine it makes sense in the realm of video game music than in any other kind of music, and I'll admit that I used to fall victim to it frequently. Hell, I probably still do it to some extent, though I actively try to curb it. What I'm talking about is the general inability for a VGM fan to separate the music itself from their memories of the game with the music attached.

Case in point: Dancing Mad. Some FFVI spoilers will follow, though they'll be spotty as it's been years since I've played the game.

I'm sure I'm gonna catch all kinds of flak for this, but I absolutely hate Dancing Mad. It's honestly one of the worst compositions I've heard, falling just short of the King of Fighters 2001 soundtrack. And believe me, if you've ever played that game, you know that's a long way to fall. Put briefly, Dancing Mad is a confused mess. It has no sense of pacing or flow, it's drawn out well beyond its welcome, and it's just plain ugly. If you even think about mentioning the Black Mages version at this point, I will beat you to death with this copy of Three Kingdoms sitting right next to me.

But you say in response, "It was the perfect music for fighting Kefka!"

For a moment, I'm going to put aside the fact that you're talking about fighting a freaking Godzilla-sized clown (that people only love because of Ted Wooseley's liberal translations, no less), and make this my point. Final Fantasy VI is a popular game, and I don't blame anybody for that. The problem comes about when people recall how the game as a whole affected them, and then mistakenly attribute that feeling to the music. Granted, good music will make a good moment in a video game better and bad music can dullen a similar moment, and that's what makes talking about video game music in this particular context so tricky. Since people generally feel that defeating Kefka was an epic ending to an epic game, they will thus believe that Dancing Mad is an epic track in all its seventeen minutes. It makes sense on paper, but it just doesn't make sense in my head.

But hey, I'm the guy who buys soundtracks for games he's never played or even heard of.

I'm an oddball like that. And when you really think about it, my approach - that is, considering video game music in terms of the music in and of itself and outside of its effect in the game entirely - would objectively be the "more wrong" one, as video game music is written to be experienced inside of the game to begin with. Or at least, that's what I figure, though aspiring video game composers have told me otherwise. I'm sure that most of you reading this will just write me off as crazy, but a handful of you will read this and actually think I make sense. Either way, bringing about awareness of the metaphysical state (for a lack of a better term) of video game music is the real goal here, so if you've learned something, my job is done.

If you haven't learned anything yet, then learn this: The Dynasty Warriors series, and by extension Three Kingdoms, is a lie. Out of all those characters, the only two who are really revered as heroes in Chinese culture are Guan Yu and Zhuge Liang, Everyone else ranges from "meh" to "conniving rat-bastard", and Liu Bei is amazingly at the latter end of that scale. Man, do parents make a hobby out of deconstructing things or what?