- Day 20: Racing Game Music
- Game: F-Zero X
- Track: Devil’s Call in your Heart
I already touched on the original F-Zero via Brawl’s Fire Field remix. F-Zero X, the N64 sequel, also had a pretty good soundtrack. It was extremely metal for video game music at the time, and it started leading me down the metal path before I even realized where I was headed. Crazy to think back to a time where I was listening to this VGM without knowing who, like, Metallica was.
6 months after F-Zero X’s release, the official F-Zero X Guitar Arrange Edition album was put out by Nintendo. You might think it odd that Nintendo would release a metal album. Thing is, it’s instrumental metal, which is much more family-friendly than other metals. I’m not exactly a Japanese Rock expert, but I have a strong impression that instrumental rock and metal has a larger audience there. I myself enjoy a few J rock/metal bands (Sokoninaru comes to mind).
I have a belief: there’s an unwritten law that the vast majority of metal (and art in general) is uninspired, since being creative and original and good is difficult. A lot of this metal relies heavily on tropes. As an American, J metal is kinda interesting to me because they have different tropes than I’m used to. But it can’t really shoot above “kinda interesting” on tropes alone, which is where the album ends up in my book.
I was gonna write more, but I finally finished my WoW 10.2 week 1 dungeon farm. Total count, 74 dungeons, got my BiS daggers and trinkets, and filled out most other slots. As soon as I got my 2nd dagger my body was like “alright we can finally relax now, time to become tired.”