LaTale Ultimate VGM Mix
The search for Iris continues across the world of video game discography!
Summary
LaTale Ultimate VGM Mix is the largest scale music project that has been published to date both within and outside of the Twin Exhibitions. It is an 18 hour long music mix that compiles tracks from the 2006 MMO, LaTale, with tracks from various video game soundtracks that sound similar. Due to its size and nature, this mix features music from a wide range of franchises such as Kirby, Final Fantasy, Bomberman, Sin & Punishment, F-Zero, Halo, Donkey Kong, Rush, and plenty of others. What originally was supposed to be a single presentation, became a two part project where the mix had to be split between two discs in order to pass upload limits on platforms such as YouTube. Putting this project together was one of the few recording marathons that I ever did for the Twin Exhibitions. All of the components of this project can be viewed through the LaTale Ultimate VGM Mix YouTube Playlist where Arcmaevotix is home to the original versions and Nehrpsyznet is home to the remade versions.
Process
The idea for the music mix began after I had re-discovered the soundtrack for LaTale in the late 2010s after having not interacted with the game for well over a decade. As I listened to the tracks of the MMO I couldn’t help but notice that the composition of many songs reminded me of music from games such The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, Mega Man Zero 3, Kirby Super Star, and Sonic 3D Blast. That is when I began hunting down music tracks from other video games that sounded similar to (and most likely influenced) the items in LaTale’s ever-growing OST. After assembling a library of about 100 tracks from LaTale with 100 tracks from other video games, I started the process of combining them together into a continuous playlist. However, due to the processing limitations of my PC and poor rendering software, the mix was split into six different sections before being shared on the CSN28 YouTube channel. This initial release of the mix suffered from audio degradation, improper track balancing, muddy visuals, no playlist metadata, and a variety of other issues. Fortunately, all of this was corrected when the project was picked back up two years later and featured double the amount of tracks with closer compositional matches, higher quality audio, new visual themes that matched the scale of the project, and proper metadata that allowed people to distinguish the order of tracks.
Reflection
LaTale Ultimate VGM Mix was one of the biggest hurdles that I faced in developing a project for the Twin Exhibitions due to the fact that it was one of the few productions that required marathon style work sessions. The entire final mix of the playlist was recorded live over the course of 18 real life hours in a single 48 hour period with metadata being filled out song by song as the time slots rolled through. Transitions between the different visuals of the mix were also manually controlled live in order to avoid rendering large video files that would have made for a post processing nightmare. While this project did not lead to any breakthroughs or massive leaps in my knowledge about design production, it did show me that commitment to an ambitious vision is something that I was capable of. Having a 400 track music mix that has unique backgrounds for each quarter of it and is split into two 9 hour sessions of non-stop listening was a tall order, but one that I was set on pursuing.