586:

At least for now, I've finished my first draft of the 'misc.' portion of my 10 star music as well.  It came in at 586 songs out of 1485, a pretty drastic reduction.  For some reason my music player didn't play all the songs, so I had to manually direct it to good ones it had previously missed.  Which means there might be more good music I accidentally left out, which I'll have to address eventually.  But pretty much I got everything I needed.  The very fact that a song is forgettable means it can't be that vital to inclusion.

The grand total stands at 1355.  It could go up if I find more songs, or it could go down if I tire of the songs that did make the cut.  But for now it's 1355.  Well below my announced goal of 1485, so it looks like I really did succeed in a brutal, over 50% cut of my previous music lists.

It also goes to show that Final Fantasy still reigns supreme.  Even when all other games team up against it, FF is still responsible for more total good music than all of them combined.  At least the other side put up a respectable fight.  I was worried it would be a total slaughter, which would have meant my year of listening to Tales music was a complete waste.  Luckily that didn't happen, and a lot of Tales songs stand on an even basis with FF.

From start to finish this grand melee was a total mess, nothing worked as intended, but the end result is still a playlist full of good songs, that's half the size of the original, so oh well.  I think I'll take this as a glass half full ending.