Heroes of Might and Magic IV-VII Music:

I gladly availed myself of the soundtracks to Heroes II and III, but inscrutably ignored the soundtracks of IV-VII.  That's been corrected.  I've now employed these four games' soundtracks in my ultimate video game music list as well.

To make room, I had to ax a good deal of Tales songs.  These were Tales songs that I've already listened to 100 times, so thought were safely good.  But safely good is all relative, and the quality of music has been steadily rising.  Eventually that left a lot of Tales songs that were previously secure underwater and needing to be cut.

After scrapping all the Tales songs I found distasteful or vaguely irritating, I still had four more Heroes songs to squeeze in, so I got rid of four of my many Song of Prayer FF 10 remixes.  With that, everyone was fully represented.  Now I really don't know where I'd be able to find any more songs, so by default I must be content with what I have.

After all these changes, the playlists are still 1.4 days, 1.4 days, 1.4 days, 1.1 days, 1 day.  And 700, 700, 700, 750, 750 songs.  It's still 3600 songs overall.

The balance has changed though.  It's now 1417 Final Fantasy, 1132 Tales, and 1051 Other.  By joining the 1,000 club, Other has really staked itself out as a vital pillar of the whole.

225 Remixes remain.

The star playlists have also changed, they now look like this:

5 star:  FF: 415.  Tales:   98.  Other: 187.
4 star:  FF: 371.  Tales: 206.  Other: 123.
3 star:  FF: 192.  Tales: 384.  Other: 124.
2 star:  FF: 328.  Tales: 161.  Other: 261.
1 star:  FF: 111.  Tales: 283.  Other: 356.

As you can see, the final form of my video game music playlist has a healthy balance across the board, in all five sub-categories as well as the whole.  It took a lot of effort to reach this point but the beautiful symmetry at the end makes it all worth it.