Valkyrie Profile music:

My Good Music hall of fame shrank by four more songs, three of which came from Final Fantasy Tactics this time, due to the three being remixes of other, better FF Tactics themes.

'Pray' isn't an exact replica of 'Ovelia's Theme', but they share enough similarities that there's no point having both songs, and Ovelia's Theme is the far superior of the two.

'Alma's Theme' and 'Hero's Theme' are both remixes of different portions of the same song, 'Prologue Movie'.  There's no point to them when I can just listen to 'Prologue Movie' and hear them both.

The fourth remix is Dungeon from Final Fantasy 1, which is a copy of Flight of the Bumble Bee from my star classical music.  I decided Uematsu's version of the song was better though, so Flight of the Bumble Bee had to go, since the hall of fame can never host two songs with the same melody.

At this rate I was going to run out of songs because they were all going to turn out to be remixes. >.<

Luckily, I saw this problem coming and took steps to solve it, by downloading Valkyrie Profile 1 + 2's music.  I've finished judging these soundtracks, and I can say two things -- there's plenty of great music to be found here, but no, it's not better than Tales.

Motoi Sakuraba is a very reliable composer, and Valkyrie Profile's music sounds just like the stuff he always composes.  It would be weird if Valkyrie Profile's music wasn't great as a result.  But I haven't heard anything on par with say, Search a Seal.  Motoi's greatest musical feat was Tales of Symphonia, not Valkyrie Profile.  The random internet commenters were wrong.

Still, from what I downloaded, I emerged with 95 'hits' and only 52 'misses.'  This represents an enormous bolstering of my previously flagging hall of fame.  All my Mega Man music put together only has 128 songs in my hall of fame, so for these two games to nearly match that on their own speaks volumes.  As expected of my #1 ranked composer in terms of volume, who now will only pull even further ahead of everyone else.

If you look at another two related games composed by Motoi Sakuraba as reference, Tales of Destiny 1 + 2 has 106 songs in my hall of fame.  Which means Valkyrie Profile is virtually indistinguishable from Tales in quality.  My only complaint is the lack of standout hits.  There's nothing like A Town of Dancing Wind from Graces, nothing like A Merchant Town Full of Life from Xillia, and no vocal tracks at all.

Valkyrie Profile feels an awful lot like oatmeal.  It will fill the belly with a large amount of decent music, but it will never satisfy the appetite.  Sheer numbers is partially what I was looking for this time, though, after my hall of fame was dipping dangerously low from all my cuts, so I'd say the project was a success.  My new music hall of fame total is 4317 songs, 9.7 days in length.  This total is always subject to change, though.  Perhaps some of the Valkyrie Profile songs won't pan out to be as good as I initially thought.  Or I could find some more remixes, or who knows what.  But I'm finally back to where I was supposed to be before the great winnowing.  Next target -- 10 days of great music!