Motoi Madness Continued:

I'm used to remixes plaguing every game and every franchise.  I wasn't surprised that Golden Sun and Golden Sun: Lost Age shared a ton of songs between each other.  But even I was thrown for a loop to discover that much of Star Ocean's soundtrack shares songs with the completely separate Valkyrie Profile franchise.  Motoi Sakuraba is completely shameless.  Star Ocean 5's soundtrack is almost entirely remixes from other games.  If I hadn't caught on quickly, I would've been wasting a good deal of time listening to the exact same songs over and over again.

Hopefully now everything is back under control.  2/3 of the new songs have been properly tested, with 1/3 left to go.  There's just Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile - Covenant of the Plume left to vet.

I've been about as thorough as possible in terms of tracking down every major game Motoi has ever composed for, so I think any duty I have in finding his best music has certainly been fulfilled this time around.  If he's hidden some masterpiece in some junk series no one has heard about, well at that point Motoi's the only one to blame.  My music hall of fame is supposed to be pervasive, but even that is only up to a certain point.  I can't listen to every song ever made after all.

Mageborn is readable but it isn't good.  There's too much cursing and anachronistic slang for a fantasy world setting.  For some reason, even though this is a totally different setting and world, and everyone else in the story is white and has normal English names, Ramanujan is still a prominent mathematician in it, which is just ridiculous.  Worst of all, the hero has multiple opportunities to kill the villain but decides to spare him over and over again, which is the cause of all later problems in the story.  It's just unbearably stupid decision making, inexcusable, unfathomable.  Secure the kill.  It's really not that hard.  Secure the kill, and nothing bad will ever happen to you.  And it's not just the hero; all his merry band of friends also agree with him and also decide to spare the villain, over and over and over.  It's like everyone in the whole damn story took a retard pill before the book began.

At this point I'm just reading Mageborn to have something to read while I'm judging all this new music.  I do not recommend the series to anyone else.