Senjou no Valkyria Music:

When Hitoshi Sakimoto composes for Senjou no Valkyria, he doesn't compose his best.  Out of the hundreds of songs I had going in from the three game soundtracks, only fifteen ended up qualifying as great.

Fifteen new songs to my hall of fame is a nice haul and always welcome, but dang.  I expected much more from Sakimoto, who I generally regard as flawless and all powerful.  The biggest problem affecting these soundtracks is the liberal use of remixes.  Sakimoto felt the need to incorporate his main theme into virtually every song, which meant I had to cut virtually every song to avoid repeats of the same leitmotif.  But even beyond that, most of the remaining songs were also bad.  I just don't understand what went wrong.  It's in the regular style of Sakimoto, but just worse than average in every way.  Sort of like Blue Dragon was for Uematsu.  I guess he was just having an off day.

I didn't want to dilute the quality of my hall of fame, so I had to cut way more than I originally expected.  As a result, my music hall of fame is only modestly changed, from 4444 songs to 4459, and still 10.1 days in length.  Sakimoto's total composer credits total moves up from 192 to 207.  It's nice for him to break the 200 barrier, so I guess this effort wasn't totally in vain.

My Good Music permapost has been duly changed to reflect all these improvements, so now's as good a time to check it out as any:  http://diamed-the-road-less-traveled.blogspot.com/2017/08/good-music.html

While I was judging my music, I also finished off the newest Amagi Brilliant Park volume.  Part of the book was already animated so I was able to just skip through that portion.  It was good, but not as good as the parts chosen for the anime, which gives me an inkling of why they felt the need to cut so much and speed ahead in the anime.  If you know the anime is only going to be 13 episodes, it may make sense to do what they did with the books.  The real reason I dislike the anime isn't the amount of material they cut but just the violence and crudeness that suffuses the whole work, which the author is to blame for, not Kyoto Animation.

Of course, this is all relative, I love the anime and the books, they're both in my respective halls of fame, it's just that they could have been better, and many other anime and books are better than Amagi Brilliant Park.  Sort of like how Senjou no Valkyria did indeed have 15 good songs, but many other soundtracks have many more good songs than that.