Music Hall of Fame now includes Fire Emblem Three Houses:

This was a difficult to include ost.  Out of the 14 songs I had initially selected, I couldn't find any weaknesses or problems with any of them.  I kept trying to give them a reasonable rank, spread from 1 to 5 stars, but every time I thought to myself:  "Do I really want to stop listening to this song?  How is it worse than the other song I just rated 5 star?"

Ultimately I gave all but 1 of the 14 Fire Emblem songs 5 stars and called it a day.  The lone holdout for non-perfection was 'Life at Garreg Mach Monastery' which received 3 stars.

Of course, the new Nana Mizuki song also received a 5-star rating.  The second ending theme to Basilisk is so heartrending you'd have to be heartless not to rate it a top 20% song.

Which meant all together I had to find 14 5-star songs to demote to make room for the newcomers.  This was difficult.  I had spent all this time curating a perfect 5-star song list so there were no weak entries.  But room had to be made somewhere if I wanted to keep listening to my new Fire Emblem tracks.  First I kicked down some Love Live! songs -- Sunny Day Song and Tiny Stars.  Then went some Bakemonogatari songs -- Ren'ai Circulation, Decent Black and Platinum Disco.

After that I focused on underperforming Hitoshi Sakimoto tracks -- the Mitsui's from Final Fantasy Tactics and the Valkyria Chronicles 4 non-battle songs.

I also had to kick out a Final Fantasy 3 song by Nobuo Uematsu, and some Masashi and Junya songs from Final Fantasy 10.  It was a slaughter all around.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses appropriately has three separate great composers, all of whom contributed 5-star themes to the game.  Because the soundtrack was divided very evenly between them, the three of them now have comparable point scores in the music hall of fame, and all of them are middling since the points had to be split in three -- 64 points for Hiroki Morishita, 68 points for Takeru Kanazaki, and 80 points for Rei Kondoh.  Revo doesn't have any 5-star songs but by virtue of being the sole composer to his soundtracks he beats all three of these guys handily with 150 points.

80 points is nothing to sneeze at, though.  It's higher than Joe Hisaishi, the composer behind Mononoke Hime, for instance.  These are very good composers, none of whom I'd ever heard of before, but now all three are properly honored.

When songs enter higher tiers, the demoted songs force the lower tiers to also demote songs, all the way down to the 1-star category kicking songs out of the hall of fame entirely.  Like usual I punished long songs in this process and didn't pick each loser out individually like I carefully did in the 5-star list.  The result was a ton of girl rock songs losing out, by Tori Amos, Garbage and Bjork.  Some others fell by the wayside as well, like a Nirvana, a Revo and a Madonna song.  But mainly it was Tori Amos and Bjork.  They had their day in the sun, I listened to each of them 100 times, so I guess it's okay for them to retire for good now.

For all the details of the new songs and new composers and where they now stand in the points competition you can always check out my freshly updated Music Hall of Fame permapost.

Now it feels like I've really beaten Fire Emblem.  This is always the last step to do after finishing a good game.  You don't really leave the game behind until you leave the soundtrack behind.  But with so many songs making my 5-star hall of fame, I guess I'll never leave Three Houses behind completely. . . it's an indelible impression from a game too good to quit.