Remarkable:

I found five more remixes, all from FF7.  'Continue' lapses into the Prelude theme halfway through.  Great Warrior is mostly Cosmo Canyon, Steal the Tiny Bronco plagiarizes Highwind Takes to the Skies and Interrupted By Fireworks is mostly the Main Theme of FFVII.  'The Mako Cannon is Fired/Shinra Explodes' go figure has some overlap with ShinRa Corporation.  Lifestream shares its beginning with Bombing Mission, but quickly diverges thereafter, so no harm no foul.

Earlier I asked the rhetorical question, 'where would my good music post be without having added Valkyrie Profile?'  Well, looking back, we can give a serious answer to that question now.

Two months ago my music list was 4289 songs long, today it's 4287 songs long.  In that time, I added the music of 'The Last Story,' 'Terra Battle 2', 'Valkyrie Profile 1 & 2,' 'Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced 2,' and a variety of one-off songs like the opening theme to Firefly.

So for the past two months I've been adding music non-stop from a ton of different sources, enormous soundtracks full of hundreds of songs -- and my music hall of fame is smaller than when I started.  That's the number of remixes I've found and eliminated during that same period of time.  Remarkable.

It's scary to think that my music hall of fame would be in the 3,000's right now if I hadn't been proactive in searching out new good music all this time.  But the bigger takeaway from all this frenetic churn is that the quality of my music list has vastly improved.  Without adding to volume, the density of unique quality music has gone up during these entire two months.  Every song subtracted was replaced with a new song that was genuinely great, its own unique melody the world has never heard before but desperately needed to hear.  I was able to clear up enough space for all these deserving songs to get their own time in the sun, while keeping the list small enough that everyone could listen to every song without a problem.

The Music Hall of Fame today is 10%? 20%? better than the Music Hall of Fame from two months ago, and it takes up no more time than before to listen to it in full.  That's a great payoff for all the time I've put in to rooting out remixes.  My music will get 10% better this December when Yasunori Mitsuda releases what he promises to be his most epic soundtrack of all time for Xenoblade 2.  At that time he'll move up to a deserving #3 spot of all time composers, behind just Sakuraba and Uematsu.  If I keep finding more remixes between then and now, who knows, it may not expand the actual size of my playlist this time either.

My fall anime watchlist will be growing over the next couple months too.  Wake Up, Girls! Shin sho begins tomorrow, which is of course a must-see, as a sequel to an already ranked anime.  And five weeks from now, Yuuki Yuuna's new season will switch to never before seen content, instead of just a reprise of the oav's released earlier this year, at which time it will become must-see as well.  Fourteen shows may seem disappointing for the fall season, but it's no worse than the summer season so I guess the end of the year turned out okay.  It could have been better, but it also could have been worse.  I could say the same of the 2017 year in anime as a whole.  Not as good as I hoped, not as bad as I feared.  We'll survive.  And in 2018 there's so many fun things awaiting we'll thrive.