Deltora Quest Music:

Though it's technically true that I've added 1,005 new songs to my music hall of fame since January 1st, I've subtracted so many older songs that my collection isn't actually 1,000 songs larger than when I started.

On January 1st I had 4364 songs.  On December 13th I had 5357 songs.  That's 7 songs fewer than an 'additional 1,000,' even though it does include a 'new 1,000.'  So that there can be no confusion, I thought it prudent to have a music hall of fame that was straight out 1,000 songs larger than my starting total.  This way no one could accuse me of exaggerating the 'haul' I've made in music over the course of the year.

With seven new songs as my goal, I decided to check out the soundtracks of my ever reliable composers Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata.  The geniuses behind Final Fantasy Tactics wouldn't let me down, right?  All I needed was seven more hall of fame worthy songs from soundtracks I hadn't investigated yet in their long and bountiful careers.

It turned out to be harder than one would think.  First off, a lot of the video games weren't in the right genre to have particularly good music, even with the right composers.  Others were too old to have a good enough sound card to play the melodies.  But perhaps the biggest problem is that Sakimoto composes so many songs for so many games that he never really tries for any particular composition.  It's hard to reach the hall of fame when you're just phoning things in.

But with enough trial and error, I managed to scrape together 7 songs from three different games -- 5 from Deltora Quest, 1 from Kuusen and 1 from Coded Soul.  The songs are quite nice, I just wish it hadn't taken this much effort to find them.  It's not the return on investment that would normally inspire me, but my current circumstances were a special case.  At least now it's finally done.

Now by any definition of the word, I've expanded my music hall of fame by 1,000 songs in the course of a single year.

I just have to be careful not to discover a single bad song or remix for the next 17 days and I'll be home free.

Meanwhile, Lucky Star got a few more translated chapters of volume 9, meaning fansubbers haven't wholly abandoned this masterpiece after all.  That's a relief.