2009-06-26 - - 3:22 p.m.

I turned thirty today. I'm still overwhelmed by the everyday details of life. I hope things get easier, but I think that thought appears every time my birthday rolls around, and it hasn't really happened yet.

This week, I've been waking up in the middle of the night. I'll open my eyes to find myself sitting up and panicking, until I realize I was having a nightmare.

My nightmares aren't weird and heavily influenced by cryptic folktales anymore. Instead, I dream about stuff like going in to check on the office move and finding that the movers have mounted cabinets on all the walls so that none of the desks will fit.

In these dreams I wander through a beige maze, like a reject from a Kafka story, carbon paper in hand, trying to find the person who needs to sign and stamp it.

I wish I worried about stuff that was life-threatening. This is all just a slow, mild burn that will eventually etch its way through my stomach lining.

I want to get lost in the woods.

I want monsters back.

Speaking of monsters and shitting blood (and you'll only ever see that phrase right here, probably)...

I think I mentioned that I got a synthesizer a while back. Well, after playing all the piano pieces I still had memorized (a surprising number!), I did a couple of rearrangements of Chrono Trigger songs. I really like Chrono Trigger and I was replaying the DS version at the time, so it was a natural thing to try to replicate it and figure out how my beast works.

I didn't get much further than the multitrack recording/quantizing/patch selection stuff, but I am better with it than I was and was pretty happy with the results.

At any rate, I was listening to the original NES versions of those tunes a lot, and looked Yasunori Mitsuda up because that soundtrack has a lot of really memorable songs.

He has also composed for Shadow Hearts and Luminous Arc, whose soundtracks are mostly forgettable (there is a great town theme in SH2 that sounds like his, though). Anyway, it's the Chrono Trigger/Cross songs that stand out to me.

I discovered that Chrono Trigger was the first game he headed the composition for, and he worked so hard on it that he was shitting blood.

Shitting blood! No wonder it's so good. Of course, half of liking a game soundtrack depends on what you're trying to do when a song plays. Chrono Trigger had a lot of moments that felt important, and really used its soundtrack well.

Atmospheric music in games is a completely different animal than the battle themes, though. I really think Shoji Meguro is the best at fight music, particularly boss fights. The structure he uses is generally 16 measures of "This is a seriously menacing situation and we're all gonna die," an optional quiet/breakdown, followed by 16 measures of "Desperate heroes, let us heroically hero like we have never heroed before!" He is good at conveying a sense of urgency, building momentum, and setting rhythm for a fight. .

This theme from Digital Devil Saga 2 is my favourite fight music ever. I usually end up disliking normal battle themes because I hear them too much, but this was bad-ass and was the perfect accompaniment to the death and cannibalism that ensued.

Maybe now that I'm thirty I should try not to be such an escapist. Hand on controller. Head in the sand in the hourglass. These are the days of our lives.