Spagonia Act 1-2 Music Swap - BaldFalk's Be Cool, Be Wild
This mission is incredibly hard. Coming from someone who considers himself a decent Unleashed player, I can't stress enough how dickish some of the DLC for this game is. Seriously, it took around five recording takes for a total of around twenty retries just so I would complete the stage without dying.
-sigh-
But enough about me. Let's talk about this song! YouTube user BaldFalk (better known as Falk on SonicRetro and SoundCloud) used, if I'm not mistaken, a music-processing program to add effects and continuous transitions to the music within an Unleashed stage (or any game really, but this stage was the example), and followed it up with an original composition built upon many smaller pieces of music. The idea behind it was to "tell the story of the stage" as you run through it, and BaldFalk picked up on stuff I didn't even have the slightest idea of. For example, the part of the level just after the skydiving section (Section B in the music) is built to show off the beauty of the Spagonia City, with gardens, cobblestone streets, and other little goodies. As such, the music that BaldFalk composed for that area is filled with majestic harmonies as stage-to-music reflection. Of course, the best part of BaldFalk's soundtrack is that the "Boost Version" (Be Wild) is no longer just a high-pass effect applied to the original song (Be Cool), and is now a totally different style reimagining of the song. In this way, speed is now rewarded with a new version of the song, rather than all the good parts of it being lost in a cheap effect.
I could gush all day about how much I love BaldFalk's work here, but let's move on to why I made this video.
In their demo of what the stage would be like with the new music function(available via link below: DEFINATELY check it out), BaldFalk skipped major chunks of the level, understandably because it was a demo. HOWEVER, I still wanted to see how it would turn out as a full stage. Moreover, to explain what was going on with the music, BaldFalk included the program's computation graphic in the corner of the screen. Not that I mind, but I was really interested in what Rooftop Run would be like if the program was actually implemented (which is to say, with a fully visible screen).
Now as for why I chose Act 1-2, that's really just to show off the switching between the regular and boost versions of the song (Be Cool, and Be Wild, respectively). On a good run of Act 1-2, I'll be about 50/50 Boosting versus not, so it worked out perfectly with the purpose of this song. Editing this was a bitch, though, since I don't actually have the fancy program that BaldFalk utilized.
As just a personal thought, I really hope SonicTeam does something like this in their future games, ESPECIALLY with the likes of the clock tower segment here. That buildup feeling is so exhilerating, just watching. I can't imagine how cool it would be if I were actually playing it with that music. I mean, they did this once before in Sonic Heroes' Mystic Mansion, where the music would loop in a certain section until you moved on with the level. That provided the stage with a degree of character never elsewhere expressed, stressing that even within one song, particular sections mesh with particular scenery better than others (Just like Falk's work proves yet again). I'm really hoping that with this "New Standard Sonic" that Iizuka spoke of comes stages with transitional music storytelling that's half as good as BaldFalk's work here.
Okay, my rant's over now. Enjoy this epic stage with the even epic...er music!
Post Description: Here's the link to BaldFalk's original video, from which you can find the downloads for both Be Cool and Be Wild:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjtXrKpW7G4&feature=player_embedded