Rip of the week: 08/07/2024
Riki Ricch
Season 4 Episode 2 Featured on: Summer-Colored Smiles ~ The SiIvaSummer All-Star Festival Collection
Ripped by Knay
While I've now settled into this new rhythm of posting pretty nicely, it has come with a bit of its own unexpected baggage. A big part of why I was hestitant to make this switch to weekly posts was the expectations of having each of these posts feel worth the 7-day wait, a sort of pressure that daily posts didn't really have. If I found a really simple but effective rip that I just enjoyed enough to want to share, akin to Imperial Touwer or kirby will never have drip *spits out cereal*, it felt fine to make a smaller-scale post about them - the big, significant-to-the-channel stuff would just be a few days away. But in starting this whole thing with The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll and giving each post more buildup, it started to feel like I was obligated to ONLY post about these insanely large-spanning parts of SiIvaGunner. Yet doing so would, of course, be ignoring part of the channel's core appeal - that rips of all kind, big, small, simple, complex, predictable, unpredictable, and everything inbetween, are all welcome so long as their quality comes from the heart. Today, we're scaling things back and talking about nothing but a single rip and its sheer vibes: Riki Ricch.
Or, well, I still think it might help to set the stage at least a little bit first. Hell, part of what even motivated me to start this blog, and to keep talking about SiIva's history in general, has been to get new fans to realize that the channel has a stage to set to begin with. Each season of the channel, and many times periods within said seasons, come with their own sort of vibe: be it the chaos of Season 1, the lower, more tense energy of Season 6, or the ongoing pure Silliness of Season 8. Uniquely with Season 4, things were split into two halves - the sheer excitement and magnitude of Episode 1 driven by the King for Another Day Tournament and its extensive pre-release period, followed by a somewhat more laid-back vibe, of gleeful celebration, in Episode 2. The tournament was over! Everyone, the SiIva team, the fans, the in-universe characters, were all just happy to have wrapped up such a gargantuan, season-spanning event at last! And if I had to hazard a guess, I'd probably say that Season 4 Episode 2 was, by extension, the least irony-filled season in the channel's entire life even up until now - the set list for much of the year, at least in my memory of it all, had a vibe of grateful sincerity, which brought us rips like Locked In The Underground, vs SAYU (Based Version), Beyond the Floating Isles, and many more.
And right in the midst of all that sits Riki Ricch, the rip in focus for this week. In execution, it's a very simple rip - mashing up Frontier Village from Xenoblade Chronicles with Roddy Ricch's Down Below to create a fantastic example of patented SiIvaGunner "rip-hop". It's a term I've used before which loosely describes rips like Noonsummer Madness and God's PS2: Rips that leverage the emotional connections and nostalgia that binds us to video game music, and elevate those feelings further through being mashed up with low-tempo rap music. The end result puts a fresh spin on what we'd otherwise only consider background music - with Riki Ricch in particular, it takes the soothing stillness of Frontier Village, a tune that oozes comfort and hominess out of every corner, and just makes those vibes hit all the more through Ricch's personal lyrics. I've said it in many posts before that I'm hardly a connoisseur of the music world and even less so the hip hop world, but I really don't feel as if I need to be for Riki Ricch to hit home for me - I've spent so many hours taking it slow and steady in the world of Xenoblade Chronicles to where its music is already bound to cause a reaction, and giving it the smallest of twists such as this is enough to get me vibing in a whole new way.
That sort of returns to the musings from the start of this post - how much can I truly write about rips this simple but effective? Knay is a ripper with many sides, most notably for this blog being the mind behind CG Man HD Remastered Edition and its non-remastered counterpart, but otherwise contributes to the channel at their own pace with whatever they seem fit to make on that day. And I think that's awesome!! Like many of Knay's other rips, Riki Ricch, whilst not necessarily the most multi-layered rip ever made, feels like a completely original idea pursued to its natural endpoint by a ripper who genuinely cares about both pieces used to create it, a "I wonder if that would work" made into something for all of us to enjoy.
At little over 20K views, the rip is far from a runaway classic on the channel - yet, really, that only means there's many more people out there yet to have found it for themselves. And if you take anything from this post, other than the sheer quality of Riki Ricch itself, it's that I encourage all of you to really go hunting for quality rips that are similarly - unjustly - left in the dust, simplicity be damned. Season 4 Episode 2's celebrations may be far behind us, but its spirit of joyous good ought to still be upheld by us in the audience for as long as we can muster.
