Ripped/Performed by Can of Nothing
Lyrics by Aiyaaa, Chaze the Chat, Can of Nothing, trivial171
Believe it or not, I actually had plans to post something else for today - to follow some sort of schedule, yknow? Put all my ducks in a row and let the posts release day by day. But then the SiIva team decided out of nowhere, just last night, to announce the formal return of the Christmas Comeback Crisis, the channel's main storyline, to be happening this month. To say that I'm excited would be the understatement of the century. And so I figured, it'd be best to celebrate with one of the many rips made specifically for the story - The Noble Haltmann.
Performed by friend to the blog and fellow Mel, Can of Nothing aka Mellorine, The Noble Haltmann is a cover of a song of the same name from Kirby: Planet Robobot - one that typically lacks vocals, yet was given lyrics in both the English and Japanese versions of the game, and "performed" through textboxes by Susie in both games. In the English version, however, the translation doesn't fit quite right with the song's actual progression - which is why The Noble Haltmann features redone lyrics done by the SiIvaGunner team, to fit the scene its in from the actual storyline better. The edits, paired with Mellorine's fantastic vocal performance, come together to form what's in my eyes the definitive version of the original song, even divorced from its place in the series' lore.
Part of me really wants to continue talking about said lore here - the place that The Noble Haltmann has in the relationship between The Voice, Haltmann, Susie, Wood Man, and the entire storyline of the Christmas Comeback Crisis. But I'll bide my time and let the story speak for itself - a playlist of the core story so far can be found on the SiIvaGunner channel itself as "The Story So Far", which should put you up to speed with the channel's plot...for the most part. All the same, I hope you'll join me in celebration as Season 7 comes to a close - and the Christmas Comeback Crisis returns in full force.
Season 2
Featured on: Rips of Christmas Past
Also on: SiIvaGunner: Starter Kit & Essentials
Ripped by MtH, dante, turdl3, Charles Ritz, TylerNJazz, toonlink, trivial171, wolfman1405, Chaze the Chat, Princess Sylvysprit, beat_shobon, Can of Nothing
December!! Christmas times!! The holidays!! Wahoo!!
There's of course always a lot of excitement in the air during December, even if its...largely manufactured by big companies. Yet ever since 2016, I've had far more of a personal attachment to the month - the end of SiIvaGunner Season 1, and the beginning of Season 2, was some of the most engrossed I've ever been engrossed with a piece of media - and it was all punctuated with the Patched Plains Fusion Collab.
It may be hard to truly convey to newer SiIva viewers just how suspenseful and strange the month of October was during 2016. For all intents and purposes, the channel appeared to have truly ENDED with Epic Flintstones, and everything that led up to its release just further cemented that. We'd gotten behind-the-scenes reveals of unresolved content, some of the channel's biggest projects and collaborations up to that point, a huge amount of new albums within such a short amount of time...there was very little to suggest that SiIva wouldn't actually be ending. Yet viewers paying attention would be able to connect the dots, these small little hints dropped during the finale, all connected to "Wood Man" - and mind you, this was before he was even established as a character on the channel!
Just a few days after the official ending, as SiIva had gone to sleep and the channel had been avoiding uploads for so long - uploads suddenly returned, as this "Wood Man" character became the new host at the start of November. This wasn't the first time a story event had been happening on SiIva, yet it was one that left us as viewers confused and in the dark of what was truly happening, due to the lack of a proper narrator. After just two weeks and an album release, halfway through the month, uploads suddenly ceased and the channel went dark. So...was the channel actually dead? Was this just a little bonus Halloween thing, to let the team play around with Wood Man as a character in an epilogue to the actual channel?
Turns out, it was all build-up to December - to the Christmas Comeback Crisis. The channel ending, the virus in his computer, the Voice Inside Your Head, Wood Man - it was all revealed to be part of this all new ongoing storyline, presented to us in full-on episodes during the month of December. Like a light switch turned on, the confusion and uncertainty of November turned into full-on celebration of SiIva's seemingly-now-confirmed return to regular uploading. This was the start of Season 2 - and it was, in my eyes, an absolutely perfect premiere.
I really want to go more in-depth on this someday, but I'll circle back to Patched Plains Fusion Collab to round the story out - because really, it was this rip that really cemented Season 2 as having officially begun, halfway through December 2016. It had been a month since Wood Man's sudden leave from the channel, and out of nowhere we're given an animated prologue to this all-new Christmas-themed storyline, directly based on Kirby: Planet Robobot from earlier that year. And after that sudden gut punch, we're treated to an absolute feast for the ears - a red-carpet introduction to the sort of quality we were about to experience. Kirby: Planet Robobot already had a heavy presence on SiIva due to The Reboot, and so starting this big new story event off with another rip from that same game felt like a sort of reassurance - this wasn't a bit, or a side story, or anything of the sort, but the full next step of the SiIvaGunner channel.
As a rip, it's frankly excellent - it has all the quality of the average Fusion Collab on the channel condensed down to just two minutes, covering everything from different genres of music, different games, different time signatures, and everything inbetween - a remix collaboration in the purest sense of the word, and an absolute treat to listen to. A big benefit to fusion collabs of this nature is that you're able to very clearly identify who is responsible for what parts of the rip - Princess Sylvyspirit's involvement is immediately noticeable as soon as the Touhou segment begins, Chaze's affection for MOTHER 3 is expressed through his part in the collaboration, and so on!
Despite the song only having a brief segment on Christmas near the beginning, the spirit is absolutely there throughout all of Patched Plains Fusion Collab - its a celebration of what was to come, a joyous theme that let all of its collaborators truly show their stuff at the start of this new age for the channel. And its a rip that I often come back to just for that sheer nostalgia alone.
voiceless - simple ds series vol. 01 - the mahjong (¥1480)
Season 2
Featured on: Haltmann's Highest Quality Video Game Rips
Also on: SiIvaGunner: Starter Kit & Essentials
Ripped by trivial171, MtH
Part of Voiceless Week!
Requested by @cookiefonster!
WELL, remind me to never use Drafts again, because apparently last week's post just flat out spoiled the rip of today in the URL. Tumblr, huh?
Anyhow - this request was part of why I decided to commit to this week's theme, as its a track I too wanted to cover but didn't really feel up to doing before actually disclosing the original track's impact in its own post. Through its appearance on two albums now, I think I can say pretty confidently that this is the voiceless-arrangement I've listened to most in my time due to its permanent placement in my playlists. But its addition to those playlists came as a surprise to me at first, as I'd never even once heard the rip on the channel itself. Even worse - I'd never actually listened to any of the Simple DS Series-rips whatsoever!
As I've previously alluded to on this blog, I think this is one of the beautiful things about the channel - it celebrates the art of just making things without an expected audience to flock to it. Every rip is cherished by a unique group of people because its impossible - or at least extremely unhealthy! - to listen to every single rip on the channel. After having discovered the game and its rips through this installment, I can now absolutely call myself a fan.
Like the prior rips I've covered this week, this is very much a remix through and through aiming to recreate the original song in a new context. Despite having never played the game before, its sound feels so "early DS" through and through, in a way I can only really compare to Gen 4 of Pokémon? I'd speculate that this sound comes from games transitioning from the GBA's heavy use of samples to relying more on full-on MIDI, but still undergoing a form of compression to be audible through the DS. Regardless, the rest is just an immaculately dense and thick sound - drum hits that vibrate through the compression, a bassline that becomes even heavier due to it, and synths that sound videogamey in every way possible. With the three voiceless remixes I've covered thus far, slideless was a direct translation of the original song into the style of a different track, wheras voiceless (short rave remix) was a full on reimagining with all new instrumentation. voiceless - simple ds series vol. 01 - the mahjong (¥1480), then, speaks to me as a full-on rerendition of the original track, capturing every single element of the original track's instrumentation and directly retranslating them to fit the DS vibe. It probably helps that MtH worked on this directly after already being very much involved in the original voiceless, likely allowing more of the subtle differences in instrumentation to become directly translated rather than full-on reimagined.
The result, at the end of the day, is a trio of fantastic celebrations of voiceless' legacy. Ironically, voiceless - simple ds series vol. 01 - the mahjong (¥1480) in particular shows that the song hits just as hard even without vocals - even when quite literally voiceless, the team's voice shines through it all.
Season 1
Featured on: GilvaSunner’s Highest Quality Video Game Rips: Volume 7
Also on: SiIvaGunner: Starter Kit & Essentials
Ripped by toonlink & The Gang
The last post made me nostalgic for Season 1’s ending, so fuck it, here’s another rip from back then - the File Select Fusion Collab, a rip with close to 20 creators involved. What a “Fusion Collab” entails has changed quite a fair bit over the years, as the collaborations have grown larger in size with each year. Nowadays, they now tend to focus on individual artists rendering a specific track in their own style across a longer video, such as with Season 2’s Wood Man Fusion Collab. But with Season 1, the meaning was a lot more nebulous - they were almost all made under the direction of toonlink (otherwise goes by “tunedlink” and “toonlinkirl”), and were made more in the style of YTPMVs, having a base song to build off of with an everchanging barrage of styles and sources intermingling at once.
These were released every now and then over the course of Season 1 and were always appreciated, yet today’s choice in particular stands out among them. Being released during what was effectively presented as the ending of the channel, it has a unique kind of emotional baggage to it, it leans into celebrating the entire legacy of the channel and all of its inside jokes. The full-circle moment of getting Joel Vinesauce himself to narrate a section in the middle of the track was perfect - the person whose joke got the entire channel started, now gets invited to formally close it out, with a speech still very much rooted in that niche joke culture SiIva itself thrives in. And it just keeps going in that direction - the rip builds in a congratulatory, yet bittersweet way to truly signal that the channel is about to end, a giant thank-you letter to the entire community that had been fostered over the channel’s small 9-month lifespan.
Of course, its rendered a little bit moot by the channel…not ending, which some folks are still bitter about. Yet I still think this rip works wonders as part of a sendoff to the original era of SiIvaGunner - we’re never going to get anything like Season 1 again, and I’ve grown to accept that.
Arranged by trivial171, wolfman1405, dante, SungHa Hong, yodooder
When I and others talk about “Continuity” on the SiIvaGunner channel, it doesn’t just mean constant expansions to the lore and such. Really, continuity can be as simple as a call and response separated by time, a punchline waiting for payoff, or just a legacy to be honored. All that flowery language just to say, that I distinctly remember popping off back when this rip was uploaded in Season 2.
These are the kinds of rips that stay pretty strictly as “in-jokes”, and will probably confuse a lot of the people just browsing these shoutouts as non-fans. But for the invested nerds like me? This rip was the payoff I didn’t know I wanted from a year prior. The original Weight Will Change is classic Season 1, an absurd concept attempted as quickly as possible, with a hysterical falsetto-sung spoof on the original track with the lyrics changed to fit the Bowflex-themed visuals on display. The joke stuck out so much that it eventually weaved its way into the CCC, and a full year later we wound up on this rip: A lovingly made tribute to the original song.
Though clearly not aiming to be high-class, top-billing music, the cover presented here comes from the heart: A full acoustic arrangement of the original track, with multiple singers now performing the absurd original lyrics with complete sincerity for a totally different vibe than the original rip once had. It’s a rip of celebration in a way, reminding us in the audience that rips don’t get forgotten about by the SiIva team, and they’re always thinking of ways to retool all different kinds of jokes for different purposes.
That kind of sincerity is a large part of why the rips performed by wolfman1405 in particular have always stuck with me, and you’re bound to see more of him soon on here.
