Phenac City [8-bit GameBoy] | Burning Colosseum Soundtrack

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Oh, Phenac. One of the most iconic songs in Colosseum, and also one of the songs I was dreading arranging the most. First, it's absolutely massive, which always makes arranging anything exponentially harder. Second, it has very heavy emphasis on more atmospheric instruments like strings and harps, which don't translate particularly well to the GameBoy. Third, each of those different sections have tempo changes, which makes syncing everything much harder and more laborious. And finally, all of those sections are surprisingly diverse, making the transitions that much harder.

In the end, it wasn't as bad as I dreaded, and I'm pretty proud of the final result! The harps in my initial conversion didn't sync properly at all, so I had to resort to a fan transcription for that section. The tempo changes weren't terrible, but the slow build up at the end of the final section (before the loop) were done manually instead of using tempo changes for my sanity (so the notes are manually longer than on the sheet music to simulate a tempo change). The transitions between sections were also hard to nail down, but I think they work nicely as they are. And finally, I had a last-moment emergency correction on the B section (when the tempo first increases) because I realized the pulses were playing the same note simultaneously, which sounds terrible on native hardware, and my playback program had a setting that didn't let me catch that. A quick change to a chord solved that problem. Not everything is perfect, and the B section has missing strings some of you might notice, but there was just no way to have them on this arrangement, so I decided to skip them.

Thanks to everyone involved in the pokecrystal disassembly project for making this possible.

Links: tritehexagon.carrd.co