>>49112894pokemon gets pretty consistently outdone by its competition on the gameboy, masuda should not be allowed near anything chiptune related after the disaster that was gen 1's arranging and while ichinose has a much better grasp of how to arrange for the hardware his instrumentation was not particularly wild
compare to cave noire (released in 1991), dragon quest 2 (released in 1999), or medabots 2 (released in 1999) and it becomes clear that pokemon is way behind the frontrunners when it comes to instrumentation (even ignoring the european scene, which were definitely the best with the gameboy's audio) and even composition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vyN6eVXFkMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYUfhxc3z8Uhttps://youtu.be/vR9X5z5t0pk?t=1173 (the polished version of this track used for medabots 4 is way better, but medabots 4 is 2001 and the track is outshined as a battle theme by tracks like do or die anyway)
pokemon is not BAD, i would put it in the top half for gameboy rpg osts (or at the very least, gen 2 would, i'm not sure if i can say that much about gen 1), but it wouldn't get much higher than that to me
