>>53496078Honestly, I think all of them are worse
FRLG absolutely fucked up the beautiful simplicity of the originals by going “HEY GUYS WHAT IF WE ADDED 5 INSTRUMENTS TO EVERY SONG FOR NO REASON AND DIDN’T BOTHER TO MAKE THEM GET ALONG”,
HGSS replaced a lot of Johto’s themes with borderline marching-band music (which just isn’t my thing),
ORAS took XY’s bad soundtrack and used it as a base by adding really tired-sounding brass and horns (alongside bad synths) to otherwise-bombastic songs, draining them of energy,
LGPE just gave up and put everything through the most boring orchestration possible (listen to Pokémon Mansion and weep),
and BDSP is BDSP. Ignoring that the soundtrack was incomplete on release, even the updated version is a tragedy. Holy fuck Pokémon Center Night got slaughtered.
I think HGSS has the best remake soundtrack, followed by ORAS, but none of them are better than their originals and HGSS is the only one I can call “good”. FRLG and ORAS have a few decent battling themes I guess, but that’s on the same level as SwSh/SV in terms of praise so they get 0 awards.
I think the issue is that a lot of the earlier games were built on their soundfonts- RSE and DPPt especially- so taking them out of that soundfont or even trying to badly replicate it sounds awful as a result.
I can’t really explain the failure of the chip tunes, though. Those should’ve been easy slam dunks
