What a banger of a source. I won't lie, this vote has been very hard...

Anyway, we begin with a very sharp saw synth bass playing "on top" (as in, volume) what, like proph and Larry, I suspect is the source's piano directly sampled. This continues for a bit until 0:25, where the sampling suspicions become pretty obvious when the acoustic guitar enters the mix. During these first ~30s, the bass has been playing some pretty cool lines, some seem to be "original" and some seem to be quoting the faint bass lines from the source. At 0:30 we have the proper beat drop and the track keeps the same "idea", synth bass and percussion playing on top of the sampled source. The way the source is sampled is (probably intentionally) very lossy, which is a bit of an odd sound. At 0:45 we have a more fun riff since the source here is chopped up in more creative ways. 1:01 we return to a more direct sampling of the next section of the source, 1:15 the same. 1:22 samples an earlier section with a fun filter effect acting as a transition to the next part of the source which is, again, quite directly sampled. 1:44 echoes the section at 0:45 with some fun chopping of what I assume is source audio, which continues until 2:14. Honestly, the audio clip here is so modified I don't even know it's actually the source! 2:14 has the intro sample again and then the first "verse" again, over different bass lines though. 2:36 is another repeat of the 0:45. 3:05 introduces a synth bass riff based on the intro and then the track ends on a somewhat underwhelming cymbal.

Ok, so I actually think this is pretty cool on arrangement and production (mostly). The original is a fun track and we go through some straight "interpretations" of it but there's also a couple of variations added in the form of the "0:45 riff". Production is nice when it comes to bass and drums, the former's dirrty sound I dig and the latter's quite punchy. Now, the sampled audio feels extremely low quality, which I assume is kinda intentional to give the focus to the added instruments.

Now, the question is how does this approach do against OCR's bar? Honestly, it's tough. I'll quote 2 parts from the submissions standards. First, from the Arrangement section:

Second, from the Production section:

First, "Taking the original game audio and simply adding drum loops". While that's not literally what's happening here, it's actually not very far from the approach of a big chunk (basically everything except the "0:45 riff" and the outro) of the remix, since it's quite literally the source audio with bass and drums on top.

Second, sampled audio. The only direct mention of sampled audio I could find in the standards is the one I quoted above, which only forbids it from Square Enix games. HOWEVER, the Production section clearly states "[...] relying heavily on prerecorded loops,[...] is discouraged". This track, quite obviously, has complete reliance on a prerecorded loop, the source itself.

Given those 2 things, while I do think this sounds pretty cool, I don't think it fits OCR's standards since it relies way too heavily on sampling the original and, for a lot of the track, doesn't even modify it.

NO

Edited July 13 by jnWake