#keeby10

Suddenly, the memories all come flooding back.

Ever since I started taking this blog seriously, I'd known what today's post would be. I've celebrated a good few events on here - Christmas, Halloween, Voiceless Week, and so forth. Yet for the second of February - the day of the sequel - there was only one event fit to be covered. The legendary Chain of Memories II Day.

I wanted to make sure, before the day of reckoning came, that I'd made a post covering long-time ripper ShonicTH, as he's very much at the core of this event and all that surrounds it. As I described in Trial of the Heart, ShonicTH was one of the first members on SiIva that felt recognizable from their output alone, due purely to just how prominent his love for Kingdom Hearts and its music was. Soon enough, that expression of love would extend into ironic shitposting, as we got exposed to what one could consider an inside joke turned channel meme. As a Kingdom Hearts megafan, ShonicTH was aware of a subset of the community on YouTube who would post "remastered" music uploads from Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, only for the remastering effort to simply be slathering the original tracks in heaps of reverb. That is of course terrible for the sake of remastering, but undeniably fucking hilarious for the sake of ripping to SiIvaGunner - it wasn't long until we'd start seeing reverberating rips of Chain of Memories posted to the channel, and not long therafter where a very iconic catchphrase would begun being spread in the comments of each one of them.

"LOL with all that reverb and also it being KH, I know exactly who made this one. Good stuff my dude." -SSB_Seal, SiIvaGunner YouTube Comments

In SiIva's later years, the idea of SiIva uploading rips that have no intention of sounding good is kind of just commonplace, be it with Sex - Steve Harvey or even Snowball Park - Super Mario 3D World. But what the Chain of Memories reverb in-joke would eventually culminate into, on ShonicTH's birthday on May 13th 2017, was an entire day dedicated to these rips: the entire game's soundtrack of 38 tracks were ripped and all posted to the YouTube channel at the exact same time, promptly flooding the sub boxes of anyone who wasn't prepared. Chain of Memories Day became the sort of thing I would tell horror stories about to my friends, the perfect example of just how thoroughly unpredictable SiIvaGunner was, and how fucking funny it was all along the way.

But that's the thing - it was, in some small way, able to be predicted. If you'd been following ShonicTH's imprint on the channel up until May 2017, and knew that it was his birthday, you could've at least been prepared for what was to come. NOBODY was able to be prepared for the secondcoming - Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories II Day.

Season 4 Episode 1's main mission statement, before being wholly engulfed in the King for Another Day Tournament, was to make a season more unpredictable and chaotic than anything the channel had been before. And on August 31st, we saw perhaps the best demonstration of those efforts - 69 rips from a made up sequel game, 28 of which were some sort of absurd spin on the theme song Simple and Clean, uploaded at the span of once per minute. To call this day a rollercoaster would be an understatement.

Because, like, as only the second rip posted across the event, Kingdom Hearts-type beat began as sort of giving us false hope. Compared to the rips of the Season 2 event, it was just a pretty neat trap remix of the Hollow Bastion theme, with little indicating the intents of the rips to follow beyond just being moderately trashy in the way trap music tends to be. That room for doubt would be soundly squashed in the minutes to follow, as every rip seemed to be getting worse than the last. Simple and Clean (Gamma Mix) is, in no uncertain terms, LITERALLY just noise, as four separate poorly-done covers of the original song are laid atop one another with a metric fuckton of reverb, as the culmination of three prior rips each adding one more garbage cover onto the pile. Simple and Clean (Omicron Mix) features a bizarre audio recording of a poorly done Donald Trump impression, pretending to hold a speech whilst actually just reading the lyrics to Simple and Clean, althewhile a Kazoo blasts faintly celebratory music in the background. The amount of layers of irony at play to be making one of the channel's first-ever jabs at America's most ridiculed man take place during an event like this is simply incredible, and its the kind of rip that's so thoroughly unfunny that it loops back to being comedy gold.

To say that the day was painful would be one thing, yet it was the kind of pain that felt like a genuinely unbelievable experience to be part of. After Simple and Clean (Mu Mix), I think most of us expected the event to be over, with the typical Snow Halation celebration video a la Snow Halocean and its many predecessors. And yeah, despite the dubious quality of the cover, Simple and Clean (Mu Mix) was still giving the event a sort of "final" feel, as the rapid uploads halted at a nice, sufficient 29 rips.

Only a few minutes later, the rips would continue as if nothing had even happened - we'd been utterly bamboozled.

Having lived through both the Chain of Memories Day events makes me feel like a genuine survivor of war, yet when looking back on the events in hindsight I can't help but let out a sickening, yet joyous cackle. And I wanted to put Simple and Clean (Psi Mix) as the headlining rip of this mess because how well it encapsulates that joyous side to it all - through the reverb and through the context, you can tell that Keeby10 was genuinely having a ton of fun preparing all these bizarre rips for the event. SiIvaGunner is a fantastic source for quality, amazing rearrangements, but as I talked about in Can't Say Goodbye to Yesterday - as performed by Bob Dylan, there's something so thoroughly enjoyable about seeing the human nature behind the channel shine through from time to time. Simple and Clean (Psi Mix) isn't going in anyone's playlist of bangers, but it embodies so much of the fun that defined the event, and by extension so much of the affection that the team clearly hold for ShonicTH and his niche in-joke about Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories music remasters.