Rip of the week: 11/11/2024
Radical Halation
Season 2 Featured on: Rips of Christmas Past Also on: Now That's What I Call Quality!
Ripped by wheel able, wolfman1405, David Morales Boroff
Birthday Special!
Anniversaries, anniversaries...how they come, how they go. This week in particular is a pretty special anniversary, not just for the release of hit game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but for the release of ME: My birthday!
It's surreal how vividly I still remember when I wrote Your Silent Reality for my last birthday, covering a SiIvaGunner rip that's sat with me long since I first heard it due to the emotional ties I have to the material it utilizes. I began this entire blog as a way to give me writing practice, and I'd like to think I've grown a fair bit as a writer in the time since; but nevertheless, even a year and a half since the blog's begun, my emotional attachment to Season 2 of SiIvaGunner remains as firm as ever. The channel's output has grown to be more impressive than ever before, and last year's Season 7 in particular has had me in a chokehold with rips like Beautiful Dreamer (late but- happy birthday Minindo!) and The Paragoomba and the Wiggler...and yet, I will always keep coming back to the rips of that second season, to the rips that defined my ride-or-die fixation to the channel, and to the season that more than any other gave me feelings for things I didn't even know I was capable of caring so deeply about. Indeed, in direct contrast to last year's birthday rip, Radical Halation was the kind of gift I never knew I needed, yet one I will never stop treasuring.
Way back when I covered the rip Eterna's Cocoon, I wrote about how special it is to me to know that rippers on the team will continue to champion the works which have long since faded from public consciousness. Sure, SiIvaGunner leverages then-current events for comedy a fair number of times; a previous post on the blog's covered one such example in Lagplane, and one of the channel's most revered events back on Your Best Nightmario only came about as a result of a viral meme from that same timeframe. Yet just as often - if not moreso - the channel operates within its own bubble of time, with no care in the world for relevance or target audiences, a team making rips in huge part just for their own enjoyment. Take, for instance, the 1999 SquareSoft JRPG Chrono Cross; a game that, six years before its remaster in 2022, still existed as nary but a memory to many. Nevertheless, it was a memory treasured by two rippers in particular, a duo who had already impressed me time and time again throughout the channel's first two years. Be it Sog-Gee Ambiance, voiceless, Kass' Theme, or their previous collaborative work on 28 Saves Later, wheel able's stellar touch for arrangement and wolfman1405's unbelievable talents as a jazz performer are both some of the absolute highlights across the channel's early run. When the time came for one of the most important anniversaries relevant to the SiIvaGunner channel, the two took the opportunity to also honor a forgotten classic they both cherished – and in doing so, Radical Halation ironically became one of the first times I ever engaged with Chrono Cross. With the game's anniversary also just two days away, and the rip lying so close to my heart, I see no better time than to reciprocate that passion all these years later.
The sheer quality of Radical Halation should be made evident just a few seconds into listening; this is, as Wolfman1405 in particular specializes in, a ground-up cover and performance of the original Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel theme from Chrono Cross. The original theme already had a shockingly acoustic sound to it for its era, really plucking at the emotions just a few chords in; that emotional rawness in the track may well have been the core reason why it was chosen to celebrate this anniversary in particular. Indeed, the anniversary I alluded to beforehand as being one of the channel's most crucial is that of the very song the rip title alludes to, the song that sits at the very emotional core of SiIvaGunner's entire being: Snow Halation from Love Live. I wrote back on Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix) that the Grand Dad meme is like the beating heart of SiIvaGunner's creative spirit, being the core that created the entire channel; by that same logic, I feel as if Snow Halation is like SiIvaGunner's *emotional* core, its "soul" for lack of a better term. Grand Dad may be the spark that sets new rippers into action even all these years later, but Snow Halation was the first thing that people got EMOTIONALLY attached to on SiIvaGunner – it was the core behind its first story arc of SiIvaGunner: Rebooted, it continues to effectively serve as the "protagonist" to the Christmas Comeback Crisis storyline – and its use throughout the channel continues to feel like a reminder of that same attachment, the one that the channel has to all of us. It's an openly sappy, almost overbearing song, yet one that represents so much about the love of remixing and rearranging that SiIvaGunner continues to focus on all these years later.
You take that emotionally-charged melody, put it in the hands of two stellar arrangers, and inject it into an arrangement of an emotional melody the soundscape of which said aforementioned rippers already appear to hold a close attachment to, and the end result is exactly what Radical Halation shows us. Throughout 2016, throughout the entirety of Season 1 of SiIvaGunner, we as the audience had gone on such an emotional rollercoaster regarding out attachment to the channel, its creatives, and its memes, with Snow Halation at the very center of it all; with the channel returned just in time for the holidays, it also happened to return just in time for Snow Halation's anniversary on December 22nd, ever so coincidentally aligned with the time upon which we were all wholly, earnestly in love with everything the song had come to represent. Many months before Season 3 and beyond would begin feeding irony into the discussion of appreciation for these melodies, right as the Christmas Comeback Crisis was just kicking into gear, and just long enough after the channel's return had occurred to make us truly accept that it was back, Radical Halation's release window struck gold in a way only truly comparable to the rips of the Season 1 finale a la Tupac's Empty House and THANK YOU FOR RIPPING.
I'm of course not aiming to frame Radical Halation as just being "the right thing at the right time"; beyond that emotional attachment, the simple fact of the matter still remains that its a hauntingly beautiful arrangement, even close to 8 years later. Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel's beauty sinks in just from the acoustic guitar lead-in, and is only emphasized by the time the rip's true "twist" sets in, of its lead melody being that of a Snow Halation arrangement played on violin. The two halves form an incredible, inseperable whole; not confined by the restrictions of a mashup, the hand-made nature of this arrangement means that both the guitar and violin segments are free to fill in for one another, to emphasize the sounds of Radical Dreamers ~ Unstolen Jewel or the melody of Snow Halation to different degrees on a moment-to-moment basis. I particularly love the section after the Snow Halation melody first plays - at around 0:47, the violin seamlessly leaves the Snow Halation melody and instead takes cues from the source track, yet never stops feeling as if its all from the same arrangement, even upon returning to Snow Halation at 01:10. The rip throughout has the same feeling as the best and most carefully-constructed mashups of today a la Eazystep or Maroonbound whilst in reality being a completely new arrangement and performance.
The visuals of the rip are of course just the cherry on top of it all. Viewers are made immediately aware that the rip is going to be something special not just through its audio, but from the cold-open visuals of pitch blackness fading into a view of the ocean from underneath the surface, the logo fading in just as the melody's played its first few notes. These visuals only change once Snow Halation is first quoted in the audio, changing from the undersea depths to the view of a beachside in winter, a quite literal mash-up of Chrono Cross' dreamy seasides and the snow-covered comfort of Snow Halation. None of this visual detail is particularly "necessary", it's not here to further a punchline; rather, in the spirit of rips like i love(d) you, the visuals serve to punctuate the emotional core of the rip. Visuals in any rip are a surprise, an often-time momentous occasion, and Radical Halation combines that knowledge with its purpose of celebrating Snow Halation's first-ever anniversary celebration on the SiIvaGunner channel to create a rip that, even with no ties to Chrono Cross at the time of watching, I just KNEW would be special back in 2016 just three seconds in.
All these years later, and a rip as special, profound and heartfelt as Radical Halation still manages to feel...forgotten about, in many ways, sitting at less than 25K views as of writing. In that sense, Chrono Cross may have been a more apt game to use for this tribute than its rippers initially thought; all these years later, despite its clear emotional core, the passion that went into it and the release of its remaster, the game remains a jewel swept away by the tides of the industry. We're soon nearing nine whole years of the SiIvaGunner channel's run, and with every day I run this blog I'm made all the more aware of how many gems just like Radical Halation continue to slip by the cracks, how much joy and love the channel's team crams into so much of its output despite never having any sort of guarantee that its audience will reciprocate that love.
But, even all those years ago, Radical Halation did reach me. And even so many years before the idea of this blog was even a consideration, before I was knee-deep in thought about the channel's existence and the people involved in its upkeep...I knew that I wanted to thank its creators. I knew that it was a rip that could only have been made out of outpouring love; love for a game years old, love for a channel that was still standing shakily, love for a leitmotif and its impact on an audience...and most of all, the love of creating and performing music outright.
I held onto those thoughts, kept them stashed away in the back of my mind – yet I feel as if subconsciously, they were part of why wolfman1405's arrangement and performance of Sunday Morning, three years later, hit me as hard as it did. The song was different, the subject was different, the context was different, the "joke" was no longer there; and yet it was as if Wolfman1405's creative, emotional spirit, that I'd felt so prominently years past, had never left. Put simply, beyond its inherent qualities that I'll forever applaud wheel able and wolfman1405 for, I feel...indebted to Radical Halation: it may well just be one rip, but its one of the most core pieces I can think of for why my love for the channel continues to this very day.
