I connect strongly with the music of the games I play, so growing up a fan of Sonic and Pokémon was great. There was always
one song from Pokémon Silver that was so beautiful and pleasant that I would be overcome with emotion and nostalgia every time I heard it, even as a kid. That song was the National Park.
After beating the game I always made sure to save there when I finished playing, so any time I felt like playing it again after a long time I would be greeted with that song.
As for Sonic, I played the hell out of the GBA games because at the time I didn't have a then-current gen console (PS2/Xbox/Gamecube). I loved Sonic Battle, the music, the art, the arena brawler gameplay, and the story. I was really into customizing and building up Emerl,
making him OP as hell watching him grow, but then he went mad with power, blew up a star and then died, so that sucked. Then Sonic Advance 3 came out and Eggman's new robot lackey was a rebuild of Emerl with spare parts and data or something called Gemerl, and I kinda took it personally, like "How DARE you remake my precious boy to do your bidding AND MAKE HIM LOOK COOLER?!" So I played through the game, followed the convoluted steps to get the Chaos Emeralds, and unlocked the true final boss. Once again, Gemerl went mad with power and stole the emeralds to become more powerful and flew into space, forcing Sonic and Eggman to team up to stop him. After some excellent
Super transformation music, the final battle begins, and this song begins to play:
I was kinda floored. It was Emerl's theme. It was a remix of
Emerl's theme from Sonic Battle. Up until that point I was mostly playing up the story just for my own enjoyment, because the story in the Sonic Advance games are pretty minimal compared to Battle's. But when I heard that song for the first time I was shook. I remembered all the good times had with Emerl, then I was brought back to the end of Battle, where Sonic had to defeat his "son" (it's stupid saying it now, but it made sense in the game) and it was actually really damn sad. And now here he had to do it a second time. It was such an overwhelming bittersweet feeling listening to it, and I still feel it when I return to this track. It's such a damn good remix, and even the fight itself was pretty decent. I love those two games a lot, and this song from this moment plays a big part in that.
