ReMix:Undertale "NoMercy" 2:44

Newcomer Nwgo (Nedim Gökhan Aydın) is from Turkey, where there has recently been a devastating earthquake. If you're looking for ways to help out, there are some relevant charities accepting donations, and I always recommend Doctors Without Borders. Natural disasters remind us that we're all in this together; Earth may still be our precious & only home, but it can also be a very dangerous place. The artist writes:

"I believe I have finally made something that I can submit to OC ReMix. I have carefully read the submission instructions. Although it is clearly stated that "chiptunes" are discouraged, I still wanted to give it a shot as some of the my favourite remixes in this community are chiptunes already! Looking forward to your feedback.

There is an artist called Paptircem, who started an online challenge where she prepares a music sample by following the poll results on Instagram and followers respond with a cover/remix to that. I have made a chiptune remix, the community and the artist liked it, which encouraged me a lot. I have been listening to chiptunes since my teen years and since 2 years I have been specifically reading, watching, learning, and working on chiptunes in my free time. This semester, my work at university did not leave me any time to produce anything satisfying, thus I have made a poll on my own instagram and asked for songs that may sound nice as chiptune. One of my students suggested "Megalovania", which excited me a lot since I've recently completed Undertale and loved it. "Megalovania" is an amazing low-bit, chiptune-ish song which blew the minds of thousands of fans around the world.

I was planning to do simple, a few minutes-long projects in a few days for each suggestion, but "Megalovania" took 3 months to fully satisfy me. There are lots of arpeggios and short, plucky notes here. The song starts with the notes from the bridge part of the original song. We hear the original melodies from the song that are re-arranged with chiptune instruments, which ultimately changes A LOT to result in an original scramble of notes and tones, still respecting the original scale and melody. In the final part, there are faint non-chiptune sounds (choir, cello and flute) used. I had a final fight clip on my mind, including the infamous "No Mercy" fighting scene, Flowey's fight, gathering colorful hearts, and the final scene of full pacifist ending where all the heroes were watching the scenery. I wanted to name it "NoMercy" since I wanted to put the feeling of "constantly increasing pressure" and a constantly transforming badass boss fight. Tried to fill it with my feelings. I hope I could do it in the correct way."

We're trying to revise our standards for clarity & brevity, but the original intent was to discourage chiptune ***demakes***, specifically of the variety where the core composition's tempo & general structure are identical and only the instruments are swapped out. It's been misinterpreted enough that the fault is clearly our own, for not being clearer, but the short version is: as long as it's interpretive, we LOVE chiptunes... and anything else. Nedim leans on a lot of the tricks & tweaks & ornaments that make chiptune so much fun, and I also dig the tempo fluctuation. Judges were unanimous, but did all feel like the snare was a little hot. DarkSim sums it up nicely:

"Classic source tune. Classic 8-bit synth choices as well, although as Larry says, you've not restricted yourself to the channel/waveform limitations of the NES, allowing for some more creative expression when it comes to sound design.

I enjoyed the glitching and flourishes from 0:27, although when the beat comes in, the percussion is definitely mixed too loudly. Typically with chiptunes, it's easy to pick out individual elements, particularly the melody, but I find the white noise in the snare is bleeding into a lot of the tonal content. You can still pick everything out, but some extra EQ and mixing attention on the percussion would go a long way here.

The slowdown into half-tempo section is really cool, and then there are some nice layered sounds at play as the track builds back up to the finish. Despite the lofi sound palette, you've got a nice warm, rich sound, particularly in the slower sections where the beat isn't so prevalent.

Overall it's a very enjoyable track that I'm sure will please fans of the original. Not without its faults, but a great debut nonetheless."

I'll second that; Nedim's students are lucky to have a teacher that can jam like this, and now we're lucky, too. Enjoy!