listening to people rank new horizons music and i just realized the reason im not as big a fan of the hourly music is not just because some of the synths stand out like a sore thumb but because a lot of them are honestly interchangeable for the feel of the hour? a lot of them sound too similar, even with 600+ hours into new horizons you can play a song for me and i probably wont be able to tell what time of day it plays unless it’s iconic ones that stand out like 5am, 5pm or 6pm. new leaf set the bar so high for the hourly music sounding like, well... the vibe of the time of day it’s meant to communicate.
like in new horizons 7am and 8am in new horizons sound like they could be early afternoon songs, 8pm sounds like it should be 8am, 9pm sounds like it could be early morning like 2am etc.
but the songwriting in new leaf’s hourlies sounded EXACTLY as they should for their respective hour. that atmosphere is very important to me and i was really let down by new horizons’s soundtrack