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7grandmel · 28 days

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Todays rips: 31/03/2024

Your Best Nightmario and Bowser's Finale

Season 5 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume C

Ripped by Blookerstein

youtube

Season 5 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume C

Ripped by Blookerstein, Sarvéproductions

youtube

Requested by themessengervevo! (@themessengervevo)

You KNEW this day was coming. Surely, right? Its March 31st, a landmark day in gaming history. The day that Super Mario died. The day we lost him to time forever. And the day that spawned perhaps the greatest April Fools event on all of SiIvaGunner. For me, its no contest - Your Best Nightmario and Bowser's Finale, and the entire event they were part of, were the absolute highlight of Season 5.

The April Fools events held prior on the channel since their very beginnings with Grand Dad Metropolis had all been presented as complete surprises. That is perhaps a given - it is in the nature of a prank to be surprising - but it's also where the Season 5 event differs most even today, in that its theme was all but known to us well beforehand. Announced on September 3rd of 2020 as part of a bizarre marketing tactic to drive up demand, Nintendo had let us known that their newfangled Mario celebration releases in Super Mario 3D All-Stars and Super Mario Bros. 35, would both be delisted from sale after March 31st. Super Mario Bros. 35 stung in its own right - it is effectively lost media now as a digital-only, online-only game, but Super Mario 3D All-Stars contained three of Nintendo's most celebrated games, games that had no reason to stop being sold just for a cheap trick. Everyone rightfully denoted how scummy of a tactic this was to drive up sales, but more than that: the imagery of Nintendo celebrating Mario's birthday by killing his games - and by proxy, killing Mario himself - was a joke that online spaces just ran absolutely rampant with. And can you blame them? That IS funny as shit, and reframes Nintendo's slimy marketing into something that makes them look far worse. Because of the joke's sheer prevalence, I had the same thought as many others in the early days of 2021 - there was *no way* that the SiIvaGunner team were blind to the potential this gag had, and how well it lined up with their previous explosive festivities just a day after. By March 29th, they even teased the event's start with three daily rips of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, a game all about impending doom affecting the world in just three days, with each rip featuring the melody of one of the three 3D Mario games in the collection.

And sure enough, the day came. With March 31st, we saw a whole day of nothing but Mario rips and Mario-related jokes in other rips - a last hurrah for his life - all ending with Super 3D All-Stars Music S64 Game Over. Just like that, he was gone - faded from the video, faded from view. Yet few of us could've predicted just how dire things would get.

In SiIvaGunner lore, the term "Figment" refers to the personification a meme or joke on the channel takes, its characterized state - think Mr. Rental in Mr. Rental [B Side] ~ Out of Options or Inspector Gadget in Become as Gadget and throughout his two takeovers. When a figment based on a real human dies, it can easily be reborn - the human itself lives on in the real world, after all, and can recreate the essence of its Figment in a variety of ways. But when a purely fictional Figment dies...its erased from all history. As if it had never existed to begin with, all traces of it are wiped from memory, wiped from the very state of having ever existed. And under Nintendo's very own Gulliotine, this was the fate Super Mario himself succumbed to. As a result every single Super Mario-series rip uploaded in the channel's five-year run, be they Kart, Sports, Paper or just outright Super, was set to private on the SiIvaGunner channel. And as April 1st of 2021 went on, it seemed to be harder and harder to remember the name of that mustachioed man. Had someone like that...ever existed?

I'm certain a lot of what I'm writing here is familiar ground to many of you reading, but I really want to convey just how incredibly well-done this atmosphere was. Throughout April 1st, fifty-five rips were uploaded, many of which featuring games that seemed just...the slighest bit off. The opening to the classic Philips CD-i game "Hotel", where a lone Luigi talks to himself; The underwater music featured in the SNES Launch title "Super World" with a bizarrely-lopsided logo, and most prominently - games like Super M̸̌̊a̴͛̿█̸͌̑i̵̛͊█̷̾̓ 64, Super M̸̌̊a̴͛̿█̸͌̑i̵̛͊█̷̾̓ Sunshine and Super █̴̧̀a̵̤̐r̷̙̋█̶̰̆o̶͚̚ Galaxy, three games that were bound by a strange malfunction in their presentation, as if they're collectively...held back by something. Or someone.

Your Best Nightmario stood out as the centerpiece of it all, with a title yet more bizarrely mangled than the rest - Super 👉█̸͌̑█̷̾̓😁̶̆͠☼̷̇̃👈̸̂͑█̷̾̓█̾̓ 64. Two fingers, pointing toward a desperate smile. It's-a-me. The rip serves as an incredible multi-stage arrangement of Your Worst Nightmare from Undertale, the boss music for Flowey the Flower. Its already incredibly befitting on the surface level - Undertale is at once one of SiIva's most prominently-ripped games, and a game very much about the state of living game characters have, the idea of how characters in games can affect you in a way that makes them worth remembering for all time. And though the rip is initially in line with the instrumentation of the original Ultimate Koopa theme, it uses the segmented style-shifting sections of Your Worst Nightmare to arrange music from other Nintendo platforming games - the ones primarily bound by featuring characters like Luigi, Peach and Bowser within them, but ones where I can't really place my finger on who their protagonist is. As a result of all these styles and the fervent, desperate, downright nightmarish pace of the music, paired with the full-on galactic-scale orchestral sections near the rips end, it truly feels like a hopeless struggle, a plea from an unknown hero to stay alive, to not be forgotten, to not be lost to the sands of time.

The sheer atmosphere conveyed throughout the entire event was primarily carried through these rips, of course, but it cannot be understated just how much of a part the comments section played in it all. There was no confusion - the buildup had been done so well, the gag established so clearly, that EVERYONE was on board with the day's theming in the comments, and "playing along" with the story's theme. Everyone reminisced and had fond memories of all these games - New Super Bros., Luigi: Superstar Saga, Super 64 DS, and more - yet we were all collectively wondering why things felt so different from before. It was the most fun collective gaslighting I've ever been part of.

As the day came to an end, Mario's fate seemed to be set - the entirety of April 2nd was silent, except for one rip that confirmed that even our beloved Gangsta Mario (see Caramariodansen) was lost. Yet on April 3rd, we were all finally met with Bowser's Finale, a direct followup to Your Best Nightmario by its very same ripper. Blookerstein, the legend behind The expanse of meme in past was split, A fiendish trap has now been set; Behind a tree the villains sit, Terror of sport, the Robbie's Net., this time aided by Sarvéproductions of Goodbye To Love fame, created the absolute perfect way to round out the event - a return to the desperate battle that had once seemed lost, now with the music of Finale instead of Your Worst Nightmare to indicate the turning of the tides - that this legend, nay, SUPER MARIO, was not going to give up. This figment did not deserve to leave us - and Bowser's Finale was his last stand. The excitement in the air, in the comments section, was palpable.

Finale is already an incredible theme, and one that some of us even have some emotional attachment to in the context of SiIva - remember Aphex all the way back in Season 1? Bowser's Finale leverages those feelings, and the theming set up throughout the event as a whole, to incredible effect, with the same structure of going through the styles of various Mario music to rising dramatic effect. Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, Super Mario Galaxy - the first two using songs like Slider and A Secret Course that are beloved by so many SiIvaGunner viewers, the third hitting a emotional gutpunch in its orchestral instrumentation, and all three bound together as the games that started this whole thing, the games part of the 3D All-Stars collection. It is with no exaggeration a pitch-perfect rendition of this idea, better than anything I could've ever anticipated before the event began - once again only elevated through the sheer sense of community the entire comments section held through it all, cheering Mario on, collectively remembering his existence - fighting to bring this lost figment back to reality.

Y'know, I've been critical of Season 5 in the past - it is likely still the Season of the channel I was "least" invested in taken on the whole. That is in large part due to its lack of ties to the channel's ongoing lore, as it was focused primarily on self-contained events just like this one. But GOD, those events. I still see people online today who are less in touch with what SiIvaGunner does, who cite this event - "The Disappearance of Super Mario", as some call it - as the absolute peak of SiIvaGunner's output past the Season 1 finale. I wouldn't necessarily agree - but the event was undoubtedly unforgettable, at once an incredible execution of a long-anticipated bit, surprisingly emotionally gripping, whilst also being subtly tied to the very canon and theming of the SiIvaGunner channel itself. I chose to highlight Your Best Nightmario and Bowser's Finale in particular today, but I emplore you to go watch the entire event yourself through the fanmade YouTube playlists - if nothing else to see just how committed to the bit everyone involved truly was.

But don't forget: There's more to this tale yet to be retold.

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