Finals:

Corridors of Time is avenged! One of y’all who’s actually played the Chrono games could probably say more than me here, but Scars of Time is a neat song and a worthy winner.

Bronze Medal Match:

In a true squeaker Gerudo Valley takes 3rd. Just a preview for what its later remixes can do? Meanwhile, I think this is the definitive version of Man with the Machine Gun. 4th place still isn’t bad!

And that’s it! It has been 3 months since this tournament started. I think it’s safe to say that things went a bit sideways. The new group stage procedure was a failure. It did not solve the problem it was meant to; earlier groups put in significantly more songs than later groups, and a whopping 651 songs advanced to the playoffs. The first two rounds of the playoffs alone took over a month; if we had cut directly to a top 256 we’re probably looking at a tournament more in line with the 16-bit one.

So, to keep future tournaments more manageable, I’m proposing the following changes.
1. The next tournament will cover 2001-2004, and there will no longer be any attempt to match console generations moving forward.
This one was inevitable. As OSTs get longer and the industry grows larger, attempting to match tournaments to full generations will inevitably result in thousands of nominees and tournaments that take the better part of a year to resolve. And that’s before you take into account the 7th and 8th generations being 7 years each.

2. The playoffs will be capped* at 256
There may be some wiggle room; for instance, if there’s a tie for the final spots maybe there’s one day dedicated to tiebreakers or something. But I don’t want to ever have meaningfully more than 256 songs in a playoff ever again. 256 songs already means 19 days of playoffs; 512 bumps that up to 37 and frankly I don’t want to even think about what 1024+ would mean. This will probably mean that a lot of neat marginal songs don’t make it beyond group play; hopefully by reducing the years of eligibility we can keep a somewhat reasonable ratio of playoff to non-playoff songs.

3. Hey, it’s another new voting system for group stages!
I’m sorry for messing with it again, but I think I’ve finally got something that’ll be equitable. The new system: votes in the group stages will be normalized based on how many people voted in each group. What this means is that if, say, 26 different people vote in group 2, and a song in group 2 gets 16 upvotes, then it will get recorded as 16/26 (or ~61.5384%). Then, when determining the top 256, only this percentage will count. All songs will be considered equally regardless of group; no more group champions.

4. No more than 32* songs per day, ever.
I already made this call in the middle of this tournament, but want to make it official. 48 songs was too many to comfortably finish in one day. Depending on how math works there may be some groups with 33 songs, but I won’t push beyond that.

So, that’s it. Let me know in the comments what you think, if you disagree with any of the changes or the reasoning behind them, and if you have any ideas of your own. The next tournament will happen soon-ish; I’m going to take a few weeks off, but I don’t think I’ll wait too long.