In 3rd place, New Battle!!! from Xenoblade Chronicles 3 takes the victory over Pretty Heroes from Goodbye Volcano High.

And our champion: Venba’s Kanni Kanini! This takes the gold over our runner-up, Colgera Battle from Tears of the Kingdom. Which, I think is the best a Zelda song has ever done? Definitely a song worthy of such a prestigious honor, despite its youth.

With this we’re finally caught up to present day! So it’s time to prepare for our long-awaited Tournament of Champions! Here’s the structure:

Automatically qualifying for the tournament are:

• The top 4 from our pre-1983 tournament
• The top 16 from every other tournament, except:
• The top 8 from this tournament, and the top 8 from the 21-22 tournament

This results in 148 songs for our final tourney. That’s a good amount, but I feel like we could have more. So, the next tournament will be a last-chance qualifier! Automatically nominated in this qualifier will be:

• 5th-8th in the pre-1983 tournament
• 17th-32nd in every other tournament
• 9th-16th in this tournament and 21-22

Which is a group of 180 songs. Joining them in the last chance qualifier will be songs nominated by us! But since this is an exclusive club, nominations will be slightly different. For the next tournament, you may only nominate 25 songs each. Other than that, any video game song that existed prior to this year is eligible (I’m excluding 2025 to keep things consistent). I’ll hold nominations for this soon-ish. When I do so I’ll be sure to have a compiled list of which specific songs are already qualified for the main TOC and which songs are auto-qualified for the last chance qualifier. I’ll also figure out how many songs I’d like to advance from the qualifier, and if I wanna get fancy with the tournament format, since we aren’t looking for one ultimate champion there.