Well, there's an original solo at 1:50. That was enough arrangement to get Wicked Six onto OCR, recall.

Besides the fact that it was played with axes instead of saws. ;)

Okay, we've got a majority of people in favor of the source of an arrangement factoring in some way. Now, the question is, how so?

The way I see it, there are three ways we can handle this. In order of increasing strictness:

1. allow the source to be taken into account while determining track obscurity without automatically disqualifying tracks (i.e., sufficiently obscure arrangements of One Winged Angel are fine)
2. bar arrangements of tracks above a certain level of obscurity, where that level is somewhere between One Winged Angel and Suikoden
3. put the source of an arrangement to the same obscurity test as the track itself

I'm greatly in favor of the first idea, and a few other people in this thread have shown support for it as well. What do the peoples want?

I like option 2.

The way I see it, an arrangement of One-Winged Angel, no matter how obscure, is still going to sound like One-Winged Angel. And I'm pretty damned sick of that song.

A good example would be this: Kid Icarus (Partena no Kagami) & Metroid ~ Arranged Cassete - Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka <05> bgm medley (Metroid)

It's definitely an arrangement and it's probably known but not immensely so. And it's by a reasonably popular composer. Just the same, it's the freaking music from Brinstar! We all know this melody. We've heard it umpteen times. Aside from some more resonant synths and background fx, it's nothing new.

Just because it isn't the original track doesn't mean it's relatively unknown.

I'd go with option 2 as well. Seems more reasonable to me. Again, there's plenty of obscure original music out there; no need to have arrangements of songs we know in SotW.

I'd say 3.

We allowed an actual Suikoden track into the contest after debate; an arrangement of that song or one of similar obscurity should be fine as a result.

The thing we really want to avoid, as Crash mentioned, is hearing the same old usual suspects in slightly revised form, and most arrangements are going to sound something like their source (otherwise, they wouldn't be arrangements!). Requiring the source itself to be at least semi-obscure is, in my view, the best way to do this.

There can only be 1.

I'm going with option 2, as well. It's kind of the middle ground for me and provides some leeway without going overboard. I think. But some degree of flexibility might be nice to allow certain exceptional cases to make the final cut (can't think of any at the moment).