I’ve been listening to the Ridiculon soundtrack and I have to say, I’ve genuinely been enjoying a good portion of it. Sure, Cave Story with electric guitar is an astronomical leap to make in terms of tone and instrumentation, but I think that’s the novelty of it for me. It’s a drastically different take that makes it suitable as an option for a very specific mood.
I haven’t listened to all the tracks yet, however I think there are issues (at least on YouTube) with the mixing. The drum and guitar levels sometimes seem way off, though it’s always uncertain whether this is due to the quality of the video or if it sounds that way in the game itself. The more quiet (no pun intended), emotional tracks I agree weren’t really the best choice for this instrumentation. There are quite a few games that use rock or rock style soundtracks like Mega Man X8 or Iji and those have some really great emotional or evocative tracks because they don’t limit themselves to just electric guitars.
As much as I love electric guitars, they have a very distorted and full sound and that only works well with certain moods and styles of music. Well the same goes for almost any instrument, thus why sticking with one particular instrument or set for a varied amount of remade music tracks limits what sorts of moods can be explored. If the Ridiculon soundtrack expanded its instrumentation to include acoustic guitars, for example, I think even that would have allowed for a more expansive set of timbres to properly capture the moods of the original pieces while still maintaining cohesiveness.
Personally, I’m more in the boat that the remastered is my least favourite version of the soundtrack. By no means is it bad; I simply find it the one that I almost never listen to nor play the game with. It’s just so close to the original in terms of its arrangement that the only reason I would listen to it is if I hated the ORG instruments (which I don’t). The Wii soundtrack is hit or miss, but at least it does interesting things with rearranging the compositions that make me appreciate it more, especially when I’ve listened to the original soundtrack ad nauseum. Maybe it sounded off to me when I first listened to it because of my familiarity with the original, but in the long run, the Wii soundtrack appears to be the one that stands the test of time.