Jackie💿

Original composition: Michiru Yamane

Let's closeout Halloween Night and the month on a Castlevania tune, which is a series I honestly could have spent the whole month talking about.

M2's series of ReBirth games for WiiWare are notable for lots of reasons, but chief among them are their soundtracks, which consist of some deep pulls from the games' respective histories rendered in a SNES-like, sample-based take on the FM sound of Konami's arcade games circa-1988 courtesy of Manabu Namiki. It's kinda like a mix of Super Contra, AJAX and Haunted Castle. And rather than just play the hits, Namiki and the other M2 sound staffers (including @chibitech) pull the genius move of upgrading themes like Haunted Castle's name entry music and Dracula X68000's "Load BGM" to full-on stage [1] themes [2].

Gradius ReBirth, the first of the series, had its own soundtrack CD released in 2009. In addition to the ReBirth tracks, it also had the original source tracks from various Gradius games. It also had four medley tracks with even more ReBirth arranged tracks which were eventually added to the WiiWare game as alternates in an update. The music for the last two games, Castlevania The Adventure and Contra ReBirth, was released as a combined soundtrack in 2010, unfortunately lacking the historical source tracks. They did include an unused medley track from each game, which is where this lovely rendition of Symphony of the Night's "Lost Painting" comes from. Stick around for the 2nd loop to hear it again with an alternate synth lead.

Until next year~~ 🎃

Composition: Takumi Sato
8-bit arrangement: Takumi Sato, Hiroaki Sano
Arrangement: Hiroyuki Sato
Arrangement, guitar: Tsutomu Kurihara

Apologies again for neglecting the tag recently. My plan for the month was to explore some horror and horror-adjacent game soundtracks (another of my historical blindspots) and post things I liked throughout, but offsite things and world events kept me from doing that in a way that was enjoyable or productive. I hope to resume regular music posts and commentary soon, and maybe prep better for the horror thing next October.

For now, here's a track from the second disc of arrangements from the Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon box set that came out earlier this year. Like I mentioned in the first post, the arrangements for CotM 2 are a bit weaker than the ones from the first game. That could be because the original tracks are a bit more avant-garde or the fact that TAKUYA, the person in charge of the first game's arranged soundtrack, wasn't involved with these at all. At their best, they sound like weaker Megaman Zero Remaster tracks.

Here's the original chiptune track for comparison.

Early this morning US time, famed Tecmo/Atlus composer Tsukasa Masuko launched a Kickstarter for a new arrangement disc featuring tracks from Megami Tensei 1 & 2 with added vocals. He describes this as fulfilling the original intentions of the tracks as written at the time. He says he has the rough concepts of the arrangements already completed, and is seeking 1.5 million JPY (~10,000 USD) to press discs and finish the songs with professional singers as opposed to vocaloids.

The provisional tracklist might look familiar: It's essentially the arranged disc of 1991's Megami Tensei I • II Summon Disc & Fusion Disc with the tantalizing addition of "DAEDALUS". Pledge bonuses include a second disc featuring just the instrumentals, autographed copies, having your name listed in the special thanks, a dinner date with Masuko himself, and at the max tier, he'll make a ~3 minute song for you. All goals include international shipping (except, naturally, the dinner date -- unless you wanna fly yourself to Tokyo).

It was fully funded in under 2 hours.

While I'm sure Masuko's arrangements will be great, for me nothing will top this performance from the 1991 arranged soundtrack with Ryo Yonemitsu and crew recording this on one of the country's biggest pipe organs.

Apologies for neglecting the tag recently. The Poster's Mood has not been with me these last few days. orz 🙇