Impressed by how little Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon seems to work on PC? Like, at all? Fullscreen mode has giant black borders even if it can do an integer scale to your screen res, and windowed caps out at 4x its internal res. Got a 4k display? Windowed mode takes up less than a quarter of the screen at the highest possible size. At first I figured "oh fullscreen is just broken, they want you to use windowed" but actually windowed is even more broken.

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.

Composition: Ippo Yamada
Arrangement: Hiroyuki Sato, TAKUYA
Guitar and bass: TAKUYA

This set was worth it for the first game's arrange disc alone. Except for a couple snubs (no rendition of Michiru Yamane's "Voyage of Promise") and one particularly sour solo in their version of "Boundless Avarice", the execution is perfect. It's up there with the Dracula Battle Perfect Selection and F-Zero X Guitar Arrange albums as one of the best rock/metal VGM cover discs ever. Though, like those albums, this could maybe do with a dose of rock organ and some synth.

Unfortunately the arrangement disc for the second game, from an entirely different performer, isn't as impressive. Still, it's nice to have all this music and the games' original soundtracks in a form completely divorced from LRG's bullshit.

Here's the original for comparison's sake.