Castlevania: Chiptunes of the Night, the latest album by Shiryu
June 15, 2017
genoboost
A very interesting collection of arrangements and sounds from Shiryu. Two discs worth of Castlevania based chiptunes in both NES and SNES formats. If you need more Castlevania VGM, and you do. We all do.
It is hard to believe that twenty years have passed, two whole decades from the release of "Akumajo Dracula X: Gekka no Yasokyoku", better know in the west as "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" for the Sony PlaysStation (with a Saturn version releasing shortly after). Despite many attempts, Igarashi was never able to produce another game of the series that reached the quality of this 1997 release (not that I wasn't happy that he kept trying, with many games following the formula on GBA and DS) but I do not find fault on his work because "Symphony of the Night" was simply the perfect storm, a result of Michiru Yamane's beautiful soundtrack with Ayame Kojima's incredible character artwork that made this 2D game truly stand apart from the mostly 3D games being released at the time and also the reason why two decades later the game seems (much like their vampire characters) not to have aged one single day.
"Castlevania: Chiptunes of the Night" is my long and delayed tribute to Michiru Yamane's incredible soundtrack. You might have found me teasing this release in the past years with me chiptune demakes/remixes/covers from such timeless classic songs as "Wood Carving Partita" or "The Tower of Mist". But this time I went for the complete soundtrack, or at least the tracks that I could get my hand on sheet music and/or MIDI files. The results of that adventure you will find on "Disc 1 ~ The NES Incantation".
"Disc 2 ~ The SNES Incantation" is a whole other subject. I have for many years been collecting Super Nintendo soundfonts, but have never really used it for anything I have released...until now! The second album was an (somewhat successful) attempt to reproduce the "Symphony of the Night" soundtrack using only Super Nintendo instruments. I have used samples from "Super Castlevania", "Dracula X", "Secret of Mana", "Final Fantasy VI" and even "Chrono Trigger". I hope you enjoy both discs and that their sounds bring you some excellent memories from video games past. For me this was just something I really wanted to do and I am glad to have successfully completed this release. Now if you will excuse me, I think it is time to once again replay Alucard's most epic adventure.
Shiryu