【GBA】Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance - Successor of Fate - PC engine cover【DefleMask】

[@doricdream498]

One of the finest themes from one of the finest soundtracks in the series. Brilliant work!

[@Michirin9801]

Thank you very much!

[@doricdream498]

@@Michirin9801 oh also, i forgot to mention - congrats on the game release! I will definitely check it out. :)

[@Michirin9801]

@@doricdream498 Thanks again! I hope you enjoy it ^^

[@doricdream498]

@@Michirin9801 ^~^ its inspiring to see other lgbtq devs make and release stuff. It gives me the determination to continue my own projects! Your game looks really cool - i absolutely adore top down games like that!

[@Michirin9801]

@@doricdream498 Ohh~ Keep it up! If I could make a game, you can do your own things too!

[@Margatroid]

Nice job, as usual! Retro Castlevania music is so beautifully baroque. It always stands out to me as an example of how video game music is still overlooked as an often-sublime form of art, even if "gaming" itself has become more mainstream. You sure don't hear tunes like this very often in games now.

[@Michirin9801]

Thank you very much ^^ And yep, you're right.

[@Margatroid]

@@Michirin9801 Btw, since other people are making requests, I'd love to hear a PC Engine version of this. ;) kzbin.info/www/bejne/jp-wYpmaZsaors0

[@NoHandleThisIsntTwitter]

This sounds perfect on the PC-Engine, I definitely wouldn’t question it. Great job and nice song choice! ;) (I prefer classic Castlevania too)

[@Michirin9801]

Glad you like it ^^

[@semarugaijin9451]

You are still the greatest, thanks

[@Michirin9801]

Thank you!

[@andymiira_gameplays]

Nice cover! It really does justice to this epic track

[@Michirin9801]

Thanks!

[@vuurniacsquarewave5091]

I really wanted to hear this song on PCE, thank you for making it come to life, it's very much like how I imagined!

[@Michirin9801]

Glad you like it ^^

[@st1ka]

This sounds awesome!

[@Michirin9801]

Glad you like it ^^

[@st1ka]

@@Michirin9801 your work is always amazing ^^

[@VinsCool]

This is very good!

[@Michirin9801]

Thank you very much ^^

[@hkseeker7566]

Great job! You know, something similar happened to me with this game's soundtrack. At first I thought nothing of it, but recently I started replaying it and I was surprised that I actually remembered most of the OST. Now some themes like this one and the one from the Chapel of Dissonance are among my favorites.

[@Michirin9801]

Thanks ^^ And yeah, this soundtrack really sticks with you doesn't it?

[@hkseeker7566]

@@Michirin9801 Yeah, definitely. So thanks a lot for making this cover!

[@spoonybard13]

Funny thing about Chapel of Dissonance, I SWEAR the opening melody is an altered version of part of "Bloodlines" from Rondo of Blood. (At about the 20 second mark to be exact) It blew my mind when I discovered that!

[@treefroggy]

an excellent choice!

[@Schimnesthai]

Aweosome, love this game, it sounds really great on the PCE also!

[@Michirin9801]

Thank you very much ^^

[@ashkirby8896]

Nice Castlevania cover!

[@Mackenzie_EV]

This is excellent!!

[@Michirin9801]

Glad you like it ^^

[@Ech0Chamber]

BLESS YOUR SOUL! I HAVE A BIAS FOR THIS GAME SPECIFICALLY!

[@timetraveller5400]

This is awesome and nostalgic, amazing cover :D btw Happy Holydays xD

[@Michirin9801]

Thank you very much ^^ Happy holidays!

[@DaedalosC9]

I love how people covering Harmony of Dissonance makes the fanbase notice that the game already had awesome music, it was the hardware the reason to have low quality and give the bad impression of it being awful

[@Michirin9801]

I thought the music sounded just fine tbh... They just used simple repeating waveforms for the instruments, which makes it sound more primitive, but I think it's rather charming!

[@vguyver2]

It was the sound compression. Nothing wrong with the compositions, i recognized them as beautiful, but people heard me listening to my copy I recorded directly from the GBA to a Cassette tape. I suppose in hindsight I was the odd one out listening to videogame music instead of Linkin Park like everyone else.

[@brandonnetwork]

Sweet.

[@matthewmacgregor09]

Sounds really good. Thanks for the upload!

[@Michirin9801]

Glad you like it

[@ventusargyle6794]

Ah this game, lots of fun times and good music^^

[@Nordischsound]

Cool, I don't like all tracks from the game but this one stands out

[@luckyspray]

i love this theme, not for a retro handheld console

[@davidgusquiloor2665]

This is beautiful. Although Harmony of Dissonance is not my favourite Castlevania the music was great, and this version reminds me of that.

[@Michirin9801]

Thank you very much ^^

[@lazava5150]

I felt like there were only a couple areas were I could stomachs the music. Held back by the limitations of the system no doubt, however some of the areas were just flat out lacking in the composition.

[@SomeOrangeCat]

Everyone: You can't make Baroque music in chiptune! Konami: *laughs in Konami*

[@WillowEpp]

This has always been a weird song to me because it feels more like a (nice) credits roll with shades of a final approach, but then the B section swoops in and... eeeeh, kind of feels like I'm getting jerked around and I'm not a huge fan. I think you captured its essence well, though. Unrelated to that, it's _really weird_ seeing these comments deriding the GBZ80 PSG usage when the Direct Sound channels have probably the worst rendition of any console ever in general playback, handheld or not. (This isn't counting weird one-off tricks like playing voice clips through the OPN2's or Game Boy's PCM channels which are far from normal playback). Even good samples for interesting compositions sound muddly and distorted because of that garbage DAC, the resampling needed, and the CPU time constraints.

[@Michirin9801]

Personally, I'm kinda obsessed with it, and one other song from this game that I'll also be covering sooner or later... And like, I don't know, perhaps it is the worst DAC around, but to me that's part of what gives it its charm! I think the low-quality samples feel right at-home with the GB soundchip's beeps and bloops, and the combination of the two makes the GBA the most unique-sounding game system of its time! When you hear a GBA song you can tell it's on GBA, it's the same as with a song on SNES, PCE, MD, GB/GBC, NES, C64, AMIGA and so on, when you hear a song from those systems you can tell what system it's coming from based on the sound alone, it's like each one of these systems has its own "audio-identity" know what I mean? And the GBA was the last system ever to have one of those, and frankly, I wouldn't have it any other way!

[@Margatroid]

@@Michirin9801 Have you ever listened to this OST? kzbin.info/www/bejne/hJDGZoSkm7Sgnc0 I generally agree with Wyatt about the GBA's sound quality, but some of the music that was made for it was pretty remarkably complicated, and hearkens back to the best stuff of the 16-bit era. It seems like it was the last true machine of that era in a way, although the DS kept that style alive for a while longer in some games. The style felt "truer" when realized through the GBA's limited technical specs though, and I think you are right that there's something about the limited power of those older systems that gives them specific identities--especially when you compare them to nowadays, when every game comes out nearly identically for Playstation, Xbox and PC. There is a real kind of charm and enhanced artistry that springs from people working within technical limitations, and the format they're using lends its particular spirit to the the resulting work. I think you can see this just as much when artists work with a traditional media like colored pencil or watercolors instead of utilizing photoshop or some tablet software with 1000 tools and filters. Limitations inspire creativity, and they lend a unique character to the resulting work which I think has more value to it than merely what's granted by nostalgia or by pleasant association. Somehow, when things are created in a limited space, they empower the imagination far more, and therefore they come across as being more real.

[@WillowEpp]

@@Michirin9801 I get the sonic characteristic, yeah, but...I dunno, I guess it's kind of weird to like YM2612 and not Direct Sound. A bit. Maybe I'd be more charmed if it wasn't used as such a prominent part of so many tunes or if the badness had some degree of consistency. Some things sound great (Ace Attorney, anyone?) and it seems like it's redeemable. But then I hear Jake's recordings of the Risky's Revenge soundtrack and think "jeeze, this would be great if he didn't have to torture the samples into mud to meet hardware budgets!" Ruining good songs purely with bad rendition is, in my view, worse than using a finicky chip suboptimally and ending up with the Sonic Spinball soundtrack. Interesting point about it being the last console with a clear calling card, though. That _is_ rather sad.

[@Michirin9801]

It's not weird, it's just a matter of taste, some people prefer FM synth, others prefer Wavetables or Samples, I like 'em all but I'm definitely more into the latter two... Here's the thing, as a developer, you can't approach the GBA's sound hardware like you would just any other sampler and expect it to sound good, you have to take its limitations into consideration the same way you would with any old soundchip! The fact of the matter is that the more you try to cram into the GBA's Direct Audio at once, the worse it is going to sound, and there's only so much you can do to mitigate that, so obviously, the best-sounding GBA games took that into consideration and split the instrumentation between the DA and the GB soundchip, you can hear it in games like Mario Kart Super Circuit, the Densetsu no Stafy games, Puyo Pop, and yes, Ace Attorney, among others, those games sound pretty good, in fact, I think most of them sound straight-up excellent! Personally, I think the GBA still has A LOT of untapped potential for chiptuners, all we need is a GBA Tracker or something, I for one REALLY wanna make GBA music, perhaps more than music for any other system! Unfortunately I can only make rough approximations, and even that is in a pretty user-unfriendly way...

[@WillowEpp]

@@Michirin9801 Yeah, maybe I'm just jaded from hearing so many atrocious manglings; I'm not averse to having my mind changed. I'm not sure what a good tracker for GBA would look like, but it's a shame it doesn't exist yet. I guess your current approach is something like tracking a regular GBZ80, then using a DAW to sequence out a bunch of low-bitrate samples and munge them together? Actually, do you have any idea to what extent the problems I've mentioned are a symptom of having to also run the entire rest of the game with the CPU? I mean, hopefully, it's mostly just timers and DMAs, but if you need to do any mixing, you're spending real cycles... What about cartridge space? How many games ran afoul of the power-of-two resampling for weird source bitrates because they had to scrimp on quality to fit in their ROM budget?

[@Servbot01]

Nice work, Harmony of Dissonance has the worst OST of the series, looks like the composer used just the GB 8-bit sound chip.

[@Michirin9801]

I deeply disagree, but thanks for the comment anyway! They did use the GBA Direct Audio to play the leads and percussion btw, but the rest is indeed being played on the GB soundchip...