I got it today. The catalog number is LC-1713~14. I almost had to wait until tomorrow, but I was lucky enough to run into the mailman as I was leaving my complex. It's very annoying to go to the post office. My post office doesn't have a special lane for pick-ups, so you have to grab a number and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. I need to start bringing the full set of Encyclopedia Britannica (as opposed to a magazine) when I go there. That might get their attention.

The sound quality of the music is better than Dawn of Sorrow and even seems slightly better than Portrait of Ruin. However, I'm unsure if these are the DS versions or the full sound versions. You have to be mindful of that these days, since it's happening to a lot of DS soundtracks.

And risk drowning out such critical insight?

Was the entire soundtrack spanning both the discs? On Gallery of Labyrinth the DS version was the first disc and the full sound version was the second disc so maybe its arranged in that manner. I'm curious to hear how improved the full sound version is. I know in GoL that the organ was most excellent but a lot of the other sections were sort of drowned out.

I do have to say the soundtrack is growing on me a lot which is more than I can say about most albums. Most of the time something that sounds unpleasing will most likely always sound bad to me but I am really liking the music now. Ruvas Forest is really catchy.

I finally got a chance to listen to it on my headphone system. It seems that the first 48 tracks are full sound versions; they sound a lot better than the original music from Dawn of Sorrow and Portrait of Ruin. The last 6 tracks on disc 2 are arrange versions and do sound improved over the other versions. Konami would've needed to make this a 3 disc set in order to offer both original DS versions and full sound versions. The soundtrack length is 117 minutes. To include both versions would require an additional 117 minutes. That's 234 minutes. Three discs can hold 240 minutes.

Keep in mind that I could be wrong about which version this really is. I remember that Harmony of Dissonance sounded markedly different from Circle of the Moon, and they were on the same system. It is possible they decided to greatly improve the sound quality for Order of Ecclesia.

I do like the inclusion of The Tower of Dolls, from the X68000 version. Oh, and Riddle from Castlevania III. And a few more sound familiar.

Actually if you pack them really tight, three discs can hold up to 247 minutes, 30 seconds...but that doesn't matter here.

I have never understood the lackluster reception of Curse of Darkness' soundtrack.  Seriously.  I felt Yamane was at her best on that soundtrack and definitely consider it the best CV soundtrack of recent times.  Almost every single stage theme is fantastic.  I agree that Lament of Innocence was a low point for her.  Though the arrangement was nice, many of the themes meandered too much and ultimately came off uninteresting.  But Portrait of Ruin was pretty good, so I don't really understand this recent "rut" that everyone keeps talking about, considering Oz was fantastic too.  Her rut occured with Suikoden III and Elder Gate.  I have no problem with her continuing to compose for CV games.

- Justin Pfeiffer

I see. Well thats a pretty big soundtrack then. I was definitely pleasantly surprised when I saw Tower of the Dolls on the list of remakes for this game. Maybe I will have to shell out the money for this one. Thanks for the info about the album.

Curse of Darkness wasn't bad per se, it was just more......bland. I can't speak for everyone on this but her synth harpsichord is getting really grating on the nerves. Also, the way she continually rapes one of my favorite instruments (the organ) is not appreciated either although Gear Confusion Begins in PoR is a step in the right direction. The way each of her pieces flows in this OST really makes me sick sometimes. Curse of Darkness just had less stand out music that would make a person go, "Oh wow this music is great" or at least for me personally anyways.

The best tracks on that album IMO:
Abandoned Castle ~The Curse of Darkness~
Followers of Darkness -The First-
Baljhet Mountains
Garibaldi Courtyard
Garibaldi Temple
Mortvia Fountain
The Forest of Jigramunt
The Cave of Jigramunt

8 out of 56 songs. The eight are quality yes and one could argue that if every song was good from Castlevania 1 or 2 that this amount is not so staggering being that their soundtracks were max 14 songs a game. The thing is I was captivated by a lot of her work, almost everything in Bloodlines, a great deal in Symphony, a lot of Aria, a decent amount in Lament, less in Dawn, Portrait brought hopes back up. CoD was just blah, like Yamane was humming on the toilet one day playing the harpsichord (business as usual) and said, "Hey that could be an alright song"! CoD was enjoyed by me but to a much lesser degree. This sort of degradation makes me want her to take a break, some one could smash her computer with all of her samples and when she decides to come back from hiatus she can get brand new shiny samples or a live band to play.

This is directly conflicted with my enjoyment of the OoE soundtrack. There maybe some magic in her yet. OoE is really growing on me.

Well, critical insight is augmented in part by considering different opinions/views, so why not?

I found it kind of bland, the cutscene music that made up almost half of the 2-disc soundtrack was incredibly boring, and while I agree that most stage themes were pretty good, they weren't even near mindblowing like most stage themes in Bloodlines, Symphony of the Night, and some in Lament of Innocence are. Like I said, personally I only find "Baljhet Mountains" to be really stellar on the CoD OST. The guitars used in many tracks just sucked: instead of heavy thundering melodic bliss we got a sort of weak buzzing-kind of noise. A far cry from the Dracula Battles.

Haha! "Gear Confusion Begins" (track 15 on the PoR OST CD), or as it is more often called, "The Gears Go Awry", is one of the few tracks in PoR composed by Yuzo Koshiro. No wonder it sounded too good - its not by Yamane at all. I agree that its one of the best tracks on that soundtrack by a long-shot, definitely the kind of stuff we need to see in new Castlevanias.

After taking some time to separate the Koshiro tracks from the Yamane tracks in PoR I'll have to say that he should definitely be contributing more to the series than she has been. His tracks are solid and fit 'Vania very well without being trite or sounding like your typical Yamane.

I'm not a Yamane fan, but Lament of Innocence features some of her best music in my opinion. I totally agree it's very inconsistent, but there are some fantastic dramatic gems in there. I have only spent a little time with Curse of Darkness but it seemed a bit poppy and dull for my taste. Symphony of the Night and, thanks to Koshiro, Portrait of Ruin also rank pretty high with me. Order of Ecclesia doesn't seem to offer much new but seems to be a solid enough soundtrack on first listen.

I was actually kind of excited about Curse of Darkness when I first heard some of it, mostly because it WASN'T LoI and it was much more melodic than that offering. But...I dunno, just lost interest in it, I guess. It definitely needed to be stripped down a LOT, mostly down to the stage themes and boss themes, but then I got to the point where most of these had worn out their welcome and the whole thing just came off as bland. Some of the rock was okay, but at no point was it as good as it should have been. I think nostalgia would have really helped this one out, but the game never looked good at any point to me, so...

"The Gears Go Awry" was the only song I liked in PoR. I give it a thumbs up! Go Yuzo!

And I don't think Yamane molests the organ that much - yes, I've heard "The Final Toccata" from SotN way too much to care for it anymore but "A Toccata into Blood Soaked Darkness" from CoD is another story.

To be honest, I like CoD for many of the reason you dislike it:

* I don't know if I call CoD bland, but at the same time it doesn't really stick out. I think "mellow" is a better word, at least in my case. For some reason this kind of works for me, especially in a situation where I don't have the urge to over analyze what I hearing.

* The cutscene music is nowhere as bad as it is in LoI, the pieces are not as long (disrupting the soundtrack much less severely) and at least Yamane creates some connectivity between some of these tracks by incorporating hints of other tracks in them. "Sarabande of Healing" is used in many cut scene pieces and makes them more digestible. Still, this area is a glaring weakness of hers.

* I love how the guitars were restrained from going too wild, thought this brought a sense of meaning to tracks like "Legendary Belmont" and “Followers of Darkness -The First-“

I purchased the CoD and LoI soundtracks at the same time and I only have CoD left, I did repurchase LoI but in the Limited Edition Sampler style where I got rid of all the tracks I didn't want - the only one I miss being "Statues Born of Darkness"

We can definitely agree on this. LoI's cutscene-music was truly the bottom of the barrel. But, that doesn't really make the cutscene music in CoD any more digestible, IMO. Its better than LoI's, but it still sucks plenty, the stage themes are definitely the main attraction on both OSTs (and in this department, I find LoI to be clearly superior).

They just need to face it: cutscene-music has no place in Castlevania. ...And when I think about it, neither do cutscenes.

I love PoR myself, both Yamane and Koshiro's music...probably 85% of the tracks are gems (though that includes some remixes of older music).
I also like Curse of Darkness a lot, and OZ as well, but neither made much of a /memorable/ impact. Great to listen to, and well worth having, but I guess they are both kinda "also rans" as it were.

As for LoI, well there's a lot of good tracks, but it's a very different sort of sound. It's more on the ambient side...I like it too, but it's hardly better than the above three TO ME.

"Open Hell's Gate! Come forth my servants! Crush this flea who invades my castle! HA HA HA HA!"

I'm a little disappointed at the way they handled track 25's "Rhapsody of Indigo Sorrow".  It's my most favorite Ecclesia track, but it really doesn't sound wholly improved as an arranged piece -- the instrumentation is even less potent than its original sound counterpart.

I just did a comparison of both versions and at first I thought the overall volume was changed, but certain parts of the arrange version are quieter. There is more treble in the original version, which makes it sound 'brighter'. I think all the arrange versions sound better (may not be better) and Azure Wanderings is the most striking.

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Same here. My brother (who's learning Japanese) decided to go for the Japanese LE game, so I decided to chip in $30 to get the OST.

Will post my thoughts when I have given it enough listens. An interesting thing to note that no one has mentioned so far is that Yamane isn't the sole composer, there's also Yasuhiro Ichihashi, one of the arrangers from the PSP Dracula X remake. I don't know how much he contributed to the soundtrack as a whole, but here's hoping he brings some fresh ideas to the music.

At this point, I really can't think of another reason.

Absolutely, I couldn't agree more. Castlevania has been agonizing since Harmony of Dissonance (2002), but the newest episodes headshot the series for good. I don't understand how can Iga and his team not see what they are doing to Castlevania; it's simply amazing.

Can I have your copy of Ecclesia?

I don't have it yet; I don't have a DS neither. And when I will, I'll keep it sealed just like the other recent Castlevania. Why do you ask?

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Can the DS be properly emulated yet?
Not that I'm interested in doing any shady business, but I really wanna take some pictures of the games I own, and I have no idea how to get proper pictures of DS games apart from emulation...

I have to wonder why someone who doesn't have a DS is buying copies of DS games he won't play, from a series he feels has been stagnant for six years.

Because seeing the name Castlevania on a game box reminds him of the episodes he loved so much, and because he likes collecting sealed games. Sorry if I drove this out of topic. I don't say they're bad games, because they really aren't, but they're horrible Castlevania, if Castlevania at all.

And people wonder why there's a depression

Although the thread topic is "CastleVania Order of Ecclesia Soundtrack" and the thread had 60+ posts already, there has hardly been any discussion about the actual soundtrack yet. My thoughts on the matter are as follows...

Dais does have a point that threads like this one often approach self-parody, its often easy to predict what people are going to say. That considered, however, I'm still going to continue on that track and say that, after listening to the Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia soundtrack six or seven times, I'm pretty disappointed, though hardly surprised. I was half-hoping for Yamane to do a Meguro-Persona 4-style revival, but no such luck here.

Its basically what I thought it would be: a few nice gems buried in a lot of boring filler. Compared to Yamane's two earlier DS Castlevanias, the tone is a little darker and more somber, so it doesn't sound "exactly" the same, but its still pretty much the same sound. There are a few very nice themes, like "Unholy Vespers" (my favourite so far, really good), "An Empty Tome", "A Clashing of Waves", "Chapel Hidden in Smoke", "Rhapsody of the Forsaken", and "Emerald Mist". Most of the really good tracks seem to be stage themes (which isn't surprising), but there are also some good non-stage themes, like "Sapphire Elegy" and "Requiem of Star-Crossed Nights". Then there are a few tracks that hardly could be called "great", but still win points on being somewhat more original and fresh-sounding, like "Wandering the Crystal Blue".

There's also three very weird and distinct tracks that, to my ear at least, stand out in stark contrast in comparison with the rest of the soundtrack: "Ecclesia", "Stones Hold a Grudge", and "Gate to the Underworld". These three sound like no other tracks on the OST, having electronic undercurrents backing piano/tubular bells sounds, and they sound like cutscene/incident music. I rather like them, they sound cheesy in a 80s B-horror-movie way (I'm thinking Fright Night), but I like the dramatic sound of them. I have a strong feeling we're seeing the hand of second composer Yasuhiro Ichihashi in these pieces: it sounds like nothing I've ever heard Yamane compose for the Castlevania series. I don't have the info on hand for which composer wrote what track, but I'd be very surprised if these were Yamane's. If they are, my hat's off to her for it, but the inevitable question then immediately arises: why does the rest of the score sound so same-y, why no more of this new style?

As usual in CV-scores, there are a few tracks recycled from earlier entries. There's "The Tower of Dolls" from Akumajou Dracula X68000/Castlevania Chronicles. Its pretty OK, although no way near as awesome as Sota Fujimori's rearranged version from Chronicles. There's "Enterprising Mercantilism", which is basically identical to Dawn of Sorrow's shop-theme "Speaking of Equipment" (its not remixed or rearranged in any way, its the exact same synth and all). And then there's also "Riddle", the second-to-last stage theme from the classic Castlevania 3 soundtrack. Although I'm a huge fan of CV3's soundtrack (I can basically hum all the themes from memory), "Riddle" was one of the few tracks I didn't like on it. I'm going to commit 8-bit-heresy here and say that this new version actually gives the melody the extra kick it needs to shine: the Order of Ecclesia version is much rockier, and although its on a superior soundsystem, it actually sounds more like a classical, high-octane chiptune than the NES original (GoldfishX, I have a hunch you'd like this one). Apart from these three, all the rest of the music is new (although shades of "Vampire Killer" creep into the end of "Ecclesia", of course we wouldn't escape yet another rendition of that one...).

I've gone to great lengths to really pinpoint the positive aspects of the Ecclesia soundtrack here, because I wanted to give it a chance and try avoid falling into the "predictable"-trap. But alas, there's no covering up that the great majority of tracks are exactly what one feared: the same old, same old clichés. I've really tried to keep an open ear, but when only one fourth of the soundtrack (a generous estimate) is actually worth listening to on it's own, and the rest is really, really mind-numbingly bland, the writing is pretty much on the wall. The majority of Ecclesia exactly follows the trend of most newer Castlevania music: rushed, bland, lukewarm, clichéd, and just overall half-assed, and to top it off, the stand-out tracks are merely "good" and "passable", none of them really stick or have the promise to become future classics. One thing that really gets me is that the same crap that bogged down the PS2 scores - half of the soundtrack being boring-ass cutscene music that no one cares about or likes - is creeping into the handheld scores as well. Ecclesia has a plethora of really shitty, boring tracks that sound like stuff that has no place on a Castlevania-soundtrack (which is probably why they stretched out our misery to two discs). Arghh! *bursts an artery out of sheer rage*

It is worth noting that I haven't played the game yet, so I'm fully aware that I might be missing out on the emotional attachment-factor that goes with that. But good music is still good music, and when we're talking about this kind of music, you shouldn't really need to brainwash yourself with 15 hours of gameplay before you "get" it. I remember there was a time before this series stagnated when you could pick up a Castlevania OST and pretty much count on it being full of awesomeness (Dracula X, Symphony of the Night, Castlevania 64, and Castlevania Chronicles all fall into this category for me, as I dug them a lot before playing the games the music was taken from). It seems that time has passed, as the series has clearly devolved into mediocrity on the music-front. We all know there's only one way out of this, namely: