Okay, now my take.
I need to preface by noting that I consider Yamane's
SotN soundtrack to be not just the best Castlevania soundtrack but to be one of the best soundtracks to anything I have ever personally experienced. In brutal honesty, I feel that Castlevania soundtracks are perhaps better known for certain
iconic tracks than they are for music you'd purposefully record and listen to at your non-gaming leisure. Some tracks from
Castlevania 2 and
Castlevania 3 would make such a list, in my opinion. A couple from
Lament of Innocence. Not much else, really. Now, do I mean the
entire SotN soundtrack? No. I don't have rose-tinted glasses when it comes to music; I can differentiate between music that is genuinely superb in ways that I personally like, and music that I've simply gotten used to, grew up with, or associate with a particular game/movie/whatever. That said, I would say that 50% of
SotN's soundtrack (not counting the many boss battles) is in my traveling playlist. I can only name a handful of games or movies which share this distinction. Super Mario Galaxy, Chrono Trigger... it's a short list.
Where to begin on
Bloodstained's music? I think I'll limit the discussion to two tracks:
Galleon Minerva and
Cursed Orphan.
Galleon Minerva seems calculated to be
Bloodstained's counterpart to
SotN's
Dracula's Castle. The two tracks are just about interchangeable. I don't consider either track to be flat-out amazing, in the specific sense of adding to a limited playlist that includes only the best, but I
do consider
Dracula's Castle to be an absolutely iconic part of
SotN's soundtrack, and I am gradually coming to accept
Galleon Minerva as fulfilling much the same role. Comparing the quality of the two,
Galleon Minerva suffers from a decidedly lower production value, feeling like a track that was rejected from
SotN in favor of
Dracula's Castle.
Cursed Orphan is the one track we have from the second composer, Ippo Yamada. Yamada has done a fair bit of music I like, including the exceptional and very famous Wily stage music from Mega Man 2. But I'm not here to be part of an echo chamber, so I must honestly submit that I find
Cursed Orphan to be extremely generic and derivative. I get the impression that he slapped it together to serve as a counter piece to the somber and inactive main theme provided by Yamane. Yamada did a good job with minute-long chip tunes on the NES, but there is little here to give confidence in his half of
Bloodstained's soundtrack. I found myself heartened to note that the demo's music was in fact entirely Yamane's doing, particularly as I was betting on Yamane only providing a token number of tracks, leaving it to Yamada to compose the majority of the soundtrack.
Now, there's a point that I feel I need to stress: While
SotN's soundtrack was a
technical masterpiece from front to back (not counting the credits), what elevated it above almost everything else I've ever listened to was the standout pieces that simply blew me away.
SotN did not waste time in this regard: The first track that caught my notice to that extent was
Prologue.
Now, just give the speakers some volume and listen to that. People in this thread seem hyped for the music we've heard so far in the demo. "I like it," everyone seems to be saying. "It's great." But if we'd been privy to a track anywhere
near the caliber of
Prologue, people would be frothing at the mouth over how great the final product is going to be. There would be no question: We were in for something special.
In a way, I'm glad we've only been shown sort of middling-good tracks thus far; goodness knows I wouldn't have wanted to wear out
Prologue a year before I got to play
SotN. But in a way, it also leaves me room to worry whether the final product will have
any tracks of the caliber of
Prologue, the incongruous but irresistible
Crystal Teardrops, the appropriately macabre and discordant
Abandoned Pit, the melodic and slightly dissonant waltz
Dance of Pales, or the epic and surprising
The Tragic Prince. I also worry that Yamane's total output won't even allow for very many such tracks, especially with her counterpart muscling in.
The final worry I have is that the change in IP may have (or may
be having) a stifling effect on Yamane's creativity. What do I mean? I mean if we don't get any waltzes, organ-heavy Beethoven-esque sonatas, gothic-sounding harpsichord tunes, or, heck, even heavy rock pieces here and there, it's specifically because that was all done in Dracula-themed
Castlevania, and here we have a new game whose setting feels nebulous. Perhaps the most Yamane really knows is that they want it to be "like
Symphony of the Night", but perhaps not identical to it.
I have to say that the music is the component of the game that I'll fuss over the most because my taste in games, I have found, has tended to be dictated to a great extent by how good its soundtrack was. You'd better believe that if most of
Bloodstained's soundtrack ends up being of a vein of
Cursed Orphan, it will color my entire experience with the game. So far,
Bloodstained is looking to be more than I ever hoped it could - especially after the debacle of a certain very closely-patterned flop. Here's hoping the soundtrack ends up blowing me away.