Uploaded October 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Another great track from Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. This one uses several layers of BrightStr, plus a French Horn preset, Timpani, some Crash Cymbals, and the Harp from the SC-55 map.

Interesting fact: the soundtrack for the game contains a lot of well known songs from previous Castlevania games, and Sotaro Tojima was responsible for arranging most of the tracks. But "Fate to Despair" is one of several original tracks that he composed for this game.

Technical notes: when you extract the midi files with GBA Mus Ripper, they are a bit complex and can't be used "out of the box" on the SC-88 or even with a SF2 player. Because there are a lot of overlapping volume curves and it creates audio clicks and bugs. I wrote a python script to convert the tracks to make my life easier (basically what it does is split each instrument track into multiple tracks to prevent volume curve overlapping). Once again, I work on each instrument stem separately (either from the SC-88 or my own VST) and I do the main mix afterwards.

"Fate to Despair" was composed by Sotaro Tojima.