it’s utterly amazing how the OST at times feels like a note by note recreation of SOTN yet the pieces still have their own identity and in some places are actually stronger (imo). I’m really amazed at yamane’s ability to endlessly write anthemic gothic pop epics. even if it sounds a little formulaic from time to time it still mostly is catchy, fresh, and sets the over the top mood very well.
they are not nearly as well mixed tho! why do modern game soundtracks have so much low end filtered out? there’s like no kick drum or bass presence on any of these songs. is it to make room for more explosion sound effects or something? I hate it.
anyway I’m super close to the true end and tbh I love this game, I think it’s terrific and wonderful. it’s not as “good” as sotn, but there’s no way it could be. but it has the same spirit and energy in a way that intervening igavania’s have not, like I think igarashi honestly was trying his best but was really shackled by budget and technology limitations so he and his team were just never allowed to stretch their wings. this basically feels like a castlevania fan game with a lavish budget, but wasn’t symphony of the night basically the same thing?
they don’t have side chain compressors that can just duck out low frequencies when loud booms happen?
it bums me out how much graphics technology has progressed with games while audio is still basically still, at best, just superimposing dynamic assets over pre-rendered backgrounds like resident evil 1 or some shit.
My understanding is that there’s a bunch of dynamic compression going on but that it can’t be used too heavily or it becomes really obvious to the player.
Here’s conversation about a talk DICE gave a decade ago about their dynamics systems, which are generally considered top-notch:
Essentially its a system that prioritises and mixes audio based on the loudness perceived by the player at any one time. It works by taking a dB range (lets say 50dB) and culling any sound quieter than 50dB less than the loudest sound perceived by the player. This “window” in which sounds are heard shifts depending on the loudest sound perceived by the player.
And the talk directly (they seem to have missed/lost video on this one):
One of the biggest challenges audio engineers have is mixing to different targets; headphones, television, home theater are the primary targets, and not all teams are good at testing on each environment with different-quality speakers. There are standard layers that get applied to change the mix (the common ‘select your speakers’ option) and these days that gets crossed with a subjective mix option, like ‘midnight mode’ or ‘low-dynamic range’ that are probably doing almost the same thing, compressing down the range.
I’m really curious about what system capcom has been using lately because the audio in both Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 2 Remake are astounding. They both incidentally allow you to set it to “theater mode” which has a much higher dynamic range.
The demonstration of DICE’s system (which looks neat!) doesn’t really answer my scenario because it’s not mixing sound effects against a soundtrack. The music in the scene they show is really just another sound that exists in 3D space and is already being heavily filtered as a result (which is appropriate for diegetic sounds). I’m talking about being able to just have a full unfiltered music track as BGM that subtly ducks out in response to loud sound effects.
I don’t think most games even try to do this – the article there says that DICE’s system is highly proprietary and implementing anything like that requires a great deal of custom audio coding which I imagine most mid to smaller sized game studios (including the hodge podge of studios that made bloodstained) just don’t have access to.
Damn maybe I should write a library that does this for modern game engines. Too bad I’m dumb and lazy !
Audio middleware (FMOD and Wwise are the ones I’ve used) is happy to treat music as just another layer subject to your environment rules; certainly that was how I implemented my naive attempts at this. Generally I follow recommendations and put the music as a top-level container, responsive to only a few of the environment envelopes.
I don’t think it’s a technical issue, I’m just not sure what the thinking is here.
You know, another way you see game music being shaped by the dynamic environment they live in is the trend towards slithering, percussive action music. This follows what film scores have been doing and for similar reasons – you can cut and mix in at most any point in the track and get decent results, at the expense of melody.
Yes, but for a random drop which he isn’t guaranteed to produce the first time you beat him. He’s more of a very-late-game farming target and you can skip him on the first way through the area.
is anyone talking about how broken the lili soul is? it’s like the jewel knuckle of this game. you can get it really early and it has insane damage output, especially if you level it enough to get her chun li kick
No, I didn’t hear about that one. Everybody is talking about a different broken ability. If you bother to upgrade a soul, it’s like 50/50 whether the result is completely broken or not
On my second playthrough I upgraded Flame Cannon to level 7 by buying gunpowder, which one-shots most things until the midgame and is probably on the pareto frontier of extremely early, powerful and easy to upgrade (I would not be surprised to see it in the speedrun, although probably runners have discovered something even better).
Flame Cannon was my primary directional shard until I found Teps Oceus. I tried most others only briefly.
I also barely touched any other weapons after trading my 8-bit coin for Encrypted Orchid early on. It remained effective through the entire game with its periodic upgrades.
Edit: Oh, and I also used Void Ray periodically because it was fun (and powerful).
There are so many tremendously useful shards, but the one that is the best out of the box is Tis Rozain, which you craft from a Tis Raiff shard (from Vul’sha) and a diamond. It’s a directional shard but it’s also basically a hitscan, so you can use it for less than half a second and do full damage to anything you can get a bead on. It’s also holy damage so most things are weak to it. I used it for the last quarter of the game almost exclusively.
The downside is that she shouts the name of the shard every time you use it. I turned voices off.
Other good and early ones I found that I didn’t hear people talking about much:
The fairy summon can use healing items on you that you can grind out from the fairies. Plus you can carry 9 of each, more than the 5 max for big potions.
The bouncy water ball you get from the first squiddy enemies is actually pretty useful? Not amazing but good utility since it’s affected by gravity.
On the same token, the gale crawler from the bird assholes is good too
Is there any familiar worth the annoyance factor of having them float around distractingly and make enemies drop items in inconvenient places? I think I’ll just not use any if I play this again. Silver Knight never got noticeably powerful even being highly leveled up, mostly because he doesn’t attack often.
I used Buer longer than any of the others. I don’t know how it compares objectively. I just like how it hits very hard sometimes and other times gets stuck in the ceiling for a while.
If anyone missed it, try playing the piano with Carabosse out.
This was the problem I encountered with my favorite one as well. I ended up turning music volume up and voice volume way down for the latter part of the game.
I honestly love how diverse everyone’s experience with this game is, I feel like older igavanias and sotn tend to be a lot more uniform in terms of ideal loadouts
probably some of that is just a matter of this game being so new but I think there is a difference in design philosophy too.
this is so important. music should be twice as loud as everything else, the sound effects are kind of too loud and jarring, the audio experience of this game is just way better when being drowned out by the soundtrack.