Castlevania III: Dracula’s Castle

Year: 1989
By: Konami Kukeiha Club (Hidenori Maezawa, Jun Funahashi, Yukie Morimoto)

The Castlevania series is noteworthy for its baroque-infused tunes. The third major entry in the series for the Famicom went a step further by making use of the VRC6 soundchip, right into the game cartridge. This allowed for deeper saw bass and complex harmonies thanks to the extra audio channels. Unfortunately, this is only true of the Japanese version — the NES counterpart had to be cut down significantly, but still retains some charm thanks to the strong original compositions shining through, as well as some clever adaptation tricks and choices.

Comparisons between the two versions would be worthy of an entire blog post, but for the sake of this selection, I’ll only feature the original Famicom soundtrack here.

By the way, this is not the only time you’ll hear about Castlevania in this thread…

Best picks

Beginning
Clockwork
Mad Forest
Aquarius

Full soundtrack

on Archive.org