Castlevania Dungeon Forums
The Castlevania Dungeon Forums => General Castlevania Discussion => Topic started by: Nagumo on March 15, 2023, 11:50:35 AM
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Hey, guys! It's been a while since I posted anything. I would like to share an interesting theory from a buddy of mine called Crying Wolf, who unfortuantely has been unable to make an account here, so he asked me to post the following:
Konami never ported Castlevania: Curse of Darkness to the PS3, and still have yet to do so for the new PS5 classic store. Even when they’ve already ported a lot of their PS2 library to the old Classics storefront, we still don’t have Curse of Darkness despite an existing port of literally every other Castlevania game released on PlayStation. Let’s discuss PlayStation Classics policies and the very first release of the Curse of Darkness Original Soundtrack.
Sony has a policy, when porting PS classics, that you are not to change or modify the game in any shape or form whatsoever, if you are releasing it under the Classics label. It is to be released digitally as long as it plays well on their emulator. Although they have not stated it publicly, it is sort of an open secret due to Mega Man Legends not being put on PSN for a while because Capcom wanted to remove some product placement in addition to a small handful of issues with the voice acting. There is also the case of the Japanese game, “Cho Aniki: Kyuukyoku Muteki Ginga Saikyou Otoko,” which was released as is- unchanged and untranslated which supports the notion of this unspoken rule even further.
In the original release of the CoD soundtrack, the ending theme “True To Your Dreams” was composed by Michiru Yamane, written by 2 people credited as C. Bucknall, J. Briley and performed by Russell Watson. That song only appeared on the first soundtrack release and never again, not in the Perfect Selection, not in Black and Red box collections, and lastly, not in the digital releases of the soundtrack.
You may be wondering why this is worth discussing. After all, didn't they remove the Yuzo Koshiro tracks for the digital releases of Portrait of Ruins OST? Interestingly, they are back in the Black and Red box collections. On the Curse of Darkness soundtrack, “True to Your Dreams” was composed by Michiru Yamane, but it seems the actual ownership actually rests with either C. Bucknall, J. Briley, or possibly both. I have searched copyright and music ownership databases online, but came up empty handed. There is, however, something that did help me in putting together this theory/investigation... and that something is the term “Copyright Control” written next to C. Bucknall and J. Briley’s names in the liner notes for the soundtrack. I’ve looked it up and ended up in conversation with a US copyright attorney to confirm, and it basically means one of the following (we can’t really be sure due to us not having their contracts of course):
1.That C. Bucknall and J. Briley own the lyrics and the rights to the composition are with Konami/Michiru Yamane
2.It exists is some gray area where no one really owns nothing
Given that the song never appeared again, we can hazard a fairly educated guess, but can’t know for sure. They can still probably work something out and make a Classic release or just replace it and make an actual full port in a collection as they did with Symphony of the Night on Dracula X Chronicles.
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Interesting theory. The points made in the above by Crying Wolf could go a long way as to explain why CoD never had a release outside of XBOX and PS2. Personally I for one honestly never cared about the ending theme of CoD. To me it sounds very out-of-place in Castlevania. Come to think of it, so did the original SotN ending theme 'I am the wind'. These are just my opinions though as others will feel otherwise.
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I would presume it's probably caused by something tied with the reception of the actual game content itself. Maybe konami is not satisfied with the game's quality or something.
I don't think copyrighted vocal songs would be barrier. They could always re-record new songs to replace like the case in DXC SotN. If they really want to re-release the game they would've done it already. But judging from current situation we could only hope for a potential new 3D collection in the future.
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Interesting theory. The points made in the above by Crying Wolf could go a long way as to explain why CoD never had a release outside of XBOX and PS2. Personally I for one honestly never cared about the ending theme of CoD. To me it sounds very out-of-place in Castlevania. Come to think of it, so did the original SotN ending theme 'I am the wind'. These are just my opinions though as others will feel otherwise.
I agree it feels out of place, however, in context outside of lyrics appearing “in-game” perhaps while there were a handful of others that preceded SOTN(namely original release of ‘Tales of Phantasia’) it wasn’t considered common in those days. While I don’t mind ‘I am the wind’, I actually hold no association to it with SOTN aside from the Saxophone instrumental at the very start when Alucard starts legging it…
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Maybe because the game sucks? I thought LoI was bad until I played CoD.