Dance of Illusions is still king BUT this theme is amazing.
And I hope you remember we already heard the battle form of it
Castlevania Concert in the Play Fest Festival "The Return of Final Combat"
Interesting. I wasn't aware they hosted a LoS2 concert.
Yet the major drawback of these formal musical performances is that the music that's being interpreted was never
meant to be played in a formal setting in the first place. It was composed to give a suitable ambiance to a large-scale battle, not to be performed on its own.
Listen to Araujo's suite. It's almost gruesomely tedious and repetitive. And that has nothing to do with the composer's skill or musicality -- it just has to do with the role his music was supposed to play. Most of his piece is a monotonous stream of insistent, agitated musical beats, rolling across different instruments to give it an illusion of variety. That's perfectly suited for a battle, but it's practically infuriating when listened to on its own.
This pattern remains uninterrupted until halfway through the fourth minute, when the music momentarily dies down to return forcefully with an impressive
tutti. Here, we get occasional bribes of Drac's melody, along with sweeping orchestral roars predictably orchestrated through voice and brass. But there's very little substance to it; its only purpose was to give the player a feeling of exaltation during an inspiring battle, and provides very little melodic depth to the piece. It's essentially the blaring trumpets and choirs you'd hear in a Lord of The Rings theme; it "wows" you for a moment, but doesn't exactly keep you listening.
Don't get me wrong here; Araujo is by no means a bad composer. It takes a great deal of talent to capture a sense of atmosphere as well as he did in Lords of Shadow. The only problem here is a conceptual one -- video game music isn't created for stage performance, and in most cases shouldn't be formally interpreted... It belongs in the game itself, where it can thrive.
Except all of those are actually exclusively battle themes, where the Dracula theme in SCIV is used twice before then, in the intro, and the Castle Keep. It's not a unique piece in that regard.
Dracula's theme in SCIV is unique. It it only teased earlier in the game, never entirely fleshed out. In the intro, it instantly seizes the game's eerie, foreboding tone, but doesn't show more -- take as a kind of foreshadowing, if it's appropriate. And it's only in Simon's final encounter that those vague fears materialize. It's probably the most unique Dracula theme in the series.
As for Simon's Theme, Silverlord is right. Once Dracula reaches his 'second form', Simon now has the upper hand, and his theme follows to bring the battle to a close, just as it opened it at the game's beginning. It's some extraordinary musical planning that I haven't found in any other CV.