Loading up on the Castlevania music without breaking the bank… or the law

It’s hard to argue against Castlevania‘s music being some of the best in the gaming industry. That said, despite the fact that the series has had much greater sales numbers in the US than Japan, it’s pretty darn difficult to come by any one of the many Castlevania soundtrack CDs here, because for some reason Konami fails to release them. The instinct may be to turn to eBay or even Amazon, but we’ve discovered that if you don’t break the bank on those CDs, you’re almost guaranteed to be buying a bootleg, even if the one pictured in the auction isn’t a bootleg, as happened to me with Apocalypse.

This leaves only a couple of solutions if you’re not prepared to drop $30-$50 US per disc to buy them from an importer. One is to buy a bootleg and hope it isn’t total garbage, but if you want to do this legally, your cheapest option is to buy the albums from the iTunes store or Amazon’s music download service. Both services are currently offering five Castlevania soundtrack albums at $9.99 each, or individual tracks at 99¢. Both services boast high quality sound, around 256kbps, and both are DRM-free. So for less than $50, you can have high quality digital versions of the following four Castlevania soundtracks:

• Symphony of the Night
• Curse of Darkness
• Dracula X Chronicles
• Konami Game Music: Classic Castlevania

The best value here is the Dracula X Chronicles soundtrack. This is two CDs worth of music, somewhere around 60 tracks (wow!), and many of them are rockin’ remakes of classic Castlevania tunes, which is what we tend to want from these soundtracks. The Curse of Darkness soundtrack is a two-disc affair as well, while Symphony of the Night is widely considered the best soundtrack in the series by many fans.

You could easily spend $200 amassing the CDs for these, or $50 to download them. As someone who has an attachment to actually touching the CDs, it was hard for me to let go, but once I’d been cheated by frauds, I decided this was the best way to go. Here’s hoping they release Judgment‘s soundtrack this way, and maybe we’ll see Apocalypse in the future. Both games have great soundtracks.

Here’s another tip. Get these using your spare change. Pull together all your loose change in a jar or whatever and find your nearest Coinstar machine that supports Amazon.com or iTunes. You can dump your change in there and get 100% of it as a credit at either of these stores. Then go home and buy your soundtrack albums without having to even pull out your credit card. It doesn’t get any easier than that.