[DELETED] [NDS] Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia - "Rhapsody of the Forsaken" by Atcero

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Submission Information:
Series: Castlevania
Game: Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
Console: Nintendo DS
Title: Rhapsody of the Forsaken
Instrumentation Solo Piano
Arranger: Atcero

[Atcero]

[Libera]

Sorry for the wait on this one, I should have got to it sooner.  That being said, I think there's going to be quite a bit of high-level arrangement and structural criticism before I can give it the detailed (final) check that I usually do.  Obviously there will be some formatting to do afterwards but it's better to leave that for later as well.

The first major point I'd make is about the texture of this arrangement and how it's not really capturing the feel of the original in many places / is too empty.  Let me take bars 3-6 as an example.  You have written some held notes in the right hand followed by an arpeggio-like figure at the end, and in the left hand we have power chords that follow the rhythm of the piano/keyboard part.  What's wrong with this?  Well, partially we have left out the bass part from the original entirely: the bass in a piece of music is often very important as it informs a lot of the harmony and the rhythm, so excluding it is something that, while not always the wrong decision, should be considered carefully.  Here, I think it is the wrong decision as it leaves the arrangement lacking the rhythm and drive of the original.  Another problem is that the right hand is not really doing anything until the arpeggio in bar 6; all it does is reinforce harmony that's already been given by the left hand.  This also contributes to the arrangement lacking drive, rhythm and sounding hollow.

How could we improve this?  My approach to these four bars would be to write the bass part into the left hand and to put the piano chords into the right hand.  Those are the elements that stand out to me most when listening to the original.  Here's how these four bars could look if we followed this approach:

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Hopefully you can see that this captures more of what is going on in the original (more of the rhythms and harmonies) but also the texture matches much more closely.

This is not just a point about these four bars (3-6) but applies to the whole arrangement.  Many places have the left hand doubling what the right hand is doing and the bass part is excluded throughout the entire arrangement.  Furthermore, there are no harmonies anywhere (apart from powerchords/quasi powerchords in the left hand) and often bars are just a single line from the original being doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in octaves through both hands.  This sort of texture sounds very weak rhythmically and harmonically compared to the original.  I highly recommend going through the arrangement again and listening to the original whilst following the same sort of strategy that I showed you for bars 3-6.  If you have any issues/questions when doing this, please feel free to ask for help/assistance either here in the thread, in the #help channel on discord or if you prefer you can message me privately.


That major point aside, here are some other things that I've noticed that are unlikely to change during the rework.

-Komni is a great developer but I personally prefer Konami.
-Be careful with your beaming: quaver tied into crotchet on beat 1.5 should be a dotted quaver in most situations (bars 4, 8, 12 etc...) and make sure to show beat 3 in bar 34.
-The structure of the repeat is not written out in a very conventional or readable way.  Ideally, you shouldn't have to skip over music that you are going to play on a later repeat and you can always rearrange the music so that this doesn't happen.  You have two options here, one with a coda and one without.  Option 1: Add the current coda to the end of the 1st time ending section.  Option 2: Remove the first and second time bars; the content of the second time bar is moved into a coda and a coda symbol is added where the content of the current first time bar starts.  Option 1 is simpler and uses no coda, but some people don't like to use a standard repeat symbol that sends the performer back multiple pages.  Option 2 avoids repeat bars (you can use a D.S. and replace the forward repeat bar in bar 3 with a segno.
-You're missing the pickup to the first bar.

Hopefully this helps and sorry again for the long wait.

[Latios212]

Chatted with Atcero on Discord and we decided to archive this one for later, to work on some easier pieces for now.

(Don't worry Libera, your feedback is very much appreciated and we can pick this one back up again later!)