Comment on Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse - Announcement Trailer
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Looks interesting…
…but you should know the guy who made the Castlevania games left Konami a while ago. He makes the Bloodstained games with a different publisher. So it’s a new IP but it’s basically the same thing. And they have a new one coming out. The first one, Ritual of the Night, was a spiritual successor to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. They also made a handful of 8-bit games in the IP to satisfy the old-school crowd.
So there are basically no “real” Castlevania games. If it uses the Castlevania name, the creator isn’t involved. If he is, it’s called Bloodstained and not Castlevania.
Koji Igarashi was responsible for the “Metroidvania” style, but was not the creator of Castlevania. He worked on the series from Symphony of the Night and through the NDS games. There were games in the series both before his involvement and after.
Iga’s great, but Castlevania is still Castlevania without his influence.
There were Metroidvanias outside Castlevania as well. And that’s my point. You take the person who made the games what they are for most people, it’s just another one of the clones, but with official branding.
It’s like when Call of Duty started adding multiple developers so they could churn out the series. People were paying for the name, they didn’t really care about who actually worked on it. But, those games were super formulaic.
A better example would be Rockband and Guitar Hero. Harmonix made Guitar Hero, but they wanted to add drums and vocals, and publisher Activision said nah, just stick to the one controller. But Harmonix were all musicians (mostly indie bands around Boston) so for that and other reasons, they left. Activision kept remaking Guitar Hero 2 with different songs via the Tony Hawk developer, Neversoft, and it was mostly okay, until Rockband started getting big, and Activision realised they needed drums and vocals as well. Long story short, they did very poorly. They kept churning out games, mostly to flood the market with crap. Guitar Hero is now dead, and Rockband is now called Fortnite Festival (I’m not kidding).
So yeah, Castlevania without the guy who made Castlevania what it is and into something people want to play? It might be successful, but it’ll be a soulless husk at best. Maybe it’ll even be fun, but it just sounds to me like a game dreamed up by suits in a board room who hate gaming except for the profits, not a game made by gamers for gamers and for the love of the game. Like most shit churned out by Activision, Bethesda, Ubisoft, EA, etc. (And yes, many of those publishers have storied histories.)
jaselle@lemmy.ca 23 hours ago
Iga was not the creator of castlevania. He was the creator of SotN and later games.
danc4498@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
It certainly feels like the beginning of that franchise.
tomkatt@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Nope, believe it or not the first Metroidvania style game was Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest for the NES. It was actually an excellent game, but a botched translation to English made it more frustrating and obtuse than it should have been. It was rather ambitious for a NES game.
Also, while level based and not Metroidvania style, Castlevania 3, Super Castlevania IV, Bloodlines, and Rondo of Blood were all fantastic games and Iga’s games have their lore and continuity based on the prior titles.
Not to mention, while it wasn’t as well received, the attempted series reboot (Lords of Shadow) was pretty great too. Mostly people didn’t like the gameplay changes for the 3D title.
And that’s not even getting into the N64 and PS2 games (one of which, Curse of Darkness, was popular enough that the first Netflix Castlevania series involves characters based on it).
Metroidvania was Igarashi’s style, to the point they were sometimes coined as “Igavania” games, but they’re not the end-all-be-all of the series.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 20 hours ago
What a terrible night for a curse.
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
Yeah, 3 and 4 were amazing. And 3 has Trevor Belmont, Sypha, and Alucard. I always assumed Netflix Castlevania was based on that.
jaselle@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
Even with a fixed translation, I would not say II was an excellent game.
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
So, the good ones, minus Simon’s Quest.