Some of them born from my period of discovering Castlevania and having to play all of them.

First, the N64 Castlevanias. Ugly, terrible platforming, bad camera, but occasionally trying cool stuff. Oh, of course, bonus point for the second one being technically a sequel with new characters and a continuation of the story and basically the same game with a lot of reused and slightly tweaked levels.

And now for the worst one…Castlevania Judgment (Wii). A fighting game featuring several characters from the Castlevania series fighting in gimmicky arenas with a generic “I gathered you all from all over the timeline to fight the ultimate big bad”. I loved to hate that game.

Most characters are unrecognizable. They got Obata of Death Note fame to redesign everyone, and it shows.

Simon Belmont has the usual beefy barbarian body with Light Yagami’s head grafted on it. Death is basically Ryuk. Maria has a distinctly Misa Amane gothic lolita style that has nothing to do with any of her apparitions. Grant Danasti is… well it’s not as much as he’s a Death Note character, he just basically became Voldo from SoulCalibur for some reason. Eric Lecarde was brought into the game as a young boy and doesn’t look anything like his two apparitions in the series, he’s the token shouta brat in this.

Funnily enough, the game has Cornell, the werewolf from the aforementioned second Castlevania 64, despite those games being basically purged from the Castlevania canon in everything else. Likewise the boss is a very random reference to the Kid Dracula NES game, basically a Castlavania parody game featuring… a young Alucard? maybe? He technically already had a reference in Symphony of the Night already, but in this game he’s specifically referencing “lore” from the parody game.

Even the characterization is unsufferable. Maria is a teen from somewhere between Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night, and she spends the whole game envying other female characters who have bigger breasts. In fact almost everyone is obsessed with something they have to bring up in almost every line, and it’s either a very basic background tidbit or completely out of place.

All in all it’s very much bad SoulCalibur. I spent way too much time on that shit.