For all those wondering, no, this is not PS5 exclusive: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4231820/Castlevania_Belmonts_Curse/
Oh thank God! After watching the trailer and seeing only the PS5 logo, I was staying to feel real bummed.
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.
Iga was not the creator of castlevania. He was the creator of SotN and later games.
So, the good ones, minus Simon’s Quest.
It certainly feels like the beginning of that franchise.
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. In fact, SotN’s intro sequence is literally the ending of Rondo, it’s a direct sequel.
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.
What a terrible night for a curse.
Yeah, 3 and 4 were amazing. And 3 has Trevor Belmont, Sypha, and Alucard. I always assumed Netflix Castlevania was based on that.
Even with a fixed translation, I would not say II was an excellent game.
Nah, it’s great and has some of the best music in the series. I mean, it introduced Bloody Tears!
Try a romhack of the game, like Simon’s Redaction or Simon’s Quest Retranslated, it’s absolutely worth a play.
Yeah the soundtrack is good. But imo those hacks aren’t enough to save it. I liked CV 3 though.
I love CV3 but it’s brutal, I’ve played it off and on since around 1991 or so and still never finished it.
Have you played the Japanese version, Akumajō Densetsu? Some of the tracks in that version are even better with the use of the fancy sound chip (VRC6).
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, and his last involvement was as producer of Harmony of Despair in 2010. 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.)
Must be thrilling for Motion Twin to get to work on this. They earned it, TBH. All the power to them.
Big Castlevania fan, but Konami can’t get bent after the way they treated gamers and devs in 2015. Never again.
It is not doing anything for me. The art style is meh.
Gonna be honest here. This, was the most interesting part of the State of Play.
And I don’t even play side scrollers.
- I love Castlevania
- Evil Empire and MotionTwin
I’m in.
I hope this isn’t PlayStation exclusive. I know most of the Castlevania stuff has been released on PC too, but there was Castlevania: Requiem that we didn’t get on PC.
I’m not a fan of the art style to be honest
I don’t dislike that art style in other games but nothing about that trailer gave me castlevania vibes
Yeah, it is too bright.
That’s exactly what I was thinking, glad I saw your comment before making pretty much the same one. Granted, I also didn’t like the 3-D but 2-D style of Bloodstained, but this is orders of magnitude worse based on that youtube vid.
Granted, the graphics aren’t the main draw to this type of Metroidvania, so long as the gameplay is good, I’ll be happy enough. But, I have serious reservations about the thought process that went into the approval of this design. I’m not usually so opinionated, so it has to the pretty awful for me to call it as much.
I agree with your opinion about bloodstained. I played it a bit recently, and I think that 3d/2d style is pretty horrendous.
I think it is done to save cost as it is easier to make a game with 3d models than it is to use 2d sprites.
Trevor name dropped, but protagonist looks like Sonya – am confused! Given the timeline, I think Trevor must be the old guy and the protagonist is someone else. Perhaps the child of Trevor and Sypha.
Excited for a new castlevania game, but skeptical of these developers. I didn’t like Dead Cells. I hope either that it’s not a roguelike, or that they’ve improved on their formula and fixed the problems with dead cells like pool dilution.
Helllllll yeah
Oh shit, that actually looks pretty sicknasty
Wishes:
- Not exclusive to PS
- Not a rougelike
That is all, please and thank you.
Animation and sound design reminds me of blasphemous and moonscars, which are games I like, but I wouldn’t say feel very castlevania-y
Cool when can I get this on steam?
