LoginI'm a 37-year-old man who grew up with the Castlevania video game franchise, from the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis - Castlevania Bloodlines - and the first PlayStation with Symphony of the Night. Hearing that Netflix is going to make adaptation of this beloved game franchise, I knew I was going to watch this.
And watched it I have.
While I haven't finished the final fourth season, I love this series. Beautifully animated, the violence is on par with the brutality of the video games, and the storytelling is *chef's kiss* excellent. Graham McTavish's mellifluous voice fits Dracula well, and Richard Armitage's Devil-may-care performance as Trevor Belmont...he sounds like the kind of guy who's tired of BS.
Highly recommended. If you like the video games, you'll like this series. 22 episodes of bliss.
Castlevania Reviews
Great Video Game to Animation Adaptation.
Posted : 12 months ago on 14 May 2023 01:19
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Stake this monstrosity!
Posted : 2 years, 4 months ago on 27 December 2021 03:55
English is not my native language so I apologize for the errors that are bound to exist.
Castlevania is a fun vampire, because it doesn’t suck blood, it just sucks.
Don't be fooled by the good art, the competent animation that is terrific at times, the excellent voice acting or the blood that makes you think this shit is mature. And that weird episode in which suddenly there is sex everywhere.
It's a pretty lazy series and I don't believe they planned the story, it very much seems like they wrote it on the fly, which should be impossible because of the Netflix format, but it still seems to be the case.
Now, I’m gonna stake this bitch!
CHARACTER
No, the characters are not great, they are barely functional, and virtually none of them get development. They are very soft.
Sypha's development is that she starts cursing, that's all. That she knows how screwed up the world can be doesn't really change her personality or her way of thinking. It doesn’t matter.
Alucard goes crazy for a few moments after the betrayal of the Japanese, but it doesn't really matter because it is ignored, it leads nowhere.
Trevor … no idea. He strikes me as the same fuck from the beginning, but now with a mission.
Issac doesn't make fucking sense in development, but the potential was there. And I don’t give a fuck about the rest.
The vampire lovers (the lesbians) were sweet, I liked their relationship, but they barely appeared, it's disappointing. There was a lot of potential with them. At least they are alive and together. Better than Lenore and the other fuck. Lenore was awesome in her first appearances, she was smart and interesting. But once that arc is over, they no longer know what to do with her.
I don't like Hector. He is very weak. He's not a bad character exactly, he's just a dumbass for the most part. And then, when he's smart, he shouldn't have been able to even do any of those things, he should have been under constant surveillance. But vampires are idiots in that season.
Dracula is a cunt that doesn't deserve that happy ending. There is no excuse for genocide, man. Kill yourself, by yourself. But I guess everybody grieves in different ways.
Isaac. Oh Isaac. Probably the character with the most potential. His character journey should have gone this way: 1. Hating humans because they are shit. 2. Learn that not all of them are shit. 3. He doesn’t forget that several of them are indeed shit. 4. Protect those who are not shit. 5. Lead them to be better.
Very simple, but they screw it up. Because they prefer to focus on the shitty adventures of Trevor and Sypha. Two characters with very little to offer. (I would have gone in to more detail about Issac journey, but the ideas I have for that are gonna be use in a story of mine).
Instead of that, he thinks humans are shit because ONE guy hurt him. We are never shown any other encounters in his past, so I can assume that.
I have no idea why he doesn't have a problem with vampires the same way, they are worse. It's okay that he likes Dracula, but the rest are never more than pieces of shit.
No matter. Then, in a desert, he meets three or four one-dimensional humans, who are literally evil for no reason. That reinforces his hatred of them. All very lazy.
Then he meets two who are not totally shit, but is not like they do many good things. One gives him a drink and a conversation on his boat, and the other gifts him a magic mirror. That's it, that’s enough. That makes him hesitate for a while, but they are such minimal things compared to the bad things that he seems to believe about humans that it is laughable.
Then, VERY reasonable soldiers won't let him in into their city, because they know what the demons have been doing and the things they have ruin. Isaac sees that as something so irrational and evil, that he destroys all doubt and hates humans completely again. Of course, he murders them all.
People, don't forget, Isaac is a mass murderer. He is a bastard.
Then he meets a sorcerer who enslaved an entire city, another Forgemaster who is friendly, but strange ... he murders him and decides to rebuild the city for a reason that is not explained. Suddenly, he has decided to form a utopia. I mean, that's the obvious endpoint of his journey, I said it should in his early episodes, but he comes to that conclusion OFF-CAMERA.
Isaac is a fucking idiot despite having wise dialogue and an orgasmic voice. He sucks!
FIGHTS, MAGIC AND STUFF
One of the two biggest problems with the series is the lack of plausibility of the fights. Trevor is human in the series, only human. Even so, he can be psychically equal to beasts much larger and three times as thick as he is. He kicks them and hurts them, he takes their hits and survives. He is able to evade them!
It is very difficult to enjoy the battles when I kept pointing out all the times that he should have died. It gets really bad in the last season, when, after being stabbed, cut and beaten, as well as being exhausted, he goes to battle against the giant form of Death, does impossible things, endures all his blows and ends up winning. Da hell!
It is very implausible and it makes me angry. Also, another reason why he wins is because the enemies are idiots who never take advantage of their … advantages, and make horrible decisions. Most demons are beasts, but even animals would not be that dumb.
One of the worst scenes was Trevor's battle in the library. There is a giant who should have crushed him, but he stays still after taking ONE hit and allows himself to be killed. Of course, the rest attack him one by one. Because if enemies were to wait for their turn, those would be beast demons. Makes perfect sense.
No one mentions how rare his durability is and the things that he does, so that maybe you can argue that he is superhuman. The series does not seem to be aware of the problem. Just because is animated doesn't mean you have the excuse for him to do impossible things. It is not a comedy, it does not have that advantage.
And don't tell me it doesn't matter that much, that they are just fights. You can't tell me that when there are so many of them. The story progresses through fights and action scenes, and almost all of them are horrible. Not even the choreography is good, if you pay attention, many of the decisions are stupid. Nobody who knows how to fight would do the movements that the series shows you. It's the animation that makes you think it's good, but there are more important things than how beautiful it looks.
The show is rather silly, it doesn't understand the Trevor problem. It does not understand that Sypha is more broken that my anus, because she can use 3 super magics and she NEVER gets tired, no matter how much she uses it all the time, no matter how big her ice shits are and how much fire she shoots. She doesn't even have trouble breathing or pain in her hands. Nothing! She overpowers a whole castle!
Suddenly we learn that she can use thunder too, in the middle of season three I think. She never uses it before, but she always uses it after that first time. We are not told that she studied it recently, she can just use it, just like that, just when it was important. It makes it seem that they just came of with that as an asspull.
She is undoubtedly the most powerful character in the show, but Trevor still has to deal with Death. Sypha just wants to be nice, because she doesn't need his help and she shouldn’t have to leave the most important and dangerous things to him.
I don’t believe that she cannot win a battle, I never feel her in danger because I know that she has unlimited power. And she's not stupid, of course, unless the show requires her to be stupid in order to advance the plot. Like when she sees the marks on the houses in that village, and she knows they are for something fuck up, and neither she nor Saint Germain think that, maybe, just maybe, they should erase them. Just in case.
They don't do that and it all goes to hell. I was not happy with that story arc, it was very stupid. The best part was the design of the madman in charge of the cult.
The series does that a lot. They are presented to us as competent, but when they have to be morons, they are. Artificial plot! And that is the biggest problem of the show. Alucard can fly and move VERY, VERY fast, but when he must go to the castle room where Saint Germain awaits so he can stop him, he runs at normal speed. WTF And he never removes the stones (or whatever they are) that he senses are for something bad. He's a fucking idiot!
If he had flown, the story arc ends there. If Trevor and Sypha had erased the marks, the story arc would end there. Everything moves forward thanks to stupid decisions, not even just convenience, no, purely idiotic decisions. You know what Neil deGrasse Tyson would say about that.
It's a frustrating series. It should have ended with the death of Dracula. But the show drank more than it could pee.
This could have been longer, it would have been so easy to dissect everything wrong with every character and every season (except for the first one, that one is okay) but I’m tired now. I might make a video someday, that way I can use the visual evidence while I shit on it.
That's it.
4/10.
Alaoz!
PS: The vampire geisha was cool as fuck. But they give us her story after she's already dead. Assholes.
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Castlevania review
Posted : 5 years, 6 months ago on 27 October 2018 05:53
Ya se por que los productores dijeron que harían esta serie tipo Juego de Tronos, ya que los personaje hablan demasiado, pero, oh por madre de dios de Nintendo, Netflix y Konami , esta segunda temporada de Castlevania tiene una de las mejores coreografías de peleas en cualquier serie animada que se conoce hoy en día, ademas con un capitulo de oro (capitulo 7) donde hacen el mayor fanservice visual posible, incluso sonoro, ya que ponen el tema principal de los juegos de la franquicia (Dios, incluso hacen un guiño al Castlevania de Play Station 2) ='D
Ahora, no se que harán después de esta temporada, se ve que quieren hacer mas de esta franquicia en Netflix, asi que no se si adaptaran Castlevania 1 y 2 de la NES, como protagonista a Simon Belmont, o a Ritchert, ya que Castlevania tiene un lore inmenso e interesante.
Temporada muy buena, y por fin, ya la puedo recomendar a cualquiera que le guste ver acción en los medios audiovisuales, solo aguántense la sobrexposición de diálogos que tienen algunos capítulos, y no se molesten por ciertas cosas de desarrollo de personaje que le faltaron aquí, disfrútenla por lo que es y por lo que quiere brindar, complaciendo tanto a los que no son conocedores de los videojuegos, y como los que si.
Ahora, no se que harán después de esta temporada, se ve que quieren hacer mas de esta franquicia en Netflix, asi que no se si adaptaran Castlevania 1 y 2 de la NES, como protagonista a Simon Belmont, o a Ritchert, ya que Castlevania tiene un lore inmenso e interesante.
Temporada muy buena, y por fin, ya la puedo recomendar a cualquiera que le guste ver acción en los medios audiovisuales, solo aguántense la sobrexposición de diálogos que tienen algunos capítulos, y no se molesten por ciertas cosas de desarrollo de personaje que le faltaron aquí, disfrútenla por lo que es y por lo que quiere brindar, complaciendo tanto a los que no son conocedores de los videojuegos, y como los que si.
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