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[Castlevania] - Oh, shame for you. You activated my Alu-card.
Posts
LoS was a pretty big disappointment. I say keep it on consoles, let handhelds have the good ones.
Or throw the good ones on console, I don't care, just release them dammit.
TDWH: Deadlight hits XBLA this summer, and apparently it's a pretty good-looking Metroidvania with a bit of Limbo visual style thrown in. If you're not averse to 3D Metroid games, Batman: Arkham Asylum should suit you nicely (AC strayed from this format a lot).
Xbox: UnbreakableVows | PSN/Wii U: UnbreakableVow | 3DS: 1521-3241-9354
When asked about this on Twitter, David Cox replied "I would say wrong end of the stick....misinformed. I would also say the truth is ALWAYS better than fiction!
Sooo... Wait and see I guess.
Yeah I've been sitting on Arkham Asylum for ages. I know I enjoy it; I played the first bit; but for whatever reason I just got distracted and never went back to it. I'll get to it sometime; probably soon. I'm getting burned out on D3 faster than I thought I would and I don't have any new games till uh...whenever Darksiders 2 and Borderlands 2 come out, late summer.
Wouldn't the WiiU Tablet make a console collection of the DS games a possibility?
I'll be there day 1. While, it had some issues, overall I loved Lords of Shadow. The graphics were gorgeous and the sense of setting was nearly unmatched. I just hope they've dealt with some of the rough spots, in particular the combat's timing and hitbox wonkiness and the the storyline's tendency towards the worst kind of "Tell, don't show" and general non-sequitors. If this game keeps the original's strengths while polishing out the rough spots then it's going to be amazing. Then again the DLC implied that they actively regressed, so if that's any indication of the direction they're taking perhaps I should temper my expectations.
Huzzah for rumors of an actual LoS sequel on HD consoles.
I just hope it's more like LoS and less like the bad bad DLC's as far as narrative goes.
EDIT: And for anyone who cares about spoilers and still hasn't played LoS (and why haven't you?), if the sequel follows LoS's epilogue it's a pretty big fucking spoiler, and there's no way they would be able to show off the game without spoiling it. So uh..maybe finish it in the next two weeks.
Xbox: UnbreakableVows | PSN/Wii U: UnbreakableVow | 3DS: 1521-3241-9354
And I'm spanish and I should be proud (LoS was made in Spain), but MEH. I just can't like it, sorry.
Please don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you.
I highly doubt the LoS direct sequel will go 2D though, not even 2.5D.
Not once has anyone ever appeared to wonder how they might translate Symphony of the Night into a 3D game suitable for consoles. That process didn't go so poorly for Super Metroid, its principle inspiration.
Because
that is
pretty
patently
false.
And all of them (debatably, obviously) were good games in their own right. And all of them met the same reaction from fans: "this is just <game> with the Castlevania name". Fans haven't wanted 3D Castlevania games; All of those 3D games sold ok, but besides the fact Castlevania games have never been blockbuster games despite good followings and generally good critical reception; they still sold worse than their 2D counterparts. Except, probably, LoS which very well could be one of the best selling Castlevania games, despite people still bitching that it didn't "feel" like Castlevania (which is also another patently false clam, IMO).
If you're referring to them not making a Metroid Prime-ish 3D adventure FPS...no. Castlevania isn't a ranged adventure/exploration game like Metroid is. It wouldn't translate at all to a FPS in the vein of the Prime games because despite the moniker "metroidvania", they're pretty different games.
Sure, on the surface it might appear that Konami can't decide what Castlevania "is"; but alternately, it is a lot of things and the formula has worked in different types of games, from straight platformers, to open-ended metroidvanias, to Zelda-type adventure games, to GoW/DMC type action/adventure games.
If anything I'd praise Konami for not being afraid to tool with what the series can be and trying new things while trying to stick to the core of what a Castlevania game is (which, by the way, isn't something universally accepted by fans even); and giving each new variation its chance to try. Pretty much every time they've gone with something new, be it the N64 game, the Metroidvania games (which, keep in mind, were a fairly big departure from what Castlevania was prior to that), to the PS2 era adventure games, etc; they've given each "type" a game or two or three to find its voice before either moving on, or sticking with it (IGA portables).
Its a series that has never stuck to one flat formula and did it over and over, like some other older IP's.
The fact (rumored anyway) that they're going with a 2D variation on (likely, given Mercurysteams involvement) the LoS "universe" and another go with teh LoS style next-gen play, means that they're still caring about fans who desire a 2D Castlevania and those who really liked LoS (which did pretty damn good, both critically and commercially).
I don't see anything to complain about here. Castlevania is still managing to be a relevant series (minus a stupid jaunt into bad fighter territory; come on Konami, if you're gonna do a fighter, do a 2D blazblu style one, not a shitty 3D one) after all these years, and is trying things to keep it fresh. There's probably a reason we haven't seen a "real" 2D Castlevania (aside from HD which is debatable) since OoE; the formula was run to the ground. Hopefully whatever 2D game is being worked on will change it up enough to not feel like yet another rehash.
[who] came here from cuba's door where boxin aint allowed no more
Please don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you.
http://www.thedragonreturns.com/
(linked by Konami's account and retweeted by Dave Cox)
Is that down for anyone else?
It doesn't load, and there's just a circle in the middle for me.
It's just a picture of a door with a date on it anyway.
I'm confused; what is it supposed to be referencing? Aside from the naked lady statues, it doesn't look like anything I recall from LoS.
The Dragon on the door repersents Dracula, natch, as Dracula translates to Son of the Dragon.
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I mean most people know what happened, at this point, in the epilogue for LoS...who care anyway. The question now is: will the game that follows the epilogue be the 3DS one, or the console one; and which one will be the more "traditional" Castlevania story?
I.E.
Which I guess lends to my biggest question about the LoS sequel: how are they going to do the huge impressive vistas they pulled off with LoS, in "modern" times? I guess I'd rather the whole game not be set in some downtown and lose the wonder and immersion of LoS. I mean I really ant to play as Gabriel/Dracula, but not at the cost of the feeling of LoS.
Then again, some of the IGA Castlevanias were set during modern times and still manage to be gothic. No reason a modern LoS couldn't do the same; the same sort of world we can't see dealy.
Time well tell.
What is disappointing though, is that since they're just announcing it now, it probably means like a holiday 2013 release, and that's too damn far away. Surprise us and make it this year.
As for the next game, do they do a sequel to LoS as a prequel to the epilogue? That would be... odd. I'm not even sure that would be the proper terminology. I would love it if they made a game that jumped back and forth in time where you play the events leading up to what results in the epilogue as well as post-epilogue. Of course, that brings about the whole MGS3 "PARADOX" issue... sort of. There are ways around that.
But yeah, I absolutely would love to play the events post-epilogue. I just re-watched that video and I realized that I had forgotten how good it was.
One thing's for sure, if the events leading up to the prequel are provided to us as a 3DS game, then god dammit, I'll have to break down and buy a 3DS. *sigh*
I'd pre-order the Collector's Edition right now.
And yeah, I imagine, even if they go with a post-epilogue focus on the story; there's bound to be large chunks of the game that are the in-between the two game times.
Though, that is unless the 3DS game is that in-between time.
Either way though, I need to tone down my excitement for this. As I said before, if they're just announcing it now, we're probably looking at a holiday 2013 release, which feels so damn far away right now.
Think about the boss fight in the second DLC. That should help
I've said it before, but no matter how frustrating it was to get Chapter XIII and XIV 110%'d, it made me a far better player at the game than I had any right to be, and made 110%'ing the rest of the game a complete and utter joke. Since you cant use the ultimates on the Chapter XIV boss, you have to actually learn how to be a better player instead of just relying on ultimate spam.
I really wanted to beat Chapter XIII on Paladin. I just did not have the patience to do that climbing puzzle when the checkpoint would start me off 1-hit from death.
I don't know how you did Chapter XIV though. I was raging and cursing on the easiest difficulty! (Squire was it?)
For a player that is inherently better at these action/adventure games than I am (The only way I manage do to Darksiders on Apocalyptic was after getting the "i win" armor on normal, for example; a game many people think was too easy), it probably would have been a lot faster, but it was basically me forcing myself to finally learn how to play the damn game right, and to stop winging it.
I wouldn't imply at all that they haven't tried to make 3D Castlevania games, primarily since I own them all. My concern is that I don't believe a single one of them has been a particularly effective good-faith attempt to imagine Symphony of the Night's free-roaming and exploration RPG gameplay in three dimensions, and I'm not convinced any of them had any reason to avoid that approach.
Let's go down the list.
Lament of Innocence had some great core combat mechanics and a pretty nice graphics engine for its day, but this is where what I would call the major problem with basically every Castlevania in 3D rears its head: the level design is an ungodly mess. It hints at a streamlined free world experience with its hub design, but ironically, the actual stages themselves seem much too indebted to 2d logic - they're a series of corridors that lock you in, room by room, to slog your way out, with very little in the way of interesting set pieces or even much platforming in any way. This game was released between Devil May Cry and God of War, so there really isn't much excuse for why Castlevania in particular needed to be so strangled in its approach to creating a compelling 3d world for an action game. There was certainly a precedent. Its mission structure notwithstanding, DMC is actually not a bad template for a 3D Castlevania with exploration and RPG elements.
Next we've got Curse of Darkness. The RPG elements were greatly expanded, but the level design was arguably even worse. You could go back to previous areas, but (and I could be forgetting something) unless you really wanted to grind your companion characters, there was little reason to. Every level was a long series of identical hallways or outdoor equivalents. Platforming was effectively written out of the equation in favor of straight-up hacking and slashing into the fog of every hallway.
I don't know what the hell to call Lords of Shadow. How do you argue against its failure to "feel" like Castlevania? I'm not sure how to argue for that exactly, but I will say this: it was fun, and gorgeous, but as you say, it was God of War with much more sensitive mechanics and a little too much in the way of a combat system. You could have ditched the magic and I'm not sure I would have missed it. The game was assuredly not free-roaming, though the levels did have some neat architecture at times, but the platforming was either a joke or infuriating (see the Clock Tower level) and the music seemed much more interested in evoking modern fantasy films than the classic Gothic and metal influences that run through the previous games' blood. It's an aesthetic concern, but it's part of the question of identity. I really don't think you want to argue that drastic deviations from Castlevania's musical tradition don't ground a pretty legitimate argument about the game's ability to "feel" recognizably like its ancestry.
So yes, there have been many diverse attempts at making Castlevania work in 3D, and most of the time they were okay, but however you feel personally, I think it would take a good deal more convincing for me to agree that any of them represent a wholly successful action game by the standards of each's own era or in terms of an effective 3D re-imagining of Symphony's mechanics. You could even read them as a willful resistance to that style of gameplay, especially considering games of that last decade or so that have come nearer to Symphony of the Night in 3D than anything the IP itself has produced. I can dig your argument that there's an undercurrent of radical experimentation and resistance to formula in that history, but the reliance on the Metroidvania formula in 2D as major sellers in addition to some alternately lazy and conservative design decisions in each of those 3D titles makes that hard for me to swallow.
And no, the solution is not a "FPS adventure" at all, but we certainly know that free-roaming, backtracking, platforming-intensive exploration of that same kind has clearly worked for another IP with very similar DNA. You say that it is not a "ranged" platformer, but why is that in itself an insurmountable stumbling block in adaptation? Even in Metroid Prime, Samus doesn't exactly get in CoD-style shootouts. Enemies rush her in close quarters - the principle difference is she shoots back rather than readying a sword. Put it in 3D, put it in third-person, put it in a demon-infested castle, and explain to me why that's such an unattractive idea. Frankly, I'd prefer a glorious mess of an experiment to another Lords of Shadow.
The fact that you don't feel like it was in good faith is entirely irrelevant; because point for point, it was a recreation of the SoTN formula in a 3D setting. All your perspective proves is that you are one of the people who are holding the games (and the series) to an unreasonable and unreachable standard. SoTN worked because it was SoTN. Itself, it was already a massive departure on Castlevania games before hand. Even SoTN got a lot of flack because of how easy it was and how much it deviated from the older games. And each subsequent IGA game got more and more flack for being rehashes and not doing a damn thing new (which was true). It wasn't until OoE that the IGA series started getting actual praise again.
I'm really not going to respond to anything else because you're basically making my entire point about the fans being unable and incapable of being pleased no matter what Konami tries. Shit, at this point about the only thing Konami hasn't tried with Castlevania is to make it a JRPG. There is no pleasing the unpleasable, and the fact that you can sit there and act like none of the (so far) five 3D iterations of Castlevania were "good enough" is just hammering in the point home. EDIT: On top of that, virtually anything I have to say is in the rest of the post you didn't bother quoting.
This thread is full of people saying why LoS is a Castlevania game and I'm not going to bother repeating what I, and others, have already stated so. many. times. You don't want to have a discussion, you want to be right. And you're not. So there's that.
EDIT: ANd if you're gonna quote someone, quote them. Don't quote the part you think you can use to make it look like you're right, ignoring every other point made that you actively ignored and pretended don't exist.
Oh, and it really should have just used a whip instead of the combat cross. The animations would be pretty much exactly the same.
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I dont think they called it the Vampire Slayer though, so that's good.
But yeah, it could have used more music from the series; all it had was the music box. On the other hand, I dunno; they were trying a new direction and didn't want to have to try to build tons of homages into the game. LoS could have easily been just a series of homages and callbacks trying to create a "new" Castlevania but trying to keep old fans happy; and I'm glad they didn't fall into that trap.
TWO COMBAT CROSSES
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Funnily enough, this actually makes me wonder how the gameplay of a LoS post-epilogue would actually fit. I mean
That would be very un-Castlevania. Maybe he'll have some
It'll be interesting to see what they reveal in a couple days.
Man, what? I just offered a pretty detailed breakdown of specific criticisms of specific titles relative to their history and the games with which they were designed to compete. I didn't even dismiss them, Lords of Shadow included, as being failures. What I was certainly suggesting is that they don't appear interested in crossing what seems to be the most obvious frontier for them, or, if they had, they've implicitly dismissed those efforts as having been conceptually unsound (say, in the case of Lament of Innocence) with each successive re-interpretation rather than confronting the fact that there were a lot of ways in which the execution was lacking (most notably in terms of level design). And how did I misquote you badly enough as to prevent any conversation from being had? Respond to the point or don't, but it's a conversation worth having unless you would like to persist in your insistence that so much of everything I have to say is "entirely irrelevant."
Edit: in sum, I brought no hostility to you, there's no reason to bring any to me.
I kind of have a problem with saying something doesn't "feel" like Castlevania because honestly the games don't have a definitive style to them. They mix every single myth and religion under the sun together in one big melting pot, and every game does different stuff in this regard. So really, the only way to "feel" like Castlevania is to mimic the gameplay, which is impossible to do in 3d when all the original games are 2d.
I ultimately think Lords of Shadow was successful because it didn't try to "recreate" 2d Castlevania. It told a gothic fantasy tale about Dracula with lots of action, which is Castlevania distilled into its purist form. Not being confined to arbitrary guidelines they could focus on a game that was fun rather than something that had to meet X,Y, and Z criteria.
This is all correct. Simons Quest didn't feel like Castlevania. Castlevania 3 felt like Castlevania but not Simons Quest. Super Castlevania IV felt like none of the above (but was wonderful). The PC Engine ones like Rondo of Blood didn't feel like 1-3, but felt a bit like IV. SoTN didn't feel at all like any Castlevania game. The IGA ones all felt the same, but that got pretty old. Every 3D iteration has felt pretty different than each other than the 64 ones for obvious reasons.
Some people who started the series with SotN hate the games prior to it because they're so different. Some people who grew up on the originals can't stand the IGA Castlevanias because they're pretty much, gameplay wise an entirely different series. What makes them Castlevania games is the theme, same with LoS. Castlevanias have very rarely had consistent gameplay, and when they have (again, the IGA ones), its run themselves into the ground, both critically and commercially.