Це відео не доступне.
Перепрошуємо.
Reappraising Castlevania: Curse of Darkness - A Retrospective Review
Вставка
- Опубліковано 15 сер 2024
- For Halloween of this year, I decided to take a look back at my favorite of the 3D Castlevania games, Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, to see just how well it holds up. The 3D Castlevania games are well known for their less-than-stellar reputation, but I've been claiming that if any of them is undeserving of that reputation, it's Castlevania: Curse of Darkness. But how well does this game actually hold up? Was I right all along, or is it really a case of rose tinted glasses?
If you're interested in seeing a full Let's Play of this game, courtesy of yours truly, you can find it at the following link.
• Mitch Plays Castlevani...
In fact, I occassionally do full let's plays on my second channel, feel free to take a look.
/ @poqreslux2letsplayboo...
Really these links are just there so I can easily copy and paste them for the End Card later. It's not like it matters. No one reads this stuff anyway.
This video is fair use. All media encompassed within is used for the purposes of critique, analysis, review and educational purposes, and at some points parody.
Don't tell anyone this, but I'm thinking of doing the Lords of Shadow Games next year, because oh boy, are there a lot of things to talk about with those.
The music in Curse of Darkness is so sick. Also the mechanics are alot more advanced than people gave it credit for. Lament of Innocence wishes it was this deep. I need to find me a copy of this for the Xbox again.
Absolutely agree. In some ways I actually feel like this game was a bit a head of the curb at the time. It does a lot of things right that we laud games these days for.
@@poqreslux You were right when you spoke on overly convoluted gear and weapon systems. I quit alot of games in recent memory because of the tedious nature of modern gaming. I felt like this game striked a good balance between detail and simplicity.
@@poqreslux , had the game had a larger place to explore, 3-D versions of previous Castlevania bosses, multiple platforming levels, more weapons, alternate characters to play as, an Inverted/Alternate Castle/Area to explore, more diverse areas to explore, and better 3-D models, I think that it would have proven its case to make a good 3-D Castlevania happen for the franchise.
@@KurokiSamurai , I do not find modern games bad in those areas, inasmuch as I find cheap DLC ploys, or similar sorts of scams, being forced onto consumers instead of complete games.
@@paxhumana2015 totally agree. cheap gimmicks, half assed experiences, and monotonous mechanics are the true cancer to gaming.
Curse of Darkness is basically Castlevania... but with pokemons. It's fun, definitely underrated. Being able to play Trevor made the whole replay seem like the sequel to LoI I initially bought the game for.
It's important to mention Hector does go through kind of a character arc in the game. He starts off all anger and vengeance and assholishness, but mellows out considerably once he learns that Isaac is pretty much a pawn used to bring back Dracula, to the point that ultimately fighting Isaac is pretty much a mercy kill.
Thanks man
This is a highly underrated game that no ody ever seems to talk about. And this is also a highly underrated channel. This video is top quality content. Awesome work!
It is like a stake to my heart that this Castlevania game will most likely never see its way onto a newer console when it is by far the best of all of them in my opinion. And don't even think about giving me this or that reasons how I am wrong, I have been playing Castlevania since it first came to America on the NES and was called Castlevania.
I played the hell out of this game in middle school, got all my devils to 99 then played and beat it on trevor mode, then played it and beat it again on crazy mode.
my favorite challenge playthrough I've ever done is my affectionately named "Polnareff Challenge", where I only permitted myself to use Rapiers, and the only ID that I was allowed to use aside from unlocking progression, was the Speed Mail Battle Devil
it was actually pretty easy for the most part, until I got to the later third of the game, where the rapiers basically stopped showing up with new upgrades in favor of the longswords.
It was fun being so fast though, because i typically stuck with greataxes and spears in my normal run throughs of the game. So the change of pace was fun
Great Review! Helped me remember a lot about this game, really motivated me to go through it once again
Great review of Curse of Darkness. It was the second Castlevania I ever completed, and I was always pretty let down when people said it was a boring game. I still listen to the music from this game, and I lucked out today when I saw your review when I went to listen to it again. One minor thing you forgot is that you could play as hector after you beat it too although I might have missed the mention, but overall, this vid was a really entertaining and thorough.
You know, I can't believe I totally forgot to even mention that you can play as Trevor. There's also a boss rush mode I forgot to mention too. And also, the music in this game is a blast. Abandoned Castle, Garibaldi Temple and both Aqueduct tracks are some of my favorites.
I wish there was a remake of the 3d games in a collection. All 6 3d games in package.
Good review dude, I like your chill vibe. Keep at it and I'm sure you'll get the praise and more audience that you deserve 🤙🏼
I don't remember doing the stealing and crafting part but I had a really strong "skeleton the throws hundreds of bone projectiles" Innocent Devil lol. I really liked Curse of Darkness, it's a hidden gem for the PS2. Lament on Innocent was more a Castlevania though imo which I also really like.
Dudes name is "Corpsey" lol
I honestly would prefer legitimate Item Drops, per what happens in 2-D Metroidvania Castlevania games, and, sometimes, Enemies would also drop more than one Item as well. However, if one MUST have an Item that involves stealing things from Enemies, then it should have been done like similar Items were in the 2-D Metroidvania Castlevania games, specifically, the Items that raise Luck in certain areas, like making Money, Item, Heart, Food, Sub-Weapon, Weapon, and Rare Item Drops happen more frequently, and, once those little Items that you can equip that make those things happen have all been maxed out in their Strength, then you could combine them all into one massively powerful Item that makes you be able to steal, as well as spawn, a lot of Items off of Enemies, with, the more powerful the Enemy is, the more Items will Drop, and especially the Items that are of higher rarity, scarcity, power, strength, effectiveness, usefulness, and financial gain.
My first castlevania. Loved it
Before I even get into the curse of darkness part of this video ill say this was my first castlevania game and its very near and dear to my heart, honestly mainly for the innocent devil system and how dracula's 2nd phase never leaves my mind for long, or the jumping on the dragons back to wack him as he flies around, playing again as trevor and spamming grand cross cause its the coolest attack ever, I love this game and wanna hear why people hate it so much
as someone in your exact mindset that grew up with this game as their first, my only major gripe I have is this game is Empty Hallway Central
it wouldn't be as bad if it was like Bayonetta and you could move quickly through the locales if you so chose to, but it isnt, and your only major movement option is doing the first roll of the 2 roll dodge animation over and over which isn't marginally faster than your base walking speed
other than that, super fun game. I honestly don't know why it gets so much heat
I loved this game when it came out.
I love Castlevania: Curse of Darkness. I really wish that Fromsoft would get the license and make a Castlevania game using Curse of Darkness and Bloodborne as inspiration. It would epic asf. Edit: I hate Hector in the anime. They ruined him imo. Hector is a bad ass in the game. Play on emulator and it looks SO MUCH BETTER.
Underrated game.
Underrated video.
Underrated channel.
Thanks dude. Hoping to get back into the swing of making videos sometime soon.
I haven't seen every Castlevania: CoD review video on youtube, but this is definitely the best I've seen. Thank you.
It's clear that you took the time to understand and master the gameplay mechanics. Looks great tbh. I have skipped the story part because it's filled with spoilers, though.
Thanks. If you haven't played it, I recommend it. It's a lot of fun.
@@poqreslux I've bought it yesterday, so I'll definitely play through it sometime in the future =) Have you played Lament of Innocence? If so, how did it fare against this one?
@@gf618 I've played Lament quite some time ago when I rented it from Blockbuster, so that should clue you in to how long ago that was. I remember enjoying it, it was enough to get me to rent and then buy Curse of Darkness.
If you have beaten lament of innocence and have the data saved if you load curse of darkness using the saved data from lament of innocence you get to start the game with the signature Belmont weapon. The whip
Ah, a video after my own hear. A 3Dvania from the PS2 era, Booker T spinaroonies, you got the JoJo reference and a geology pun, cheeky! Basically, what you've been saying about CoD, I've been saying about Lament of Innocence and about Judgement for quite a few years, since CoD was always the better received out of the three.
Though a bit surprised it took you that long to figure out it was using the Musou system of controls / combat. It's also what, ironically, makes it deeper than Lament of Innocence. LoI tried to approach a 3D Castlevania closer in tone to classicvanias with a combat system closer to that of Rygar PS2, copying Tecmo's ideas of how a character with a whip should fight like, with quick and wide attacks and single focused strong attacks, that chain in very specific ways into each other, with heavy emphasis on the animations. Naturally, that meant that the player could not experiment with combat as much because he was bound to unskippable animations, not unlike what Ninja Gaiden 1 did later on XBOX, except that game was so much faster and with such a pace, people thought Ryu could cancel out his moves which wasn't true. Meanwhile, by adapting a Musou-style gameplay but also allowing for people to cancel out attacks, the gameplay and combat got way deeper, especially with the plethora of differences between not only each weapon type but also each weapon as well. The funny thing is that due to the game coming out two years after LoI, IGA pushed for the game to have a bigger bulk of animations, to appear stylish and it worked.
And somehow, Hector isn't even the best example of how deep the combat is in this game. Trevor is. Some of the best combat videos on youtube are of Trevor doing crazy shit with his combos in the boss rush. I'm still bummed that the two PS2 Vanias never got the PS3 bundle treatment, like so many other games got. I would love to have both of them in one physical copy and popping them on my PS3 every now and again instead of fearing for the worst due to them being digital only. And 60FPS would have probably helped with the pace of Lament of Innocence as well, if it helped God of War 1 and 2 on PS3...
Funny thing about Hector : He's voiced by Crispin Freeman, who later went on to voice Alucard from Hellsing...yeah and Hector already looks like Alucard. And then he went on to voice the main character from Nanobreak, another one of IGA's games, that is basically "Hector in nanomachines, fighting against a cyborg president, years before Metal Gear Rising". The PS2 era was a really wild ride.
Nano Breakers was also indeed a criminally underrated PS2 Konami title, as was Enthusia Professional Racing.
One of my favorite castlevanias
Never played this game, but the soundtrack is CRAZY good
looking forward to trying this. great review!
It's underrated but only a little. The game is just so piss easy it's hard to stay interested in the more interesting elements of the game.
I was hyped as shit when I saw hector in the show because this is one of my favorite games EVER
Same but the made him look like a wuss
Great video thanks
I've been playing lords of shadows 2 again since it first came out, and am deadset on beating it this time, the cut scenes and gameplay are my main gripes just like with the other los games. Gonna pick up cotd again and finally finish it like almost 20 years later, stopped playing it because of a corrupted save back then, but I remember enjoying it. It's mind boggling they haven't really put out a truly solid 3dvania yet, just take the hardness of the originals, including the annoying pitfall deaths, give it the metrovania style maps and leveling/rpg system and add the combo style combat of most of the 3Dvania games and wa la you have a killer 3Dvania...maybe take some cues from the Metroid prime games minus the fps perspective.
Lament of Innocence was an awesome game. Curse of Darkness was just as good. I'm looking for the next Castlevania to play now that's this type of game play.
Metroidvanias are overrated, boring too easy and squandering potential. If there was a shed of STAKES in these games. Playing as Alucard or Soma is enjoyable but they're OP UTA. This is a problem that could have been solved had the first game come overseas complete with save files in an easy mode. Koji igarashi understands this which is why blood-stained has so many options.
In closing... Curse of Darkness is awesome.
Best part of the game: OST.
Worst part: empty environments.
It's an okay game, Hector is cool, not so fan of the innocent devils system. You can't even invert the horizontal camera (!). The NewGame+ with Trevor is kinda lame: no dialogues, no story, nothing. I vastly prefer Lament of Innocence, it is less ambitious but it succeeds. What makes me return to Curse of Darkness is just the OST honestly.
Please do a review on lament of innocence!
Combat is more like Ninja Gaiden
Actually, in the NES/FDS game, Sypha Belnades was far less of a tomboy than she was in the Netflix series. Moreover, I think that some of the things that were in the Netflix series honestly did not belong there, namely, those two humans that tried to...do things to Alucard, namely, not just rape him, but also to poison him and to kill him...like, seriously, do I need that in a video game franchise, or Carmilla and her LGBT bigoted b
a
s
i
c
b
i
t
c
h
e
s hating males of all sorts? Yeah, maybe she did not want to slaughter humans like Dracula did, but at least Dracula had legitimate reasons to be p
i
s
s
e
d, whereas Carmilla and her friends saw humans as a snack, and not in a sexy sort of way, but in a way that was the vampiric equivalent of Galactcus and his constant world consuming hunger (I wonder if he happened to have a Celestial version of Prader-Willi Syndrome), and, to be honest, as the saying goes, "It is far better to die free than it is to live as a slave", as, by living as a slave, it is honestly like being in a state of death, yet you are not dying...ask anyone that has been a slave in their lives, and/or an unjustly imprisoned person, and they will tell you the same thing in their lives, so, to be honest, at least Dracula wanted quick and merciful deaths to the a
s
s
h
o
l
e humans that had killed his wife, and the mother of his child, but his problem was that, as Carmilla and her associates saw ALL humans as food and as slaves, Dracula wanted to murder ALL humans for the actions of the stupid villagers of one village, and that inability to distinguish the individual deeds of humans honestly made Dracula into a monster that even surpassed the actions of Carmilla and her associates. Seriously, Carmilla and her friend were BDSM seeking dominatrixes that needed some good d
i
c
k in their lives. I also am convinced that dominatrixes secretly desire power to be taken from them, as they love it when they are challenged, as their fake claims to power need to have their egos crushed, and that, deep down inside, they actually get super turned on when a man turns the tables on them in their lives, like far more so than when the women are being dominatrixes.
Personally I like Castlevania Curse of Darkness and Lords of Shadows 1.
Lords of Shadow 1 was a pretty enjoyable game. Now, Lords of Shadow 2 on the other hand...
0:37 hold up what’s so bad about Rome 2
A criminally underrated game. They just released it so damn late in the ps2/xboxes life cycle. I think 3D Castlevania(while definitely not perfect) was moving forward very well with Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness, yet somehow we got those god-awful Lord of Shadow, God of War knock off travesties instead. I hate it when companies release great titles so late that everybody's moved on to the next gen, so they consider it a failure. I still think there's an opportunity to make an excellent open world 3D Castlevania game. I'd also like to see a good Castlevania RPG to break the Simon's Quest curse.
God of War ripped off the PS2 Castlevania games, as well as the Devil May Cry and Onimusha games, so quit your whining.
This is still one of my favorite games, right next to Dark Souls and Bloodborne
I loved this game it was the first castlevania game I beat. Great music, combat, and great characters. They butchered him in the Netflix series.
I like Curse of Darkness. if you want something like Resident evil 2 (i mean the one from 1998) or the Zelda games- the kind of game where you go around and have to find things to proceed (a puzzle type game), you will NOT like Curse of Darkness. I also like Lament of Innocence. Lament of Innocence has some of the puzzle aspect to it. by the way, the plot of Curse of Darkness sucked, but that's not a big deal to me.
This was my favorite castlevania game ever....
I quite like a few of the 3D titles, the first Lord's of Shadow I enjoyed alot but the sequel is awful. Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness i would love a re release of. None of them or any other Vanias come close to Symphony of the Night though in my opinion.
I actually really like the first Lord's of Shadows. I think it's a good game, just not a good Castlevania game (it honestly felt to me that the IP was tacked on to another dark fantasy game). Lords of Shadow 2 I was deeply disappointed by. But I think most can agree that the worst castlevania game is easily Castlevania Judgement.
I watched your old video ab how bad mk11 was but Rain and mileena are coming in mk11 next week. So that might make your experience better
I'm currently playing this.
I think it's a real shame there were no PROPER 3D Castlevania games after this, because I think the ending makes it pretty clear that IGA wanted to use St. Germain as a sort of Nick Fury character, tying sequels together until the events of a Castlevania 1999 game that could act as a sort of grand finale. But that never came to pass with Konami cutting the series' budget to the point that IGA basically wasn't allowed to make Castlevania games anymore. Real sad.
Also real weird how we got a Nick Fury esque character teasing future installments in a post-credits sequence 3 years before Iron Man lol
4:45 those are complex timelines not all game timelines are like that, Gravity Rush has a good timeline.
Great video!
First of all, those so-called "fans" are actually elitist gate keeping video game Pharisees and hypocrites that hate 3-D anything, and, to be honest, each need two to their hollow f
u
c
k
i
n
g
a
s
s domes, second, a good Castlevania type game CAN actually exist, and Sony nailed it with its God of War franchise, while Capcom did so with its Onimusha, Devil May Cry, and Dead Rising franchises, though one can argue that Dead Rising was more like Red Faction I and II, or Crimson Sea I and II, inspired game than a straight up Castlevania clone, third, Castlevania: Lament of Innocence is also a good 3D Castlevania as well, and, I dare say, that it is, Castlevania lore wise, FAR more important of a game than Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, and, fourth, and lastly, had the games actually received decent amounts of time in development, as well as different titles (I would prefer calling them Castlevania: Lied of Innocence and Castlevania: Concerto of Darkness, as Castlevania games tend to have musical terms in their titles), then they would be better games than they were at the time.
I enjoy this game for the unique items you can make in Curse of Darkness. However, it’s more a like playing a Necromancer in Diablo II than Castlevania.
MK11 are you still playing it the game is fun with costume variations in kompetative play Your Boy Rain is in the game and everyone who was threatening neitherealm for Mileena she's back
I quit caring about that franchise after Armageddon. Most of the characters, including the DLC ones, are a. returns of classic characters, b. forgettable newcomers, c. needless famous cameos (John Rambo, really?), and/or d. agenda peddling idiocy (I am looking at YOU, Kung Jin). However, this is not to say that I hate the famous characters, returning characters, and newcomers as a whole, I am just saying that some of those ideas are...less than ideal. I also think that the guy from the Phantasm movies would be a FAR better fit for the game than John Rambo. Sure, John Rambo is awesome, and he is a Spec Ops person, like Sonya Blade, Cassie Cage, Jax, and whatever his daughter is named, but the thing is that he always fought real world type HUMAN enemies, and NOT nightmare fuel, and/or evildoers that had too too much power, too small brains, and that looked like they could not decide on whether to go to a costume ball or a rave. He basically stands out like a red marble tile on a whole green marble floor, and not in a good way. Now for Kung Jin, he looks like he raided the CW version of Green Arrow's closet, and he is purely a token character for the idiot "woke" bigoted hypocrites. He is so horrible of a character that I would literally rather play as Mokap than him. He is also so useless that he makes Dan Hibiki sound awesome in comparison to himself. He is so irrelevant to the plot of the franchise that he literally only existed in one game. He is also constantly on the bottom tier of the characters that are in the entire franchise, like in the top ten, or even five, worse characters in the entire franchise. He is not even a pale imitation of his far more awesome uncle in Kung Lao, nor would Kung Jin even DESERVE to be a pale imitation of Kung Lao. He basically is like a bad fan fiction character that is in the Mortal Kombat universe...let that sink in a bit for yourself.
Taking the "new" players opinions about Castlevania as a serious account is like listening to a joe biden speech summing up America in one word. Asamufootalamasafa.