In Aria of Sorrow, Soma Cruz is the childhood friend of Mina Hakuba who lived in a Japanese shrine all her life... and a foreign exchange student. Is this one of those "born in Japan but grew up somewhere else" deals? Oh, Japan.
I'm not sure if you should blame Japan. I've heard it said that the whole "foreign exchange student" bit is purely an invention of the localization.
Which is weird, because he still talks in Japanese, even in the localization.
His name is Kurusu Soma in the original with kanji, suggesting that he is indeed native.
Mmm, it's been awhile since I checked, but aren't the furigana there katakana? Which would imply he's foreign and they gave him the kanji to match the sounds, which sometimes happens. Either way he probably grew up in Japan. Maybe his parents moved there when he was a kid or something. (And yes, the 'exchange student' thing was made up for the American version.)
I suspect he's either full Japanese or a Japanese/Spanish But Not Too Foreign guy—I prefer the latter, as it makes his Meaningful Name less forced.
Which does explain some of his facial features in Aria (if you ignore some of the sameness in Ayami Kojima's art), he does have Asiatic eyes, but otherwise western features.
Why did they feel the need to make Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow take place in Japan, of all places? It's friggin' Dracula! Based off Vlad the Impaler, who reigned in Wallachia, which is located in modern day Romania? And yet somehow Dracula's castle decides to beam up a dude hanging out in a temple on the other side of the planet. It's blatantly ethnocentric, and it would have made a lot more sense and been a lot more unique and interesting for Soma to have been actually a person living near where Dracula lived, instead of being predictably Japanese.
The Japanese had no presence in the storyline until 1999, and when they did, it was because the usual heroes sent for the Hakubas in order to seal the castle. (It's pretty much the Japanese equivalent of how an American family became vital to the storyline after Quincey Morris managed to defeat Dracula in 1897.) As a result, Japan is the location of the seal, and thus the central locale of Aria. The easiest way for Alucard to guard it was to pose as a Japanese agent. As for Soma, it probably helps Dracula to be reborn close to his castle. Yet this does absolutely nothing to explain Yoko.
Yoko's last name is Belnades. If that sounds familiar to anyone, it's because it's the surname of Sypha Belnades, one of the heroes from the third Castlevania game, and chronologically the first fight with Drac. Yoko is a descendant of one of the original slayers of Dracula, and an inheritor of her ancestor's witchcraft, and her lineage probably has something to do with her getting involved in all this vampire business.
That is common knowledge among fans. I was referring to how Yoko is a Japanese name.
Incidentally, there is no evidence that Dawn of Sorrow takes place in Japan. There's the returning cast, but that's it. It does not take place in Dracula's castle, and the antagonists have names that appear to be German, Italian, and Russian in origin.
Not to mention that the design of the outdoor sections is very European. Also, the castle wasn't sealed in Japan, it was sealed behind/inside a solar eclipse. The eclipse next appeared in Japan.
Circa Lament of Innocence, Dracula in Castlevania isn't actually Dracula and so all bets are more or less off. Most likely, Igarashi decanonised Castlevania 64 because Malus explicitly gives his full name as Dracula Vlad Tepes rather than Matthias Cronqvist.
There's plenty of time after Lament for him to impersonate, possess, or otherwise somehow become Vlad. Hell, a fairly easy Epileptic Tree for that would be that the inexperienced Drac got himself fully sealed once before, and Vlad was his first reincarnation.
Vlad Teped the Drakul was at one point held prisoner in Turkey, and when he returned, he was all violent and torture-y. I always assumed that in the Castlania-verse, Vlad died in the Turkish prison, and Mathias Cronqvist the Vampire, desiring a home base and in Turkey at the time, decided to assume his name and throne. Hence the whole violence-when-he-got-home thing. Mathias must have liked being Vlad so much, he decided to keep the name Dracula, despite only pretending to be the Son of the Dragon.
Also, CV64 has been officially re-instated into canon. In addition, Symphony of the Night refers to Dracula as Count Vlad Tepes Dracula, and that game is also canon, so it's clear that Igarashi isn't trying to retcon Dracula from ever being called Vlad Tepes.
It's also worth noting that Soma wasn't the ONLY reincarnation of Dracula — Graham, Dmitri, and Dario all got significant portions of Dracula as well, and it's implied that there are others.
Soma is the only reincarnation of Dracula, the other are all potential Dark Lords and thus inherit some of the powers innate to the title, but only Soma possesses Draculas soul, though Dmitri falsely believes he is the true reincarnation
Igarashi has stated in an interview that he wanted a character that was an everyday person (originally going to be a salaryman). So who else can a Japanese teenager (their chief demographic) relate to other than a Japanese teenager?
That also explains why Genya's got the salaryman look. It kinda works for him.
Someone asked over at Chaos Architecture "how can you build an "exact replica" of something that has no constant, definitive shape?" Easy. Model the appearance of the replica off of the general theme of the original, then give IT no constant, definitive shape. Bam, exact replica. Or at least, as close as you're going to get to one, anyway.
Why doesn't Death show a interest in Soma? Soma is the reincarnation of his boss.
This one gets a lot of Fan Wank. Theories I've seen include: Death won't acknowledge him unless he achieves full power. He's testing him. Dracula's power has returned to a chaotic form, and Death obeys it, making him chaotic as well. But most likely, the game simply wants Soma to be able to summon the iconic small sickles without going into the ramifications of claiming the soul of an intelligent character who has had dialogue. After all, when Soma absorbs Dmitri's soul, it's supposed to be jarring.
I've always thought that Death never considered Soma the real Dracula, just the vessel of his soul. He fights Soma in an attempt to take his soul; being Death, he probably knows some way of restoring Dracula's soul to its "proper" evil self.
That may not be too far off. Death probably (not necessarily) knows who Soma is, but even if he does (and it's possible he doesn't), he must be disappointed in his old drinking buddy for losing his way and may figure it's time to give him another shot at reincarnating himself successfully.
I think that the writers were trying to go a "lighter", more shonen-anime type feel with these games. They were so big into this that they forgot to include some of the more important details.
I think Death lost his mind when Dracula kicked the bucket, becoming another mindless monster that haunts the castle.
Death served Dracula because he held the Crimson Stone. Destroying the Crimson Stone is an implied pre-requisite to killing Dracula. Since no one holds the Crimson Stone, Death is free to do whatever he wants, and the embodiment of death is probably interested in harvesting powerful souls whether they're Dracula-related or not.
Death may have falsely believed Graham to be Dracula's reincarnation for the same reasoning Graham himself had.
So, if Soma is Dracula, and therefore a vampire, why does he cast a reflection?
Has Dracula ever stood in front of a mirror to even know whether he has a reflection anyways? Either way, it's probably just a case of Our Vampires Are Different.
Soma isn't a vampire... yet. Keep in mind that Dracula, being the ultimate evil, had a lot of powers aside from just being the No. 1 Vampire. Soma is the reincarnation of his spirit and has his Power of Dominance, but that doesn't mean he's actually a vampire. It's questionable if he even turns into one if he does accept the powers of darkness.
The idea of vampires not casting a reflection comes from the belief that the mirror reflects a person's soul (which is also why breaking them is considered bad luck), and thus vampires, considered soulless is many mythologies, would not have a reflection. Since it's been established that vampires in the CV universe do have souls, this is basically a non-issue.
Soma isn't a vampire, he's a human being who's a reincarnated former vampire.
Arikado doesn't have a reflection. Just putting that out there.
Something's always bugged me about Soma: he's the reincarnation of Dracula. Okay, cool. He's also a seventeen-year-old high school student. Okay, cool. Aria of Sorrow takes place thirty-six years after Dracula was Killed Off for Real. Um... how did Dracula manage to delay his reincarnation for nineteen years? The best theory I've been able to come up with is that it took a while because his castle was actually sealed away in 1999, and so it was like he woke up the next morning with a huge hangover and needed something like half an hour (or 19 years) to actually pull himself out of bed. Is there a canon explanation, though?
Not that I know of. But, on the other hand, even when Dracula was killed in the past, only on rare occasions (CV2) did he come back immediately anyways. Most of the time, it took decades, if not a full century, for him to pop up. It's possible he could've come back immediately every time and just kept a low profile until he'd amassed enough power again, but if each time it took years to come back, then it wouldn't be out of place for it to happen again with Soma; in that case, the only difference here is that it's one of the few times we know exactly how long it took.
Ohh, good point. I was confused because Graham's (and Celia's, Dario's, and Dmitrii's) logic seemed sound in context ("I was born at the exact moment Dracula died last time, therefore I am Dracula"), but I never considered that they could be operating under poor assumptions and not actually taking history into account. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
Well, in retrospect, that bit throws a wrench in the works, because Soma, Graham, Dario, and Dmitrii without a doubt all had various powers from Dracula. Although we're not sure when those powers originally manifested for any of them, besides Soma. So it could be that something really is different with the resurrection process this time, but if that's the case, an easy explanation is just that the castle sealing was designed to screw his resurrection up in the first place anyway.
True, but Soma's power is clearly identified as Drac's supreme power from which all the others come, while Dimitrii's and Dario's look more like powers of high-level monsters. Beside, they (along with Graham) only inherited some powers while Soma got Dracula's soul.
An alternate explanation is that Dario and the others did gain some of Drac's powers due to the sheer amount of dark magic that had to be bursting from the guy when he was finally permanently killed without his castle to contain it. Their powers are merely flukes brought on by sheer chance, while Soma received the soul when it was naturally re-incarnated two decades later.
Alternatively, This Troper suggests the following: upon his defeat in 1999, Dracula was reincarnated... except that this reincarnation died the year Soma was born, and thus was reincarnated again as Soma.
Where was Freddy Krueger during the ten or twelve years between his death at the hands of the angry mob and his first instances of stalking their kids in Dreamland? Training himself to manipulate dreams? Hanging out and knocking back a few beers with the dream demons? It's probably better not to know these things; they're quite unimportant, even if they may be a little intriguing. Dracula regularly spends upwards of a century out of commission (perhaps with his soul wandering helplessly like Voldemort's...?); he could do nineteen years standing on his head. (EDIT: Now that I think of it, Mr. P's Castlevania Realm has a Hand Wave for the "every century" thing saying that the longer Dracula waits the more powerful he is when he comes back (for instance, Simon's Quest was only a few years after CV1). perhaps how long it takes depends partly on how long it is before Drac gets confident and/or antsy enough to return.)
Interesting to note is that the eclipse from Aria of Sorrow seems to be part of the real world Solar Saros 145 cycle of solar eclipses. The eclipses are spaced roughly 18 years apart, and three of those years are of note: 1999, the year of Dracula’s death, 2017, the year of Soma’s birth, and 2035, the year Aria occurs. The 1999 eclipse occurred over Romania, and, obviously the 2035 eclipse will occur over Japan.
Yet another alternate explanation would be that reincarnations in the Castlevania universe are not instantaneous: a dead soul experiences heaven or hell, where they are rewarded or punished in proportion to their virtues or sins. Only once that is done is the soul allowed to reincarnate into a new body and new life. "So why wasn't Dracula reincarnated into a new body all the previous times he was killed?" Presumably the castle's power/Death's intervention/the Crimson Stone's power/some combination thereof was preventing the passage of his soul into the afterlife and thus the cycle of rebirth. That's why it's so easy to revive him: you don't need to reach into the depths of hell, you just pluck his soul out of the aether it's floating around in and stuff it into the new body you just magicked up for him. (The body being remade from scratch every time also explains why Dracula looks different in every game).
"Isn't 19 years a rather short punishment for all the evil Dracula's committed?" Presumably, it felt longer than 19 years.
Isn't the whole point that Dracula stayed dead long enough for his soul to pass into being reincarnated normally rather than returning as he was? That suggests that not only is a time-skip normal but that this one was longer than normal.
What was up with all the re-incarnation talk in the Sorrow series? Every other game takes place with a (very loose) Christian mythology stating that Dracula's refusal to stay down was part of his rebellion against God Himself. Was the "reincarnation is natural" thing added as part of the attempt to appeal to Japanese gamers or just a mistake?
That, and the fact that very few Japanese actually know or understand Christianity (which seems appropriate since very few Westerners know or understand Japanese mythology). That's why you have tropes like Nuns Are Mikos and why we have a JBM page for people who mix up Makai and Hell. Japanese developers see things from a very Shinto/Buddhist perspective where stuff like reincarnation seems perfectly natural, then they throw a smattering of Judeo-Christian seasoning on top of it. That isn't necessarily bad, but it can be a little jarring to a Westerner when we see things like reincarnation, evil creatures wielding holy power, and other such cultural anachronisms.
Not possible. Japan has been using Judeo-Christian mythology, despite not understanding it, for decades (see Neon Genesis Evangelion). Check out the epically-pedantic explanation of Adam and Eve in MGS3 for a prime example, when the characters, for all intents and purposes, should know the story back to front.
Oddly, the earliest invocation of reincarnation in the series was arguably based on an American work. Specifically, the Coppola-directed Bram Stoker's Dracula, which introduced the Dracula/Mina love story (absent in the novel) and argued that she was the reincarnation of his previous love interest, Elizabetha.
The religious content of the series is there purely for flavor, there's been very little effort to make the series match actual beliefs.
This is a bit of a silly question, but in 2035 and 2036, did cellphones go obsolete? If Soma had a cell phone on him, reaching him would be easy! We don't have any evidence of the Sorrow games setting restricting the use of electronics (like Harry Potter and Hogwarts), and I'm sure Arikado would know how to use a cell phone.
Castles in remote snowy European villages might not get very good reception. Neither would the inside of a solar eclipse.
What was Hammer doing in the shrine and castle in Aria? He said that he was ordered to investigate the shrine and then he suddenly came to the castle. Why would the US army care so much about this shrine? If they cared a lot, then they would probably send more people. There's a bit of Fridge Horror attached, too: If Hammer was an bystander who was suddenly caught up in the mess, then who else was there? You only see him, so you can't tell if any other innocent people got caught up in Castlevania...
Maybe somebody in the army knew about the whole Dracula’s castle thing and had sent a One-Man Army who also already knew in an attempt to help, but somehow Hammer was sent by accident. So in that case, either fate or luck brought him there.
In part of the True Ending, Castlevania has recognized Soma as Dracula, due to defeating Graham with Flame Demon, Giant Bat, and Succubus souls equipped, giving him Dracula's characteristic powers. If the Castle has recognized Soma as its ruler, why are the monsters still attacking him? It can't be said that he's not TRULY Dracula, as he's able to enter the one area of the Castle that ONLY Dracula can enter.
A likely explanation is that while he is recognized as Dracula in his ability, his character or "soul" is what prevents the castle from recognizing him as Dracula. So while he can use Dracula's abilities to get into the secret area, what prevents him from commanding the demons is because he still has his human soul.
That, or the castle recognizes Soma as Dracula but the monsters don't.
The monsters didn't obey Dracula just because of who he was, but because of the Power of Dominance. The monsters that do obey Soma are the souls you possess, and have limited ways to be used. A fully realised Soma could theoretically summon every soul he owns as a full-fledged and loyal monster.
Unfortunately, the only way to see Soma in all of his monster-summoning glory is to trigger the bad ending in Dawn of Sorrow and fight him as an enemy.
are in hiragana.