Castlevania General

Goodbye and good riddance, Barlowe.

I wonder, was Ecclesia always a pro-Dracula organization pretending to be an anti-Dracula one, or did Barlowe get subverted at some point?

It's never clear.

There's evidence for the latter considering the effect that Dominus had on Albus, but it's also possible it's the former.

We just never see enough to know for sure.

When I played Eclessia, I knew Barlow was going to turn out to be a bad guy, but I was expecting him to be SO committed to killing Dracula that he was willing to kill innocent people to do so. That would have been more interesting than a guy who just wanted to bring back Dracula for the umpteenth time.

I got spoiled that Barlowe would be a boss by Mr. P's Castlevania Realm (one of the favorite sites of my adolescence; it's still around today I'm happy to say). What clued you in?

I admit, the idea of Barlowe being legitimate a Well-Intentioned Extremist as opposed to being mind controlled or just being evil from the get go does sound interesting.

It really reminds me that there's a lot we don't know about the characters from Ecclesia:

1) What was Shanoa like before she lost her memories? We only see a tiny bit of it in the beginning, and it's not nearly enough to get a bead on her.

2) Did she actually get her memories back at the end when Albus used his own soul as the price for Dominus? That's also unclear.

3) What happened to Ecclesia post game? The organization and their secrets seemingly just vanished.

And of course: 4) Was Barlowe always evil, or did working so closely with Dominus leave him vulnerable to Dracula's influence?

These things are all left totally up in the air.

It's pretty heavily suggested Shanoa got her memories back at the end.

Still, it's nice Bloodstained gave us Miriam.

Yeah I admit that seems likely. The other questions are valid though.

So I have been checking out videos of Grimoire of Souls (is that going to get a page any time soon), and I find it interesting that Alucard never heard of Charlotte. I assumed he kept track of all Dracula related shit, since he stayed awake after SOTN. But it would explain why he didn’t get involved either with the castle returning again.

He also didn’t seem to know about Ecclesia either.

Next up, if Konami pulled their heads out of their butts and put another Castlevania character in Smash:

1) Who do you think it would be?

2) who would you want it to be?

how about Castlevania Warriors ala Hyrule Warriors?

Complete with new girl villain who has a massive ladyboner for Simon Belmont?

They could name her after the wife he had in Haunted Castle!

And yes, I know it's a Shout-Out to Hyrule Warriors. I'm just playing along.

There, joke explained and ruined.

I forgot how much I liked the Wygol villagers.

Save maybe the annoying "healer."

I mean in one route Richter has to kill him vamped girlfriend so it's not completely uncharted territory.

"what was shanoa before the emotion and memory wipe" is probably literally miriam, tbh. As for what "what happened to ecclesia", well shanoa's tatoo was essentially a one-of-it's-kind, never replicated happy accident, so I guess that even if all the theoritical knowledge survived the events of the game, it eventually fell out of relevance because nobody had a badass warrior girl with a sickass back tatoo around to make something out of it.

as for barlowe suddenly being evil, that's one of those things that always struck me as the writer not really keeping track of it's own premises. It's nice in that it gives some character depth to albus and make his story engaging and by extension shanoa's, but then you sit down or go to bed and you go "wait, how can ecclesia be secretely evil ? how does it work ?" and the game never really explains it.

Edited by Yumil on Oct 17th 2019 at 8:46:00 PM

Worth noting that Barlowe's enemy description in Japanese indicates that he was driven insane by Dracula's influence.

So presumably the creation of the Dominus Glyph was initially a genuine attempt to defeat Dracula by fighting fire with fire (using Drac's own power to defeat him). But studying and working with Dracula's power that closely for so long isn't good for anyone's sanity.

Edited by M84 on Oct 19th 2019 at 3:38:26 AM

So I ended up checking out the Castlevania Wiki, and found this little tidbit about Circle of the Moon, Legacy of Darkness, and Castlevania 64.

To quote:

That's an interesting detail. So it wasn't really IGA who said they were side stories at all if this is correct. It certainly explains some things I've been wondering, like why Castlevania: Bloodlines is part of the timeline when it's got nothing to do with the Belmonts (at least directly) but 64 isn't since it's the exact same situation: a Belmont in name only wields the Vampire Killer against Dracula.

Of course, it's possible this is just a spin story, and IGA did remove them because he didn't do them. I guess we can't ever be sure.

I still think it's odd they are out of the timeline: They take place at times when no Belmonts were around (well, no Belmonts by name if we count Reinhardt), and don't really interfere with anything that happens later either.

But meh. Gamerthumb will fix it, so I can deal with things.

Does it cite a source for that.

Also Death is stupid hard in OOE. Even the mini-sickles can wreck you.

There's a quote about it on the same page here, but that's apparently an IGA quote. It doesn't say if this was always the case, or just a thing with him specifically as we already knew.

Confession: I've never actually beaten Oo E because I've never gotten past Death. He's really obnoxious IIRC.

I just ended up mashing him with the Nitecso Glyph Union over and over again.

I'm not alone in thinking OOE is one of Drac's more impressive showings, am I? He's technically only onscreen for the final battle, but he makes the mortal villains look like complete posers in comparison in just that little time.

Oh absolutely. The fact that he stops teleporting around and starts actually walking towards you for his second phase is more badass than any monster transformation.

One of the coolest things Castlevania Fighter did was have Drac transform back into his base form as his final phase. Having the progression be base > transformation > base but significantly harder is always awesome.

He probably noted that Shanoa didn't have a whip (and wasn't Maria Renard) and figured he had nothing to worry about.

If Shanoa hadn't had Dominus, he'd have been totally right.

Edited by HandsomeRob on Oct 18th 2019 at 10:59:14 AM

I tend to prefer Drac's showing in portrait of ruin for the metal factor of just abosrbing death and trapping you with his wings-hands thing, but yeah OOE drac as a boss is easily one of the most challenging.

Even with nitesco, even tho nitesco is broken.

While the actual fight (and the game itself) isn't that great, the Nintendo 64 game's final Dracula form looked pretty cool.

Edited by M84 on Oct 19th 2019 at 1:46:52 AM

Original or Legacy of Darkness version?

I understand that Legacy of Darkness was an improvement in many ways, though as a whole the first foray in 3d for Castlevania had a lot of issues.

The Nintendo 64 was hard to develop for for many companies that weren't Nintendo.

But if the post I put up about the 64 games always being meant as side stories is true, then the quality of the games had nothing to do with it...

Which reminds me: are there any other console games in the series that are considered bad? Surely there must have been some other stinkers (relatively speaking) in the series?

This one will probably be hard, because it may be more of an opinion than agreed upon fact.

Edit: Also, been looking at more Grimoire of Souls stuff. We got an actual villain in the story, a former member of the organization who's controlling Soma in full Dark Lord mode somehow.

Of course, it's possible she's a Red Herring and the real villain is the boss, but we'll see. Also, Richter is apparently in it as an assist. I didn't know that.

Edited by HandsomeRob on Oct 19th 2019 at 8:29:06 AM