Castlevania animated series on the way (again)

[GutsDozer]

I'm pumped for season 4. And they are going to actually end the story. I like when series actually conclude. I need the closure.

 

[Taiso]

I'm pumped for season 4. And they are going to actually end the story. I like when series actually conclude. I need the closure.

It's probably over after this.

Shankar once talked about continuing the story through the Belmonts generationally.

That may still happen because money always talks but this is probably the last we'll see of Trevor and company.

 

[prof]

I like the show, overall, but after the first season, I think I've been more disappointed with it than genuinely enjoyed it. It's ok. The whole plotline with Alucard being a whiny d-bag was defintely tough to sit through. The priest stuff with the demons was interesting, and I liked the ship captain and that whole storyline. So a mixed bag the last season or two, they kind of blend together for me.

I'll watch the new season when it comes out. I rarely watch anything on netflix, we basically have it for the kids, so when there's a program I find even mildly interesting, I feel like I have to watch it.

 

[Ajax]

One thing about this show that I couldn't stand from the get go - the dialogue sounds like it was written by kids who have just discovered cursing. This is fine if you're, you know, a kid who has just discovered cursing, but if you've been playing Castlevania games since before you discovered cursing, it just feels... Off, somehow. A lot of games suffer from this same thing. I remember the first time I heard the F word in a game. It was Assassin's Creed, where the dude is at the doctor and he says something like, "It's so... fucked up" *looks around to see if mom heard* All of Castlevania felt like that.

 

[evil wasabi]

Watched 4 episodes tonight. Man… they won’t finish it. Each episode takes too long expositioning each character, where they’ve been, what they’be been up to, where they’re going…

 

[GutsDozer]

Holy crap season 4 was satisfying! Now I'm ready for a new season of Blood Of Zeus!

 

[Taiso]

Watched the entire season.

The good stuff:

1. Animation-For the most part, Powerhouse really ramped up the art direction in general. The use of shadows was far and away, the best I've ever seen in this series. The detail in the characters, especially the facial closeups, was bordering on Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Ninja Scroll film) levels of attention and most of the key battle scenes are a step above what we've seen so far. Especially whenever Trevor is fighting. Sypha and Alucard are a lot of fun to watch and have respectable power suites, but Trevor has to make up for a lack of sorcerous or supernatural might with flat out physical skill and I feel this is where the animators really put their best foot forward. The only way to make Trevor believable next to the raw mystical power the other two bring to bear, and the only way you can accept that a human, even a greatly skilled one, can go toe to toe with these monsters, is to outthink and outmaneuver them. Of course, he has many enchanted weapons at his disposal but if he loses those or doesn't have easy access to them, he has to move a lot until he can manufacture an advantage. Powerhouse seems to understand this and underscores his combat prowess.
2. The voice acting-Say what you want about the script (and I will), but the voice acting is still top notch. Sypha's VA Alejandra Reynoso is the weak link again, as she has been since the start, but whenever her delivery is overly awkward or stiff, Richard Armitage and James Callis rescue the scene with their own performances. Theo James brings the goods as Hector, as does Jessica Brown (Lenore), Jaime Murray (Carmilla), Adetokumbor M'cormack (Isaac) and especially Bill Nighy as Saint Germain. Of course, Bill Nighy is a revelation in whatever he does and is always near or at the top of whatever production he's involved in.
3. The closure-I feel that Warren Ellis managed to turn out a pretty satisfying conclusion to all the different storylines. All of the conclusions show the attention to detail that any writer worth their salt gives to put a capstone on their creative efforts. This could have been spectacular crash and burn but strangely enough, it all worked out in the end.

The bad stuff:

1. Berserk 'homages' galore-I know Adi Shankar is a fan of Berserk and I'm pretty sure his oversight on the series doesn't extend to every last ounce of the creative product, but a lot of this season felt like an audition to Kentaro Miura to prove he could handle a proper adaption for that great dark fantasy series which I love so much. I've seen traces of this in every season of this series but it feels very much in your face here. Especially in Striga's nonsensical 'daylight armor', which debuts and then is summarily closeted in the same episode. Not only does it look suspiciously like Guts' Berserker armor, but it moves like it as well, complete with giant buster style sword shoulder slung as a means of conveying the measure of strength to wield it somewhat casually. It's too blatant a ripoff, and while I understand Berserk is now old enough that it is influencing a generation of animators, somebody needs to tell the production when they've gone too far. I shouldn't be thinking about 'that other series' when I'm watching Castlevania, especially considering Castlevania has MORE than enough lore to mine for its surprises. Adi, thank you for honoring the franchises you are adapting but I hope you never get your hands on Berserk. The 'daylight armor' isn't just stupid (why don't they just make this for every vampire, again?) but it appears in one of the rare poorly animated battle sequences in this series. It took me out of the scene, as did every monster that brutally slaughtered some innocent person or ate their face off or whatever.
2. Everything in extremes-These battles are pretty to look at (for the most part) but the writers don't know how to make most of them mean anything and there is a noticeable absence of tension in the majority of them. Battles between faceless minions are like this: helpless humans with spears and farming implements line up to fight monsters. Monsters wipe them out with little difficulty. Then heroes show up and start wiping out monsters with little difficulty. There are precious few moments where the winning side ever looks even remotely vulnerable, and yet Striga and Morana have this lengthy, almost laborious conversation about how 'humans will never stop fighting'. That's like me saying 'dandelions won't stop growing in my lawn'. They are annoying but they are far from a problem to deal with. Who would stress such pitiful resistance to their rule? A few of the fights have real tension, however, such as the duel between Trevor and Ratko near the end. You know Trevor will survive that fight, but you're not sure he'll win. The show doesn't have enough personal conflicts of weighty consequence to them; it's just vapid bloodletting for spectacle's sake. The confrontation between Hector and Isaac is vastly more interesting because it's a scaled down encounter with an unpredictable outcome. The series would have benefitted from more of that.
3. Uneven pacing-some storylines have very satisfying pacing (Isaac/Hector, Alucard) and others have really bad pacing where everything is just too damn truncated (the vampire sisters, and Saint Germain in particular). It almost felt like Ellis ran out of substantial story for these characters after season 3 and either tacked them on to these events solely to tie off loose ends or because there was an obligatory need to include them because they hadn't been offed previously. Lenore is inarguably the most interest of the four vampire sisters and she has the most meaningless interaction in this entire season. It's one thing for the character to sense they will be useless in Carmilla's vision for the future, it's another for the character to be treated as such on a creative level. I mean...Ellis stuck all the landings, but he never should have put himself in that position to begin with.
4. Bad script/dialogue-This has been this series' Achilles heel the entire time. Aside from the rampant, pointless and juvenile use of profanity, there are scenes where the characters not only recite dialogue as 'mission statements' of which we are already aware, they will summarize entire conversations immediately after having those conversations! This is infuriating. Also, watching supposedly mature people go back and forth about whose idea it was to do this or that is the epitome of puerile. This show is tone deaf at times, wanting us to laugh as innocents are being slaughtered all around and being overly somber and unemotive when big reveals are taking place. This, I've learned from talking to people and reading many opinions online, is the biggest barrier of entry for the series, and Shankar, Ellis and Powerhouse would have done well to listen to these criticisms.

Overall, I'd say that the series pays off for its loyalty with satisfying conclusions and pretty great art direction. Most of the episodes are short and this is an easily bingable television show to put away relatively quickly without knowing where the time went. It's far from perfect but it's a damn sight better than most of the trash going up on Wokeflix these days. I wouldn't call it an acquired taste but it something a viewer can quickly acquire a distaste for if any of the issues are insurmountable to them.

Final conclusion: worth the investment of time, both as a season and as a series, but not without its troubles and flaws.

 

[sylvie]

Well, from your description, it sounds more like a piece of shit fanservice Berserk ripoff thats pretty to look at, and ends.

Which is pretty much the reason why I've intuitively stayed away from it.

 

[Taiso]

Well, from your description, it sounds more like a piece of shit fanservice Berserk ripoff thats pretty to look at, and ends.

Which is pretty much the reason why I've intuitively stayed away from it.

I never described is a 'piece of shit fanservice Berserk ripoff' but you are certainly free to interpret my evaluation of S04 as just that.

I want to be clear that overall, I found the series satisfying (if uneven) with remarkable denouement that I didn't think it capable of. TBF, it never really aimed that high to begin with but it built many long arcs and they all paid off well enough, even if some had rocky journeys in order to reach their respective promised lands.

Berserk and A Song of Ice and Fire will be LUCKY to be as satisfying in their payoffs. I do not say these things lightly.

A soujorn that ends well is worth going on, even if you're not sleeping in a bed every night of the trip.

 

[evil wasabi]

I liked the relationship between Sypha and Trevor. I think the writing was fine overall. It’s an apocalypse, and people acted mostly the way I would expect.

 

[evil wasabi]

Finished the show. It was satisfying by the end. Not perfect, but at least I didn't feel like it was incomplete.

 

[Taiso]

Finished the show. It was satisfying by the end. Not perfect, but at least I didn't feel like it was incomplete.

My wife and I binged S03 in preparation for her viewing S04 and I really liked it a lot more the second time around.

It's still filled with shit tier millenial dialogue fuckery. The vampire sisters' every scene when they're together is Joss Whedon tier and the Judge's heel turn as a psychopath is just more of Warren Ellis' sandy vagina about his distaste for traditional authority figures in fantasy settings but other than that, I was vastly more invested this time around.

I also felt that the siblings betraying Alucard was an unnecessary plot twist, and him killing them and putting them on pikes outside the front doors to his castle was an entirely unnecessary story beat. He could have simply been disappointed in their desires, turned them away, locked the grounds down through some vampire magic and laid himself it rest in his coffin until S04. I don't feel the isolation arc needed to get quite so extreme.

I was way more into Isaac's character this time.

One thing that I loved about S03's climactic battle between Trevor and the Visitor is when he pulled out the Vampire Killer and started dual wielding whips. An incredibly imaginative and effectively animated action sequence.

 

[evil wasabi]

Alucard impaling the siblings was in line with his inner struggle between becoming his father and being a decent human. He constantly tries to trust humans, including St. Jermaine. Sometimes it doesn't work out. And in the case of those siblings, the failure leads to a Dracula response.

 

[Taiso]

Oh I think it's totally in line with the character as established in this series.

What I'm saying is that on a creative level, this didn't need to be such an extreme plot device. We already know his life is meaningless suffering absent others with which to share his vast resources and knowledge.

In fact, that's the aspect of his character that most strongly resonates with me.

From a crafting narrative standpoint, I just feel that shitting on him quite so much was overkill. Why not give him a dog just so they can kill it, chop it up and feed it to him while they're at it?

The 'no, and furthermore' aspect of storytelling was already being covered by Hector's situation. Ellis went too hard on Alucard in order to achieve that end.

 

[evil wasabi]

I honestly don’t think the show put in as much thought to the siblings as you just did.

the writers seem to tread with one foot in the realm of a fantasy fiction, innaccessable to the illiterate, and the other in the foot of a children’s video game, accessible to anyone with half a brain. I see that sibling scene fitting well in a Moorcock universe. But it’s unnecessary for Alucard to be Elric.

 

[Taiso]

As a fan of Moorcock's work, I shudder at thoughts about how his works might be adapted for larger audiences.

Before shitty woke culture emerged, I'd have been rooting for it. Now, they can miss me with that shit.

 

[evil wasabi]

As a fan of Moorcock's work, I shudder at thoughts about how his works might be adapted for larger audiences.

Before shitty woke culture emerged, I'd have been rooting for it. Now, they can miss me with that shit.

The #ElricSoWhite protests would be very meta 2021.

 

[Taiso]

The #ElricSoWhite protests would be very meta 2021.

Moorcock should be ashamed of himself for being talented and wanting to write these stories.

 

[Gog]

I really enjoyed the first series. Second was pretty good too. My attention started to drift with series three. I feel the show lost direction after Dracula was killed. As well as losing the main antagonist they also decided to pump the amount of episodes up to ten, which seemed completely unnecessary. It's also a crime that for games with such fantastic soundtracks, they only used one song, Bloody Tears, once in one episode.
I imagine it'll be a while before I get round to watching series four.

 

[evil wasabi]

I wish I could take a time machine back to the 1990s and stop George RR from omitting Asians and Pacific Islanders from the song of ice and fire.

 

[Taiso]

I wish I could take a time machine back to the 1990s and stop George RR from omitting Asians and Pacific Islanders from the song of ice and fire.

Sounds like a Deep Thought Jack Handy didn't get around to writing.

 

[mainman]

Carmilla impressed me. She literally told her enemy fuck you as she stabbed herself in the chest resulting in a epic kamikaze explosion. She went out like G being heavily outnumbered.​

 

[evil wasabi]

Carmilla impressed me. She literally told her enemy fuck you as she stabbed herself in the chest resulting in a epic kamikaze explosion. She went out like G being heavily outnumbered.​

Who are you?!

 

[LoneSage]

Who are you?!

He was the guy with the big titty girl signature.

 

[evil wasabi]

He was the guy with the big titty girl signature.

I don’t mean it like that.

read it in Chandler Bing’s voice

I know who Mainman is