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In preparation for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night’s latest attempt to resurrect what some people love about Castlevania, I’ve spent the last month playing a previous attempt at the same thing.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow was the western-led attempt at bringing the franchise into a new era. It was made on the back of a promise that it would be Castlevania as it had never been done before. The ridiculous would be left behind, and the developers promised a retelling of the series rooted in Gothic fantasy. They hired all-star talent to truly drive home that this was not the Castlevania you remember – there would only be serious questions about what a man was this time.

Something about fans I’ve always suspected is that none of us particularly know what we want. They call it running the asylum on a certain website. Maybe it’s true, because I can’t remember the last time someone was a super fan of a franchise and did anything interesting with it.

The most immediate, damning thing about Castlevania: Lords of Shadows is that it was probably made by people who were huge fans of Castlevania as a franchise. That’s important, and I’ll keep coming back to it over and over again.

(we’re going to refer to the game as Lords from here on out.)

Lords opens with a voice over that’s definitely intended to be Epic. The developers went out of their way to hire an all star voice cast. We’ll start every level with a voice over delivered by Patrick Stewart. If you’ve ever read – maybe anything? You’ll roll your eyes and wonder about the size of the check deposited in his bank account they had to write to get him to read drivel.

Everything about Lords follows this single philosophy: to be Grim, and to be Epic.
Mercurysteam (the developers) made good effort to ensure that every scene Gabriel is in would be mostly comprised of his sulking frame. Every shot of the landscape needs to be sweeping over
a vista that’s Huge. Few games can glower like Lords does and that’s not a compliment.

Lords was born of a bunch of games about vampires and the men (and women!) with whips that oppose them. Monsters from horror movies mingled with creatures of darkness pulled from mythology and god knows where else. It’s not hard to see how someone could see the series as grim or dark, but Castlevania always worked because it had a sense of humor.

How did Mercurysteam look at the series and come to a conclusion it didn’t need one?  They probably did it on purpose! Castlevania has a rich, gothic tapestry, Castlevania is also about very pretty men who wear lots of leather and their best friend Alucard.

gabriel has only one companion through his darkest hours

Mercurysteam looked at the series and everything it represents, and made the most boring thing possible.
Understanding why requires looking at the series and hating it because it’s not serious enough. That’s me projecting a little, but also…

Whips aren’t very cool in real life. They conjure up imagery of either cattle rustlers or prison.
If you were the kind of person who couldn’t stand how ridiculous the idea of someone using a whip is,
you’d probably also be the kind of person who’d think up something infinitely more ridiculous.

Give something enough chains and enough metal, and it becomes cool to somebody.

Lords gives our boy Gabriel a weapon called a “Combat Cross”. There’s something to be at least said about how some kind of attempt was made to translate the rhythm and cadence of the 2D games to 3D. In their attempt though, the developers created one of the most confused and meandering combat systems of any of the mid 2000’s action games.

Most of Lords is dominated by combat with minor enemies that you mash your wide attack button to get rid of.
When what feels like the “real” combat starts, you’re a few levels into the game. Lords gives you two pools of energy that are stored in the red and blue areas of the screen in Diablo. 

Lords uses the blue stuff to heal and the red stuff to hurt. This is how they try to give the fights that rhythmic feeling older games had.
You can only get more energy to either heal or do heavy damage by not getting hit in combat. Enemies don’t flinch so instead of building a feeling of momentum with your hits,
you’re instead tapping enemies to death because you have to block or dodge before you can link a few hits together. Since there are always, always so many little goblins to kill you never
really get a chance to feel like there’s a real cadence or flow to combat.

Lots of sitting in corners and blocking seven large men hitting you with claws at once.

Never really rising above the parts it was made of, Lords seems like in trying to make Castlevania epic it lost all sense of identity. I do really mean parts, too. Combat is the worst offenses from God of War. Bossfights routinely go Shadow of the Colossus. My biggest pet peeve is having to write in italics, and here I go choosing a game like this to write about. Here were all of these things that worked for some other games, blended together. Reviewers said it wasn’t particularly Castlevania enough.

the romance hidden in the grim land

Lords of Shadows isn’t anything. In the hunt for creating an identity out of a decades old series, it destroyed any chance it ever had of making its own.
There is no other reason for Gabriel’s five o’clock shadow to never disappear. For the music to only be Grand, Epic Orchestra. Gabriel is Dracula for no other reason than having a dead wife is what allows us to know he’s Real Tortured. We’re supposed to feel sorry for him in his every growled moment of talking dourly to the camera.

At the halfway point of the game, after every Woman has died, the Abbott has revealed himself a coward and the vampires finally bare their fangs, I finally realized: Lords is a game for Serious Men.

Men can be sad and the only thing they can do about it is force the rest of the world to pay for it.

Someone – I am loathe to point the finger at single creators on a team the size it takes to make a videogame: saw this as something that Castlevania needed. Ma

There’s an argument to be made that the game earned its dourness purely because of the circumstances of its creation. An attempt to take a beloved series and turn it into a blockbuster. What did blockbusters look like in the film industry? They were similarly stripped of anything that gave a real sense of identity. To say that Lords stole from Hollywood is an understatement. Lords reeks of wanting to be taken seriously above all else.

Desperation wafts off of the game. Like an aging punk still putting up their Mohawk with six kids and a pension, or a fifty-year-old man trying to buy drinks for women half his age. It’s noticeable in the voiceover before every stage, in the score, in Gabriel’s permanent stubble. Because that’s what it started out with from the moment it was conceived, it never could have had any value at all.