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It's Kamikazetime for Castlevania: Nocturne! Review #12
a week ago
Normally, I would say that since Castlevania: Nocturne is a direct sequel to the first Netflix Castlevania cartoon, you should watch it first before even reading this review or watching the show. But...it's amazing how you really don't need to bother with it if you don't want to lol. You can watch Nocturne or read this review even if you don't know anything about Castlevania from the previous series. Or even the games, since those writers, once again, didn't give a fuck about the games.
The main reason for this is how the writers brilliantly wrote themselves into a corner by the mess they made with Dracula, who was not only resurrected but also transformed into a good guy by the end of the previous series. So, he has to be alive by Nocturne. And yet, no sign of him. No sign of the other characters, or at least some sort of epilogue, so we can know what their fate was, such as Isaac and Hector. Not to mention Dracula isn't even the only character that, in theory, should still be around by the time Nocturne events happen...where the fuck are the two lesbian vampires that walked out of the plot in the last time we saw them? Urgh, to think Nocturne is making me remember them...
So, what do we expect from a cartoon that simply ignores all of those characters from the previous cartoon, whose fate was, at best, uncertain? The answer is...not much.
Maybe that isn't a surprise. This cartoon is basically a Frankenstein. It mixes, fuses, ruins, and wastes characters and ideas from four different Castlevania games: Rondo of Blood, Symphony of the Night, Bloodlines, and Harmony of Dissonance. No wonder the result is quite messy, and I don't get why they do this... it would be so much easier to just use one of those games as a reference to adapt the cartoon, plus it would leave the others open to be adapted better later, buuuut that's not what they did. And now we have this weird Frankenstein of a cartoon. For that reason, I will avoid directly comparing the stuff we see here with the games as much as I can and focus more on judging the cartoon as it is, since, as a proper adaptation, this failed even more than the first one.
With Richter Belmount as the protagonist, he and his pals have to stop the villain of this cartoon, Erzsebet Báthory, and he plan of creating an eternal eclipse so vampires could walk on Earth without being afraid of the sunlight and her being the leader of them all. Now, to be fair to this cartoon, it does have some good moments here and there, though fewer than the first one. And the best of them were in the action scenes, which were quite good! I'm not sure if I like the animation of the first series more than this one, but I don't think it's bad, so maybe it will depend on your taste which series has the best animation. That aside, I did like a couple of the "original ideas" they added there. Especially with them giving some time to talk and try to address Maria's powers, which was never done in the games, so we have a girl who can summon those powerful creatures just because she can.
Unfortunately, that's all the praise I can give to it. The writing of this cartoon is just overall worse than the previous one in so many ways. Let's start with the reasons why that is, first by talking about Erzsebet herself and her plan. This is a cartoon that has quite many coincidences, some of them are just terribly bad writing compared to the "good thing I found the only weapon that can work against death by casually walking at this part of the city, or I would be fucked later" coincidence of the first series. I will comment on at least two others, which I think are almost as bad as this one, but...think about that. The only reason the cartoon even exists is that both the protagonist and the villain happen to live in the same country, and also during the revolution of that country. If Erzsebet lived in any other country, then most likely she would be able to do her plan just fine, since the heroes wouldn't even know about it, except maybe Alucard? Still, we can only talk about what we got, and what we got is that the human race is lucky as fuck that Richter and his "family" happened to be living in France when Erzsebet was doing her thing! Otherwise, they would just suddenly see the eclipse, have no idea what was going on, and by that point, it would be game over already. And this is so easy to solve! Just make as if Richter was living somewhere and was called by Maria to go to Franche to help her investigate the many night creatures showing up lately, or something like that! It would still be dumb that Maria also happens to be living there just like that, but it is a way it would work and keep her ties to that revolution. Even if that whole "Maria all about vila la revolution" thing was too much cancerous and shouldn't exist to begin with, but more about Maria later xP
Aside from issues like that, the writing also suffers from a similar issue that also exists in the first cartoon, which was having too many characters to work with in so few episodes. And doesn't help that we have at least 2 "filler" characters here to take time, which are Olrox and Mizrak. Yes, Olrox is a useless character despite what he did to Ricther's mom, which is weird as fuck, but that's the level of writing we are dealing with here. To begin with, why on Earth is a fucking Aztec vampire doing in France? If he had no intention to join Erzsebet? And if he doesn't like her plan despite being a vampire for whatever reason, why didn't he take more measures, like helping the main characters more to stop it? Why is he even against her plan? So many questions, and don't expect the cartoon to answer that. Mizrak is a bit better because he at least had his conflict about his faith and what was going on, which in the end went nowhere, but in the end of the day, they only exist so we can say that the series has something that obviously an adaptation of a Castlevania game needs the most: a gay couple fucking and vampire ass. Yay...
I will go into detail now about the other issues that we see in the series, and that's why it's so hard to recommend it, even if you have never heard of Castlevania in your life. Short version is, watch this if you liked the first cartoon, since maybe you can still enjoy the action scenes which are around as good here as in that cartoon, at least...so there's that xP!
So I will talk about some stuff about the plot and my opinion on it that will have spoilers. If you want to avoid spoilers and want to see what the cartoon offers for furries, which is the main point of my review, then please scroll down to the “KEMONO SCALE JUDGEMENT” section!
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE CARTOON AND THE ENDING
- The characters...there are a few good scenes here and there, though not sure if more than in the previous cartoon, but in the end, this was a case of too many characters to properly develop them all in so little time. I will only talk about the worst ones imo. And I think the worst of them all is Maria.
Oh, Maria...talk about character assassination. The change they made to her character is so big that it feels like they hate her in the games or something, seriously. How else would she go from a sweet, innocent girl who wants to help Richter after being rescued by her without hesitation in the games to...this. A mean bitch that is always angry and is all about the revolution, like the French nobility had burned her family alive or something. And the mess that they made with her and her Father didn't help, though there was some good potential there, but then she just kills her...and later she was fine lol. Maybe that would have worked better if they had more episodes to take care of this stuff better, but as it was, it's just messy and rushed and just makes her already terrible character even worse. And not only that, but her arc in the second season, which was one of the few good ideas that they got for the cartoon, as her powers were never explored or anything in the games, ends up feeling like filler. Which is crazy, given she killed her own father in that arc.
- WTF were they thinking with Annette? She has nothing to do with the character from the games aside from the fact that they're both woman lol. Why pretend she's Annette? Just give her a unique name since they didn't want to use the "real" Annette anyway. And not only that, but they wasted so much time with this character, which could have been used, you know, for Richter, Maria, Juste, the villains, etc. It is understandable that Annette from the games was pretty much just a damsel in distress, but wasn't part of the point of "adapting" a cartoon based on the games to do more with those characters? So why instead do you make your own OC and pretend you're adapting a character from the game when clearly you didn't give a fuck and are just inserting your oc in your cartoon?
Not only that, but she's OP as fuck, and now Richter needs her help too to win the final battle because Maria wasn't enough to help him there; he needed Annette's OP power too. And the fact that not only is she a whole new character that is Annette in name only, but her presence there brings questions that kinda break the lore and the world-building those writers are pretending to care about.
Similar to Sypha, she's just too powerful on her own. In the first series, why the heck did a few sorcerers get together and just wipe out all vampires and night creatures from the world? Here, we have the same issue. Actually, it's even worse: if she can do the crazy shit she can do on her owl, how in the fuck are there slaves in colonies such as Saint-Domingue? Just have a dozen of those guys that have powers like hers together and kill the guys or vampires that try to enslave you! Unless the cartoon made clear Annette was the only ONE IN THE WORLD that had those powers, and that's quite hard to believe, especially since we know there's at least one more with similar powers, which is Cécile Fatiman, who acts as her mentor.
Not only that, but this also makes you wonder how powerful the Belmont clan is going to be. They added in the lore of the cartoon that now descendants of the Belmont clan can use magic, thanks to also being descendants of Sypha Belnades (btw the fact that even hundreds of years later her descendants can use magic shows how powerful magic users are, so where the fuck are them? Why they letting vampires and night creatures free?) and this means that in theory, descendants of Richter and this Annette should ALSO user her ogun powers! And they would have them because otherwise it would make no sense, they can use magic thanks to Sypha's genes lol. I wonder if the writers are writing themselves into a corner again, like they did with the Dracula stuff, since the next Belmonts would be even more powerful. And, as it is, it feels Richter could take Dracula alone easily.
- Speaking of Richter, he was fine...ish. I think the worst bit about him is his vengeance thing and trauma about his mother, whose execution was sloppy at best. He literally got bullied by a vampire until he just decided he was over it and could use magic again lol. And in the end, he didn't avenge his mother because...reasons.
I guess those writers must hate mothers as much as they hate the games, given that no less than three of the main characters, including Richter himself, have the trauma of seeing them dying or worse. But that wasn't worse than the rushed romance between her and Annette that just kinda happened, but given the quality of the writing we're talking about here and with so few episodes to work on, is anyone surprised about that? And to think I thought the romance between Trevor and Sypha was rushed lol.
- Erzsebet sucked as a villain since she was just evil for the sake of being evil; there was nothing more to her. This type of villain can work, but they need to have more to their character. For example, being evil as fuck but also fun to see or be entertained by the villain and their actions, which is the biggest reason why so many JoJo fans love Dio Brando. Drolta was a bit better in the second season, but in the end, this was one of the worst twist villains I've ever seen. It would be better if she were the "main" villain from the first season, manipulating Erzsebet from behind the scenes or something.
- Writing-wise, I think this had more ideas compared to the first series that could have been quite good in the hands of a competent writer, but as it is...yeah. Just look at some of the bizarre coincidences that we see. This tells a lot about a writer, since while sometimes we need the suspension of disbelief to enjoy something, it's quite hard to do so when the writing is this bad. When we see a coincidence, we need reasons to make it feel more like a natural thing that happened, or, even better, we see it's not a coincidence at all because it was something that happened due to the actions of some character.
Of those, I already talked about one of them, about how the brilliant timing of all main characters either living in France or happen to be in France when Erzsebet is doing her thing, so she could be stopped. But the other two that were also just terrible were:
A - Annette met Vaublanc by chance in a cemetery, where she got lucky and was able to defeat him? What the heck? At least they could have made that after finding out he was in France, she followed him for a few days to see where he stayed, devised a plan, etc. But...nope. She was lucky as fuck to meet him and that he was all by himself.
B- Alucard showing up out of nowhere to one-shot an overpowered Drolta. Again, what the heck? Not only is the timing here just ridiculous, but this means that Alucard is now so powerful that I don't get why, in the second he heard about Erzsebet, he didn't just come to see and kill her before she got her power up. He certainly would have been able to kill her, even if maybe with some difficulty. And even less if he decided to do that while requesting the help of the two Belmont guys he knew were alive and well!
- All that stuff aside, the writing is just...they can't even keep the consistency with their own lore. Why the night creatures in Nocturne can keep their original souls with their old memories? This somehow even allows for them to bring back Drolta and with a damn powerup! How, after seeing that, Erzsebet didn't decide to kill more vampires to bring them back as well, since you can never have enough powerful soldiers at your disposal? How freaking Richter Belmont didn't know about the night creatures before the cartoon? How did Annette even know about them already? How could Maria's father be such a goddamn moron to think he could best vampires like Drolta, who were alive for centuries, at least since he didn't even have a backup plan or something in case he realized he fucked up? And don't even get me started on Robespierre...
KEMONO SCALE JUDGEMENT
Now that we put that out of the way...it's KAMIKAZETIME!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTeidx0_sjs
I already talked about this in the first cartoon in https://inkbunny.net/j/546498-kamik.....eries-review-4, and for the most part, it also applies here.
In other words, I can only recommend the series to fans of action in their cartoons/anime. If you're a Castlevania fan, maybe you can enjoy it for that reason alone, despite the butchering or massive changes they did to the lore or characters of the games. And this time, I can't recommend season 1 as easily as last time...
For fans of furry stuff, though...well...this time it will depend more on what you like in your furry characters. Unlike last time, we got a few"real" characters which are furry...sort of. Like Erzsebet's final form or Edouard. But aside from those, most of the furry characters you will see here are still nigh creatures that exist to be killed by our heroes. And sometimes they are mixed with random vampires, so technically we have even less well-designed furry night creatures compared to before.
The biggest exception here, which we didn't get in the previous series, is Maria's familiars! They're all here, and of those, I think the best ones are White Tiger and Azure Dragon. Unfortunately, they're like animals that Maria "controls," so they aren't characters; they don't even talk. A massive waste of potential since I'm sure at least one of them would be more interesting as a character than half the bloated cast of Nocturne lol. Imagine, for example, if White Tiger were sassy and teased Maria or Richter every time he was summoned!
As it is, though...we have way fewer good night creatures compared to before, but some nice familiars. Might be up to you if you think this is better than last time or not, furry-wise.
Azure Dragon reference: https://imgbox.com/g/N35sPkTkFX.
Cat-like Demon (despite being a night creature that shows up in more than one episode, he never got a name or backstory or anything, so weird...) reference: https://imgbox.com/g/NUhWO8smKQ.
White Tiger reference: https://imgbox.com/g/PaDkep6hbK.
Dark Wolf (I believe this one is exclusive to the cartoon, and what a waste. Plus, he has a better design than Alucard's wolf form from the last series, so...why didn't they just use this wolf for him as his canine form is beyond me...) reference: https://imgbox.com/g/apKgHddwEZ.
So, for those reasons, I believe that Castlevania Nocturne deserves a...*turns around and points dramatically at the cartoon* A TWO OUT OF FIVE OF LOF IN THE KAMIKAZE SCALE!!!
They pretty much replaced most of the few good night creatures with Maria's familiars, so it's up to ya if this was a good trade or not. I don't think it changes anything for the scale, though, especially since it's not like there are that many familiars. And none of them are a "real" character, behaving more like an animal that is called, does their attack, and that's it. Even if we count on the few "furry" characters like Edouard, I don't think that's enough to make the scale rate this more than the previous series. Not when their design just sucks, those characters suck as well (Edouard is only there to sing and add another "gay" character to the list), and we can't ignore the bad writing that sadly carried over from the previous cartoon.
The best furry character this time is...a tie between Azure Dragon and White Tiger. If any of them were real characters, they might be enough to rate the cartoon even higher in our scale! Especially if that was the case with both! But that's not what we got.
The "kemono in the refrigerator" this time is... a tie between the cat-like demon and the Dark Wolf familiar. Both are really wasted here, though for different reasons. Wolf should be Alucard's wolf form instead of bothering to make that canine show up for less than 5 minutes in a single episode, and come on, that demon didn't even have a name? He could at least be Edouard's new body! xP
Aaaand that’s it for this one! Hope you guys enjoyed reading this review. Please don't hesitate to leave your comments and opinions about it, and also about Castlevania Nocturne if you happen to have watched it or maybe wanna check it out, thanks to this review xD. I want to leave those journals as a place where people can discuss the respective things being reviewed here!
The main reason for this is how the writers brilliantly wrote themselves into a corner by the mess they made with Dracula, who was not only resurrected but also transformed into a good guy by the end of the previous series. So, he has to be alive by Nocturne. And yet, no sign of him. No sign of the other characters, or at least some sort of epilogue, so we can know what their fate was, such as Isaac and Hector. Not to mention Dracula isn't even the only character that, in theory, should still be around by the time Nocturne events happen...where the fuck are the two lesbian vampires that walked out of the plot in the last time we saw them? Urgh, to think Nocturne is making me remember them...
So, what do we expect from a cartoon that simply ignores all of those characters from the previous cartoon, whose fate was, at best, uncertain? The answer is...not much.
Maybe that isn't a surprise. This cartoon is basically a Frankenstein. It mixes, fuses, ruins, and wastes characters and ideas from four different Castlevania games: Rondo of Blood, Symphony of the Night, Bloodlines, and Harmony of Dissonance. No wonder the result is quite messy, and I don't get why they do this... it would be so much easier to just use one of those games as a reference to adapt the cartoon, plus it would leave the others open to be adapted better later, buuuut that's not what they did. And now we have this weird Frankenstein of a cartoon. For that reason, I will avoid directly comparing the stuff we see here with the games as much as I can and focus more on judging the cartoon as it is, since, as a proper adaptation, this failed even more than the first one.
With Richter Belmount as the protagonist, he and his pals have to stop the villain of this cartoon, Erzsebet Báthory, and he plan of creating an eternal eclipse so vampires could walk on Earth without being afraid of the sunlight and her being the leader of them all. Now, to be fair to this cartoon, it does have some good moments here and there, though fewer than the first one. And the best of them were in the action scenes, which were quite good! I'm not sure if I like the animation of the first series more than this one, but I don't think it's bad, so maybe it will depend on your taste which series has the best animation. That aside, I did like a couple of the "original ideas" they added there. Especially with them giving some time to talk and try to address Maria's powers, which was never done in the games, so we have a girl who can summon those powerful creatures just because she can.
Unfortunately, that's all the praise I can give to it. The writing of this cartoon is just overall worse than the previous one in so many ways. Let's start with the reasons why that is, first by talking about Erzsebet herself and her plan. This is a cartoon that has quite many coincidences, some of them are just terribly bad writing compared to the "good thing I found the only weapon that can work against death by casually walking at this part of the city, or I would be fucked later" coincidence of the first series. I will comment on at least two others, which I think are almost as bad as this one, but...think about that. The only reason the cartoon even exists is that both the protagonist and the villain happen to live in the same country, and also during the revolution of that country. If Erzsebet lived in any other country, then most likely she would be able to do her plan just fine, since the heroes wouldn't even know about it, except maybe Alucard? Still, we can only talk about what we got, and what we got is that the human race is lucky as fuck that Richter and his "family" happened to be living in France when Erzsebet was doing her thing! Otherwise, they would just suddenly see the eclipse, have no idea what was going on, and by that point, it would be game over already. And this is so easy to solve! Just make as if Richter was living somewhere and was called by Maria to go to Franche to help her investigate the many night creatures showing up lately, or something like that! It would still be dumb that Maria also happens to be living there just like that, but it is a way it would work and keep her ties to that revolution. Even if that whole "Maria all about vila la revolution" thing was too much cancerous and shouldn't exist to begin with, but more about Maria later xP
Aside from issues like that, the writing also suffers from a similar issue that also exists in the first cartoon, which was having too many characters to work with in so few episodes. And doesn't help that we have at least 2 "filler" characters here to take time, which are Olrox and Mizrak. Yes, Olrox is a useless character despite what he did to Ricther's mom, which is weird as fuck, but that's the level of writing we are dealing with here. To begin with, why on Earth is a fucking Aztec vampire doing in France? If he had no intention to join Erzsebet? And if he doesn't like her plan despite being a vampire for whatever reason, why didn't he take more measures, like helping the main characters more to stop it? Why is he even against her plan? So many questions, and don't expect the cartoon to answer that. Mizrak is a bit better because he at least had his conflict about his faith and what was going on, which in the end went nowhere, but in the end of the day, they only exist so we can say that the series has something that obviously an adaptation of a Castlevania game needs the most: a gay couple fucking and vampire ass. Yay...
I will go into detail now about the other issues that we see in the series, and that's why it's so hard to recommend it, even if you have never heard of Castlevania in your life. Short version is, watch this if you liked the first cartoon, since maybe you can still enjoy the action scenes which are around as good here as in that cartoon, at least...so there's that xP!
So I will talk about some stuff about the plot and my opinion on it that will have spoilers. If you want to avoid spoilers and want to see what the cartoon offers for furries, which is the main point of my review, then please scroll down to the “KEMONO SCALE JUDGEMENT” section!
MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE CARTOON AND THE ENDING
- The characters...there are a few good scenes here and there, though not sure if more than in the previous cartoon, but in the end, this was a case of too many characters to properly develop them all in so little time. I will only talk about the worst ones imo. And I think the worst of them all is Maria.
Oh, Maria...talk about character assassination. The change they made to her character is so big that it feels like they hate her in the games or something, seriously. How else would she go from a sweet, innocent girl who wants to help Richter after being rescued by her without hesitation in the games to...this. A mean bitch that is always angry and is all about the revolution, like the French nobility had burned her family alive or something. And the mess that they made with her and her Father didn't help, though there was some good potential there, but then she just kills her...and later she was fine lol. Maybe that would have worked better if they had more episodes to take care of this stuff better, but as it was, it's just messy and rushed and just makes her already terrible character even worse. And not only that, but her arc in the second season, which was one of the few good ideas that they got for the cartoon, as her powers were never explored or anything in the games, ends up feeling like filler. Which is crazy, given she killed her own father in that arc.
- WTF were they thinking with Annette? She has nothing to do with the character from the games aside from the fact that they're both woman lol. Why pretend she's Annette? Just give her a unique name since they didn't want to use the "real" Annette anyway. And not only that, but they wasted so much time with this character, which could have been used, you know, for Richter, Maria, Juste, the villains, etc. It is understandable that Annette from the games was pretty much just a damsel in distress, but wasn't part of the point of "adapting" a cartoon based on the games to do more with those characters? So why instead do you make your own OC and pretend you're adapting a character from the game when clearly you didn't give a fuck and are just inserting your oc in your cartoon?
Not only that, but she's OP as fuck, and now Richter needs her help too to win the final battle because Maria wasn't enough to help him there; he needed Annette's OP power too. And the fact that not only is she a whole new character that is Annette in name only, but her presence there brings questions that kinda break the lore and the world-building those writers are pretending to care about.
Similar to Sypha, she's just too powerful on her own. In the first series, why the heck did a few sorcerers get together and just wipe out all vampires and night creatures from the world? Here, we have the same issue. Actually, it's even worse: if she can do the crazy shit she can do on her owl, how in the fuck are there slaves in colonies such as Saint-Domingue? Just have a dozen of those guys that have powers like hers together and kill the guys or vampires that try to enslave you! Unless the cartoon made clear Annette was the only ONE IN THE WORLD that had those powers, and that's quite hard to believe, especially since we know there's at least one more with similar powers, which is Cécile Fatiman, who acts as her mentor.
Not only that, but this also makes you wonder how powerful the Belmont clan is going to be. They added in the lore of the cartoon that now descendants of the Belmont clan can use magic, thanks to also being descendants of Sypha Belnades (btw the fact that even hundreds of years later her descendants can use magic shows how powerful magic users are, so where the fuck are them? Why they letting vampires and night creatures free?) and this means that in theory, descendants of Richter and this Annette should ALSO user her ogun powers! And they would have them because otherwise it would make no sense, they can use magic thanks to Sypha's genes lol. I wonder if the writers are writing themselves into a corner again, like they did with the Dracula stuff, since the next Belmonts would be even more powerful. And, as it is, it feels Richter could take Dracula alone easily.
- Speaking of Richter, he was fine...ish. I think the worst bit about him is his vengeance thing and trauma about his mother, whose execution was sloppy at best. He literally got bullied by a vampire until he just decided he was over it and could use magic again lol. And in the end, he didn't avenge his mother because...reasons.
I guess those writers must hate mothers as much as they hate the games, given that no less than three of the main characters, including Richter himself, have the trauma of seeing them dying or worse. But that wasn't worse than the rushed romance between her and Annette that just kinda happened, but given the quality of the writing we're talking about here and with so few episodes to work on, is anyone surprised about that? And to think I thought the romance between Trevor and Sypha was rushed lol.
- Erzsebet sucked as a villain since she was just evil for the sake of being evil; there was nothing more to her. This type of villain can work, but they need to have more to their character. For example, being evil as fuck but also fun to see or be entertained by the villain and their actions, which is the biggest reason why so many JoJo fans love Dio Brando. Drolta was a bit better in the second season, but in the end, this was one of the worst twist villains I've ever seen. It would be better if she were the "main" villain from the first season, manipulating Erzsebet from behind the scenes or something.
- Writing-wise, I think this had more ideas compared to the first series that could have been quite good in the hands of a competent writer, but as it is...yeah. Just look at some of the bizarre coincidences that we see. This tells a lot about a writer, since while sometimes we need the suspension of disbelief to enjoy something, it's quite hard to do so when the writing is this bad. When we see a coincidence, we need reasons to make it feel more like a natural thing that happened, or, even better, we see it's not a coincidence at all because it was something that happened due to the actions of some character.
Of those, I already talked about one of them, about how the brilliant timing of all main characters either living in France or happen to be in France when Erzsebet is doing her thing, so she could be stopped. But the other two that were also just terrible were:
A - Annette met Vaublanc by chance in a cemetery, where she got lucky and was able to defeat him? What the heck? At least they could have made that after finding out he was in France, she followed him for a few days to see where he stayed, devised a plan, etc. But...nope. She was lucky as fuck to meet him and that he was all by himself.
B- Alucard showing up out of nowhere to one-shot an overpowered Drolta. Again, what the heck? Not only is the timing here just ridiculous, but this means that Alucard is now so powerful that I don't get why, in the second he heard about Erzsebet, he didn't just come to see and kill her before she got her power up. He certainly would have been able to kill her, even if maybe with some difficulty. And even less if he decided to do that while requesting the help of the two Belmont guys he knew were alive and well!
- All that stuff aside, the writing is just...they can't even keep the consistency with their own lore. Why the night creatures in Nocturne can keep their original souls with their old memories? This somehow even allows for them to bring back Drolta and with a damn powerup! How, after seeing that, Erzsebet didn't decide to kill more vampires to bring them back as well, since you can never have enough powerful soldiers at your disposal? How freaking Richter Belmont didn't know about the night creatures before the cartoon? How did Annette even know about them already? How could Maria's father be such a goddamn moron to think he could best vampires like Drolta, who were alive for centuries, at least since he didn't even have a backup plan or something in case he realized he fucked up? And don't even get me started on Robespierre...
KEMONO SCALE JUDGEMENT
Now that we put that out of the way...it's KAMIKAZETIME!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTeidx0_sjs
I already talked about this in the first cartoon in https://inkbunny.net/j/546498-kamik.....eries-review-4, and for the most part, it also applies here.
In other words, I can only recommend the series to fans of action in their cartoons/anime. If you're a Castlevania fan, maybe you can enjoy it for that reason alone, despite the butchering or massive changes they did to the lore or characters of the games. And this time, I can't recommend season 1 as easily as last time...
For fans of furry stuff, though...well...this time it will depend more on what you like in your furry characters. Unlike last time, we got a few"real" characters which are furry...sort of. Like Erzsebet's final form or Edouard. But aside from those, most of the furry characters you will see here are still nigh creatures that exist to be killed by our heroes. And sometimes they are mixed with random vampires, so technically we have even less well-designed furry night creatures compared to before.
The biggest exception here, which we didn't get in the previous series, is Maria's familiars! They're all here, and of those, I think the best ones are White Tiger and Azure Dragon. Unfortunately, they're like animals that Maria "controls," so they aren't characters; they don't even talk. A massive waste of potential since I'm sure at least one of them would be more interesting as a character than half the bloated cast of Nocturne lol. Imagine, for example, if White Tiger were sassy and teased Maria or Richter every time he was summoned!
As it is, though...we have way fewer good night creatures compared to before, but some nice familiars. Might be up to you if you think this is better than last time or not, furry-wise.
Azure Dragon reference: https://imgbox.com/g/N35sPkTkFX.
Cat-like Demon (despite being a night creature that shows up in more than one episode, he never got a name or backstory or anything, so weird...) reference: https://imgbox.com/g/NUhWO8smKQ.
White Tiger reference: https://imgbox.com/g/PaDkep6hbK.
Dark Wolf (I believe this one is exclusive to the cartoon, and what a waste. Plus, he has a better design than Alucard's wolf form from the last series, so...why didn't they just use this wolf for him as his canine form is beyond me...) reference: https://imgbox.com/g/apKgHddwEZ.
So, for those reasons, I believe that Castlevania Nocturne deserves a...*turns around and points dramatically at the cartoon* A TWO OUT OF FIVE OF LOF IN THE KAMIKAZE SCALE!!!
They pretty much replaced most of the few good night creatures with Maria's familiars, so it's up to ya if this was a good trade or not. I don't think it changes anything for the scale, though, especially since it's not like there are that many familiars. And none of them are a "real" character, behaving more like an animal that is called, does their attack, and that's it. Even if we count on the few "furry" characters like Edouard, I don't think that's enough to make the scale rate this more than the previous series. Not when their design just sucks, those characters suck as well (Edouard is only there to sing and add another "gay" character to the list), and we can't ignore the bad writing that sadly carried over from the previous cartoon.
The best furry character this time is...a tie between Azure Dragon and White Tiger. If any of them were real characters, they might be enough to rate the cartoon even higher in our scale! Especially if that was the case with both! But that's not what we got.
The "kemono in the refrigerator" this time is... a tie between the cat-like demon and the Dark Wolf familiar. Both are really wasted here, though for different reasons. Wolf should be Alucard's wolf form instead of bothering to make that canine show up for less than 5 minutes in a single episode, and come on, that demon didn't even have a name? He could at least be Edouard's new body! xP
Aaaand that’s it for this one! Hope you guys enjoyed reading this review. Please don't hesitate to leave your comments and opinions about it, and also about Castlevania Nocturne if you happen to have watched it or maybe wanna check it out, thanks to this review xD. I want to leave those journals as a place where people can discuss the respective things being reviewed here!
