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REVIEW: Castlevania: Nocturne Series Review


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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor


Joined: 02 May 2011
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2023 2:43 pm Reply with quote
Not dragging Mushoku Tensei or slavery apologism discourse in here, thanks.
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juaifan



Joined: 20 Mar 2021
Posts: 137
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 1:46 am Reply with quote
Hal14 wrote:
If you referring to stuff like "Wokelevania" then yes I have been looking at reviews and reactions. When I meant critically, I was referring to critics so my bad. But even ignoring critic reviews i'm not taking 'woke castlevania' complaints seriously. And the adaptation complaints that frame this as a personal attack on game fans are also eye-roll inducing. This adaptation absolutely has it's issues** but the vocal minority of detractors aren't worth considering


I just checked and apparently the critic scores you're talking about comprise of 14 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. That means 14 people in the entire world are speaking for the fandom, but you have decided that the tens of thousands of other people voicing their opinion are the vocal minority when it seems like that should be the reverse in this situation, no? Doesn't vocal minority mean the smaller group that appears more loud that people tend to notice more compared to the actual majority?

I also have to say there's a small bit of irony here about dismissing the voices of the general public and average fan in favor of a handful of elite critics given what the main theme and plot of the show was.
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Hal14



Joined: 01 Apr 2018
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 2:19 am Reply with quote
juaifan wrote:
I also have to say there's a small bit of irony here about dismissing the voices of the general public and average fan in favor of a handful of elite critics given what the main theme and plot of the show was.

Considering the main themes of the show it's not ironic that so many have gotten upset about the presence of gay and poc characters. Also, i don't think you get what vocal minority means. Most people who watched this aren't going to twitter to complain about it. Any review/response you see online is the vocal minority. And i'll concede i was too general, but i state clearly that "wokelevania" complaints and "muh childhood" are not real criticisms to me. And that those don't make up all the negative opinions of the show.

Also, calling online reviewers "the elite" when most of them do this either as a hobby or low-medium paying job amongst their other jobs they need to survive, is just hilarious. Also also, in your analogy the fans would be the revolutionists? You know the ones who become a rabid mob tearing down everything including themselves over even the smallest perceived slight to the revolution and ultimately (arguably) doing more damage than the elite (at least in body count).
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Snowcat



Joined: 01 Feb 2021
Posts: 190
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 4:23 am Reply with quote
Hal14 wrote:
Considering the main themes of the show it's not ironic that so many have gotten upset about the presence of gay and poc characters. Also, i don't think you get what vocal minority means. Most people who watched this aren't going to twitter to complain about it. Any review/response you see online is the vocal minority. And i'll concede i was too general, but i state clearly that "wokelevania" complaints and "muh childhood" are not real criticisms to me. And that those don't make up all the negative opinions of the show.

Netflix has the ratings, they only uses that to define if it's a success or not. If you hijack an IP to write your own story, it must be very good to avoid criticism and get audience support.

Ratings site like the critic score on RT are easily manipulated by PR firms and the fanbaiting strategy with paid legacy media calling criticism ists & phobes doesn't matter because they have become irrelevant to pop culture.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 6:54 am Reply with quote
I'm not very fond of atmosphere-breaking modernisms (which could be political, or also quips, excessive swearing, etc) in shows, but I don't really get leveling that criticism at Nocturne more than the original series. For example, is Maria's half-baked yelling about revolution in the first few episodes really all that distracting? I found Carmilla ranting about the vampire patriarchy (despite that I think there are plenty of issues with patriarchy in the real world) in the first series, and Trevor/Cypha filling every sentence with more expletives than non-expletives (and with a similar density of poorly attempted modern witticisms), a lot more "immersion-breaking" than anything in Nocturne.
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i got the shivers!



Joined: 30 Nov 2022
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 1:49 pm Reply with quote
I don't think people are saying the original's dialog was fine while only Nocturne's isn't. I think the issue is more people seem to enjoy the first series in spite of all eye-rolling quips and swearing because it had other elements they found more enjoyable so they were willing to put up with that stuff more than they were this time around. People could probably excuse the dialog and writing more when there was other stuff to hold their interest, although even the people who like the first series seem to say the first two seasons were far better than the later ones, and even season 2 has it's fair share of detractors because of things like the main trio spending a good chunk of time off in the library.
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AiddonValentine



Joined: 07 Aug 2006
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 2:07 pm Reply with quote
Snowcat wrote:

Netflix has the ratings, they only uses that to define if it's a success or not. If you hijack an IP to write your own story, it must be very good to avoid criticism and get audience support.
Ratings site like the critic score on RT are easily manipulated by PR firms and the fanbaiting strategy with paid legacy media calling criticism ists & phobes doesn't matter because they have become irrelevant to pop culture.


It's also very easy for bad faith actors to engage in review bombing in order to drive down audience scores not because of actual lack of quality, but because of perceived slights (in this case, Castlevania not slavishly copy-pasting its source material). And having seen what the audience review blurbs on RT are like, I'm comfortable in saying that's exactly what's going on.
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Snowcat



Joined: 01 Feb 2021
Posts: 190
PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 3:09 pm Reply with quote
Indeed, but on imdb there is more suspicious 10 than 1. The "review bombing" work both way, it's a limitation of sites based on user's notation. They are far from perfect, you just notice how bad they are when the result contradict your own opinion.
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Minos_Kurumada



Joined: 04 Nov 2015
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 3:37 pm Reply with quote
The reason I started this series was because I wanted to see a more cohesive version of the Castlevania lore and hoping it would get to narrate the events of 1999.

If they decided to make their own thing... then, I am quite frankly not interested at all, sorry.

If I ask for a pizza in a restaurant that says "Pizza" at the front and the guy servers me a hamburger, I think I should have the right ask "Where is my pizza?" and leave if they guy doesn't want to give me one.
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Scion Drake



Joined: 25 Nov 2017
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 4:31 pm Reply with quote
I always find this funny, cause everything I've been told about the games from people who have played the games is that a great deal of the games are borderline excuse plots with at most fragments of lore strewn around depending on the game.

So any hypothetical adaptation would have to do the heavy lifting of making a lot of its own thing to make a straightforward story based off the games.
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Minos_Kurumada



Joined: 04 Nov 2015
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 5:16 pm Reply with quote
Thus, that's why I said a more "cohesive version of the Castlevania lore".

I wanted somebody who knows a lot of Castlevannia to pick those fragments and forge it into a proper plot.

Season 1 and 2 did it perfectly, that's what I wanted for the rest of the seasons.

I don't want some random guy's random vampire plot, I wanted a proper Castlevania plot that doesn't ask you to read 30 wiki pages to kinda understand.

Worst of all, Rondo of Blood happens in 1792, it means it happened during "La Terreur" (1791ish to 1794) yet, one of the characters is a French Revolution cheerleader.

If we get into the events of SotN and she doesn't show remorse then I am naming her a genocide apologist and whoever wrote this a hack because he count' even open a history book about the historic setting he choose.

Maybe we will later get a Portrait of Ruin series where Charlotte tells us about this cool Mussolini guy.
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Scion Drake



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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 5:32 pm Reply with quote
Okay lets not call this a genocide.

I get the French Revolution is a complex part of history, but calling the reaction to the absolute decline of a country due to its miserable status quo instituted brough on by aristocracy and other brand of nobles not-so-nice-people a genocide is absolutely a laughable statement.

Again its a complex thing tumultuous thing like any revolution is, but lets not get into the royalty propaganda and call it a "genocide"
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James_Beckett
ANN Reviewer


Joined: 23 Nov 2015
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 5:39 pm Reply with quote
Minos_Kurumada wrote:
I don't want some random guy's random vampire plot, I wanted a proper Castlevania plot that doesn't ask you to read 30 wiki pages to kinda understand.

Worst of all, Rondo of Blood happens in 1792, it means it happened during "La Terreur" (1791ish to 1794) yet, one of the characters is a French Revolution cheerleader.

If we get into the events of SotN and she doesn't show remorse then I am naming her a genocide apologist and whoever wrote this a hack because he count' even open a history book about the historic setting he choose.

Maybe we will later get a Portrait of Ruin series where Charlotte tells us about this cool Mussolini guy.

Not to get too nitpicky on you, my friend, but it wouldn't be out of step with a decent range of historical consensus to consider the Reign of Terror as properly beginning in 1793, which would mean it hasn't happened yet if the show is actually sticking to Rondo's timeline (though I see no reason why it should). Also, so far as I know, the aristocracy in Revolutionary France were not all literally bloodsucking vampires, which kind of changes the context a bit.

Also, if you admit that the stories as presented in the games were not "proper" (seeing as most of them barely bothered to tell coherent stories at all), then I'm genuinely not sure why you seem to think that the only "proper" way to tell those stories would be to string all of the recognizable lore bits into chronological order with the requisite connective tissue in between them. I'm sure there are plenty of YouTube video essays that will already take care of that. The job of a TV show is to tell an interesting, compelling, and creatively successful *story*. It takes a lot more than getting all the names and dates right to do that.
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Beatdigga



Joined: 26 Oct 2003
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 05, 2023 7:29 pm Reply with quote
All things considered, I might somewhat forgive this extremely messy series if it pulls an Onimusha and reveals Napoleon was a vampire lord.
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i got the shivers!



Joined: 30 Nov 2022
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Location: Brazil
PostPosted: Fri Oct 06, 2023 4:15 pm Reply with quote
Snowcat wrote:
Ratings site like the critic score on RT are easily manipulated by PR firms and the fanbaiting strategy with paid legacy media calling criticism ists & phobes doesn't matter because they have become irrelevant to pop culture.


I don't really like the term review bomb because it implies some opinons are more valid than the others when they're all opinions at the end of the day. But yes, review bombs have always gone both ways, both with positive and negative reviews but also "critics" VS "audiences". People generally only use reviews to try to prove their point, so it makes sense they would only use the ones that agree with them or say that some review bombs are more acceptable than others.

I think this is one of those cases where people will defend the show based on political reasonss alone. I saw a few posts on X get 20K+ likes breaking down why they didn't like Nocturne with a ton of bullet points and citations from the games and overall writing quality. Yet the most popular rebuttel to them are guys dismissing everything as "I don’t like Black characters” or talking about how they like the focus on Black cultures and racial issues. So I imagine a lot of people's praise for the show specifically has to do with the whole racial plotline and characters rather than anything to do with the writing or quality. Meanwhile people who don't care about politics and just wanted a faithful and well written show won't have many positive things to say about it since those elements aren't what they're looking for or important to them at all. I don't think there's much use arguing.

Minos_Kurumada wrote:
I wanted somebody who knows a lot of Castlevannia to pick those fragments and forge it into a proper plot.


In a perfect world we'd basically get a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure type anime where each 'part' is based on a specific Belmont and their overlapping narrative of facing off against the evil vampire lord that begins with the letter D. But I imagine Konami doesn't care enough about the franchise at this point to do anything more than release game collections and lease out the IP. Most of these Konami game creators have moved on to do the spiritual successor route at this point. Bloodstained for Castlevania, Eiyuden Chronicle for Suikoden, and Mameda no Bakeru for Ganbare Goemon. But I guess never say never. Silent Hill is finally getting a new Eastern-made game by Ryukishi07 at the helm after all this time.
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