The fact that the main cast sneaks to the vampires and crouch while blantantly visible from a few yards away showed me how brain dead their tactical skills were.
Part of the issues I have is how everyone treated Richter like he was super incompetent and yet he was the one making plans and killing monsters. Somehow HE'S the incompetent one though. If anything, the girls who were calling him the stupid one were more rash and idiotic, just wanting to rush in! There's even a whole scene where Annette connects with her family spiritually or something and they literally call her out on her bullshit when she got pissed Richter ran. SHE RAN
@@mupty I know to some you sound crazy but I just watched to the part where he gets his powers and holy shit. Annette gets babied so much and can do no wrong. Idk what the writer were smoking but they should never cook with someones IP ever again. I dont remember Castlevania having so much slavery is bad stuff in it at all. Its actually insane how much,idk if symbolism is the right word, but how much stuff about slavery there is. Its literally everywhere in every episode. I dont mind having political commentary about things but there is so much and they bash you over the head so much its actually crazy. I feel the writing was whats the worst thing about this. I feel like they took apart Castlevania and placed all this messaging first and foremost and then built the Castlevania around it IF it could fit in. From making Richter a little bish to him getting made fun of all the time to the whip seemingly not doing anything at times? Seriosuly, there was a scene where he whips like 4 or 5 vamps and they just fell back like they got blown back by air, wtf is the point of the whip? The part that got me to stop watching was when he got his powers. Why have juste there at all? All he did was shit all over how evil will win, and then the oh I was gonna say something witty but fuck it. Seriously, can anyone write? Like i feel they put that in because they literally cant come up with something to save their lives. They could have easily made Juste say something like "Evil wins it always wins... But that is why we fight... when evil reigns we will be there... we exist.. to hunt the night...." and then in the same vein Richters line instead of the witty shite could have been " I exist to hunt the night" or something like that. I fail to understand these people get paid for this kind of lazy writing and that some people saw this and said "oh yeah fuck it is fire"
No I disagreed the story was just all over the place look at the Annette story we have an entire flashback episode the villain Runaway and then she met him by accident in the middle of the street and killed him this is not how you write story
I agree wholeheartedly. I heard from another comment that they weren't sure if they would be renewed for a second season so they rushed the first one and the final product suffered as a result. They didn't want to be cut for another season of big mouth.
@@1Dark.Paradise.Lost1 I did a comparison recently. The difference between this and the length of season 2 and 1 of the first show was 4 episodes. 4 episodes used to define the main villain and the characters. Would have been very helpful
Honestly it would’ve been nice if they actually had few episodes were there getting to know one another before one of them becomes a night creature so I can feel sorry for him.🐱
Who needs back story of an apparent villain thats integral to the character they forced into and told was a major problem and kept being brought up only for her to breath on him to fade away making background characters named characters to just remove space is bad writing and bad story telling just make to make the characters do more than just walk
They did have an episode showcasing Eduard's back story with Annette. The problem was that they showed it after he died, so the impact of his death was less powerful. The larger problem is the series' main villain Erzsebet Bathory having little backstory outside of hushed whispers from the heroes and the hyped up exposition from her lackies like Drolta. Bathory needs more story to make her a compelling villain like Carmilla in the first series.
Honestly I don’t need constant attachment to characters. I don’t need to feel something every time a main or side character dies or something. I also don’t need long drawn out character journeys to hit certain beats. I thought Ricthor and Maria were fine but IMO Olrox and Annette were the standouts. I liked the story and the villain Drolta quite a bit. And the idea of a vampire drinking the blood of an Egyptian God and then bringing that god into existence was a pretty cool setup and end goal. I’m looking forward to a season 2.
The plot recycles itself at least 3 times in the span of what? 6 episodes? Richter's mom sacrifices herself to save him Annette's mom sacrifices herself to save her Maria's mom sacrifices herself to save her Like fucks sake, we get it. Killing moms is a cheap way to give your characters motivation, but if you do this a fourth time I'm going to flip
The fight scene where he rediscovers magic should have been: "There's something you forgot about Belmonts; we kill vampires!" Have it be a nice call back to an episode ago before he ran away, and a nice, recurring line of the series itself.
@@Doralga Moreover, Richter even manages to somewhat deal with that trauma firstly by attacking Olrox when he comes to make a bargain, and even cooperating with him against the antagonist. This speaks volumes.
My issue with Annette was that she came across as fairly unlikable at times. Such as when she dismisses the difficulties of Richter's traumatic past and loss of magic.
She is literally a mouth piece for white guilt to sell white guilt to white people. If you are not white, her scenes are obnoxious, repetitive, preachy and irritating. It's doubly funny if you know anything about the Haitian rebellion and their ethnic cleansing of whites and mixed people on their half of the island
Agreed. She was supposed to be someone who understood pain and then got super pissed because he ran from the ONE thing that scares him. I literally rolled my eyes at her during those parts lol other than that - she’s a pretty okay character. I’m hoping for more development.
24:35 The issue with night creatures goes much deeper than that. In the first series, night creatures are established to be only loyal to their creator/summoner, to the point where the vampires had to put a collar on the forgers, because otherwise the forgers might rebel and take all the night creature servants with them. But now they're just.... not?
ive seen people claim that in Nocturne night creatures have free will because they were made using NightCreature.exe instead of the human touch of a forgemaster. its not a bad explanation but it shouldve been discussed in the show instead of on twitter
@@seanmundyphotoIt isn't headcanon, is obvious, Remember the fly creature that was able to speak in the first show? It wasn't created in its own body, Isaac used some else's body to create it (Like all the others he and Hector made) meanwhile in Nocturne the father used the creatures own bodies to create them and so they still have their memories, this happened because he isn't a true forgemaster, that's the reason. Is Nocturne a perfect series? No, not even close but some things do make sense and this thing about the Night Creatures does it, it was never told to our faces because there was no need for them to do it, since is so obvious.
@@juannaym8488 Richter, whose family fought vampires and other creatures of the night and have records of every single monster they've ever fought, and yet he doesn't know what a night creature is. It's not an excuse when since Richter's mom is an active Belmont who should know their history and has likely taught Richter everything. The same could be said to Annette, unless she encountered a vampire who has forgemaster like Dracula did, she shouldn't know what a night creature is if someone like Richter, whose family hunts every monster for a living, doesn't know.
@@bunnyleaningonasquishedbun5542 yeah it's dumb that Richter didn't know but that doesn't answer how a random girl from the Caribbean can know who Dracula is The timeframe is off a world that was a lot less connected than modern times, and even today, in more cut off parts of the world, people won't know about important historic figures. Ask some guy from the Mongolian steppe who Hitler was. Chances are he won't know
I don’t think its that much of a stretch to assume something akin to forgemasters exist outside of just europe isaac being an example and why would colonizers go out of their way to teach locals and especially slaves about a vampire from several centuries ago forgemasters are specifically humans thats why isaac hector and the abbot aren’t turned into vampires as for richter not knowing belmonts are mostly vampire killers forgemasters arent vampires and the only mentor he had was his mother who was killed when he was like 10 so maybe it was never mentioned to him but i think it was likely done to inform people who are not familiar with the previous show even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense richter wouldn’t know
Honestly, one big problem with Nocturne comes from the original show because they wrote themselves into a corner with Dracula's ending. They can't rely on Dracula this time. So they are pulling from vampires throughout history and other games in the timeline. Elisabeth has great potential as a villain, she was the leading lady Castlevania Bloodlines using the current world war to resurrect Dracula. But now it just feels kinda hollow. With how the story they are telling now is it seems like they wanna combine Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night but not build into it. What is their pay off gonna be in the end? They showed off Alucard way too early. Annette is trying to fill in Older Maria's role i guess? It is just kind of a mess.
Without Dracula existing in some form of course its hollow thats what drives the belmonts in the first place they are born when Dracula is resurrecting thats why the vampire killer brings the next belmont memories of how to kill vampires and belmonts are stronger than the previous belmonts canonically Without Dracula resurrecting their isnt a need for belmonts or Alucard for that matter both only help the church when Dracula is resurrecting or someone is trying to prepare a vessel like shonoa and Graham in aura of sorrow without Dracula Alucard isnt necessary and neither are belmonts unless something is far stronger like richter being controlled at full strength
Yea it pretty much tramples with the Belmonts’ motives going way back from Leon’s time of preventing anyone from suffering the fate that his fiancée experienced and hunting down Night Creatures and Vampires.
The main problem is all the setup is to setup for Annette with very little after thought and an episode for ritcher its like it was supposed to be a movie and were forced to make a series
Yeah, I couldn’t get into Nocturne like I did in the previous series. It honestly felt most of the problems that were in that series got amplified in Nocturne, like the F-bombs and weird narrative choices. It’s honestly telling that when you ask some people what the best parts in Nocturne were, they’d ofter say “When Alucard showed up in the end” or “Juste showing up”, instead of anything relating to the new characters. And I say this as someone who isn’t really into Castlevania stuff.
I enjoyed Nocturne a lot, and I remember talking to my friends about it. When asked to give my review of the series, I had trouble trying to give the plot of the series other than "they're off to fight for freedom in France". It felt like: - Ep 1 is the summary of the series - Ep 1-3, 7-8 is the Story - Ep 4-6 is Filler This is without saying how due to the pacing, you can say it's a whole lot of something doing nothing in the episodes that are Story Content. I had to rely on things outside the story to talk about it, when these are often the "Toppings on a Dessert" in reviewing.
I would say the best part of Nocturne was Olrox, the idea of an Aztec vampire is cool, I like his impact on Richter's childhood, and he works well as an independent force that's not necessarily allied with our protagonist nor antagonist team. My one nitpick is the character has so little in common with either the character in the games or Count Orlok from Nosferatu, that the character could have easily had his own name. Heck considering we are incorporating other religions into the world building one could have easily made the character Quetzalcoatl, he already had a serpent form that resembles the blood consuming Aztec god, so why not just go all out?
While I agree this show was nothing compared to the previous but f-bombs? Jesus Christ you guys need to watch Spartacus if a few fucks are so offensive
“I was gonna say something cutting and brutal but I couldn’t come up with anything” is how I felt seeing that scene Also what’s up with everyone and their mothers being magicians?
Castlevania Nocturne just feels like fanfiction to me at the end of the day. Doesn’t feel like it it really cares about the source material like the first series. It’s just… playing with it
You can say the same for the original Castlevania series. This criticism is weak, as everyone throws it arrownd when it comes to reboots and adaptations and it has nothing to do with the actual quality of the product.
@@manolgeorgiev9664 That's not true at all. Reboots and adaptions always have the same constraints but the difference between respecting the source material , building upon it and this thing we got is obvious. The writing is all over the place and characters all suffer because of it , it's not because it's an adaptation
@@A.Froster What I'm saying is, the quality of the product has nothing to do with how faithful it is to the source material. You said it yourself, it's issues with the writing and characterization. My issue is that people throw arrownd the "It feels like a fan fiction" and "It's not true to the source material" as criticisms, when they are basically worthless. You don't need to be faithful to the source material to make a good show and the original Castlevania series proves this. To me it seems like people who throw this criticism arrownd don't really understand why a piece of art is good or bad.
Nocturne is such a mixed bag. the animation is GORGEOUS, but the writing is awful. The characters are terrible and it wastes half a season on backstories to characters we couldn't care less about, the lead character is mostly a pathetic excuse for a hero who runs away like a coward, has a legit badass fight and comes back as a better character, but we have wasted too much time on dumb opera singers and BS. I give it props for the show seemingly realizing how lame its heroes are and using that to make a logical ending for their ineptitude and reintroducing someone we can actually give a shit about though. The villains also suck, a bunch of rando nobodies who are "somehow" worse than Dracula. Logic is also a flaw, in this universe Dracula survived the end of the last show and went off with his wife yet makes no moves against these new big bad vampires. A beautifully animated and yet anemic sequel to a fantastic series. Season 2 may be able to save it.
Honestly i am the only one who liked the opera singer for me it felt as a evolution of what they did with isaac howewer i agree that rhey could have handled better the characters and overly the villain and i don't think that the show will consider them over dracula in strenght and probably dracula himself could have choose suicide after the normal death of his wife but i agree that for having a complete story we need a season 2 that explore better character like just belmont and because season one felt like the half of a true season
Honestly they should’ve saved some of the backstories for the 2nd or something just to create a tension for certain arcs that will keep you at the edge of your seat.
I tried to give this show a chance, watched until I got to episode 5 (it has 8 for those who don´t know) and dropped it, in case this video didn´t summarize it well enough (which it did), here´s what you get: *So Richter what´s your problem?* - "When I was a child a vampire murdered my mother before my eyes" *Man sorry to hear that, that must have been tough...And what about you Annette?* - "When I was a slave child, a vampire murdered my slave mother before my eyes, we both were slaves by the way and no one was going to put a slave mark on me" *But..I can see the mark on your left ha..Anyway that must have been tough...Hey Tera, what abou-* - "When I was younger, a big, evil, very dangerous vampire that happens to be the one causing all the problems now took my sister away from me and turned her into a vampire, so she sort of killed her, had to do something about it" *...Oh..But...That means you knew all along and didn´t say anyth-... I guess Maria is fine ri-* - "ReVoLuTioN GoEs BRRRRRRR" That´s all you are gonna get, and these are your main characters, wait I miss the singing guy, he sings and seems kinda nice, he sings by the way..A lot For the bad guys we have: Angry, dumb and cartoonish Church leader guy, who is also a forgemaster (I dunno), Erzsebeth Bathory which you are much better off reading her real story, gay Aztec vampire which...Is just curious as to what´s happening there and Cyberpunk vampire lady, which is just 100% loyal to big cheese vampire lady. And oh yeah, forgot about the equally cartoonishly evil slave holder vampire that lets Annette escape for no reason and decides it´s a good idea to hang around 10 minutes before sunrise to get a snack...Yep
Annette marked herself to show solidarity with the slaves marked by the masters. She goes into how, despite being lead to believe marked slaves are trouble and should be avoided, that she understood that those with the mark truly value their freedom and chose to mark herself as they had been. Kinda like when someone shaves their head when someone they love gets cancer.
Nocturne to me is the animated equivalent to the Netflix Witcher series: it's an adaptation that obviously hates the original media it's based on and the episodes give the feeling that they are focused on _correcting_ said material rather than telling an interesting story. I don't know why even bother with the Castlevania label (aside for the brand recognition) if they are gonna deviate so far from the source they might as well made their own show.
But Lords of Shadow gave an interesting alternate take on Castlevania. At least Until LoS 2 where I wasn’t sure what that was. But the first one at least was something reimagined but I could recognize it and Mirror of Fate.
I know why. Because they know there won’t be eyeballs on it unless they use an existing property with brand recognition because they’re terrible writers. They’d rather go the infamous route for clout and for the general audience to talk about their shows faster than try to polish their craft with their own original shows.
These grifting videos have gotten really old but y’all need to stop pretending that majority of the people watching Nocturne even have any idea a game exists. We liked the original castlevania series and tuned into the follow up.
I hate that they got rid of Dracula and gave him a "happy" ending , I really wanted to see how they'd portray his curse. The castle slowly taking piece of him each time he was resurrected, even though he was happier dead, until he was an empty twisted puppet of the castle itself to play the role of its "master" his soul pretty much being its hostage until Julius finally ended his suffering and freed his soul
The only good thing they can do with it is make him fight Erzebeth He's the only dude on her level and I hope they're not stupid enough to let this opportunity pass
@@arkenn3497imagine this Batory:who are you? No it doesn't matter now knee to me because i am the goddes sekmhet Dracula:and why i would kneel to a mere pagan god when even satan himself fear me? Alucard:DAD???? dracula send bathory flyng with a punch
@@massimilianoreali4398 ...No, you are technicaly satan an avatar of chaos and the anti thesis to god, ever since you betrayed Leon to become a vampire.
The choreography is mostly great. What I disliked about Nocturne's fights was the irregularity of how impactful the abilities are. Vampire Killer has immense wind up and no pay-off. Richter can sometimes instantly kill a vampire with swift strike but then makes huge waves just to push the enemies back a few steps. There are also a lot of noticeable animation errors. Some carried items like Vampire Killer itself go missing when Richter holsters it. And the sky boxes that they use for rendering the outside fights are missing textures. The resolution of 2d textures in the background is also very inconsistent with some being beautifully drawn scenes while others are low resolution upscaled textures.
That's literally the only two positives I could give the show as well. It simply looked nice that's it. Everything else was utter shite. The writing is such a complete mess for both story and characters. Also in my opinion there wasn't a single character to care about. They were either unlikeable or boring. Hell I can't even remember half the cast's names they're that forgettable.
This version's Annette is such a weird idea for me. Giving a completely different character the name of one of the game characters is almost the exact opposite thing I like about the previous series, but her case is even more confusing due to how Tera is given Game!Annette's role and design. Nocturne!Annette is a character I find interesting but it feels like she was only given that name because Richter's the main character, which I can't exactly blame someone for being annoyed at.
@@MrNoot39449 Yeah, when i say "confusing yourself with rondo of blood" i'm talking about the translation differences. when it comes to tera replacing annette, i wouldn't necessarily agree unless he's only specifically talking about the vampire thing. i do think it's weird that they turned tera from one of the rescued npcs to maria's mother but i can see his point. that being said if they literally just went with the non canon bit of annette being maria's sister in this show i think everyone would be happier tbh
I had a big problem with Annette. She was race swapped sure but, because of that she had an entirely different backstory and ability set. At this point, the only thing she had to do with her namesake was just that, her name. Contrast with Isaac from the first series, he was also race swapped but damn was he an amazing character. Personally, im still mad at the original Castlevania series for not using Grant at all but, I can respect them for leaving him out rather than do using him where he doesnt fit. Annette should have also been left behind as well but they just couldn't leave behind a potential girlboss.
isaac and her have a different backstory. the original annette whole character was being a damsel in distress. I dont see how thats better than what we got. Seems u just dont like "girlbosses" bc looking at thinhs objectively her and isaac have similar character storytelling.
@themysticwarriorgal9465 Aside from Annette's name, can you think of any other part of her character that was not changed? I can name plenty for Isaac. He was still a Devil Forger loyal to Dracula and had a history with Hector. All of those things are important for his character to still fit into the lore. The things that were changed about Isaac are his race (and character design by extension) and his religion. Isaac's race was never mentioned, and his Islamic faith was mentioned once during his conversation with the sea captain. Isaac is clearly more lore accurate than Annette. They took a very minor character and gave her a completely different backstory to keep her in the story, whereas Grant is MUCH more important to the story of Castlevania 3, and he was left out of the adaptation.
Thank you that's litteraly my point, like why can't they show some good things about christianity like they did with others belives ? They just using the same tropes over and over again
@@zonedechris4233the church entire function is always seeking out the belmonts plus the renards i believe are part of the church like belnades clan of witches are there to help the church by contract to help removing demons and monsters
what pisses me off is that there's barely anyone good that's part of the church. In the games the church was a force of good, Sypha was took in by the church and that's potential wasted on a tribe that was present for like 2 episodes ? There could've been conflicts and drama but no, church bad >:(.
@@rattled6732 there’s ppl who truly believe in it and it just became boring to see their believes with an evil eye in every fictional story . (+ I don’t see why would it be fun to hate ppl bcs of their faith )
@@rattled6732 thats why the church abandoned its people in lord of shadow and kicked everyone out so the priest could live due to the hatred of the people and for some reason wanted sanctuary from demons because the people brought the demons along with the fear from the priest
Castlevania Nocturne is what happens when the showrunners not only disregard and ignore the source material, but also the reasons why people love said source material.
Annette isn't just a raceswap though, she's a completely different character. The only thing she has in common in her gender and her name. If they're gonna use Castlevania as a source material, use it as a damn source material. It'd be fine if they made her a brand new character and kept the original, but nope. It just shows, or at least to mw anyway, that they didn't think the character could stand on their own, which she clearly can't. When watchning adaptations, I want to be able to pick the characters out that I know without then even saying their names.
It's strange because they basically kept the original Annette as well by giving Tera her bad end (or something comparable to it), which only further supports your point that rhey wanted to introduce a new character that they knew couldn't stand on her own, so they made her the new "Annette".
Pretty disappointed with Nocturne so far because I really enjoyed Rondo of Blood and Richter as a character. It's not like there wasn't stuff to adapt properly from the original game. In fact, there's should be an easier time to do it compared to Castlevania 3, since we had characters like Shaft to play as the antagonist and driving force for the story before Dracula comes into play, Maria as the heart and potential comedic relief and Richter as the badass protagonist. Instead, Nocturne just feels like they changed things just for the novelty of being different, and some of the decisions don't even make sense. Like, there are more characters from Bloodlines right now then there are from the actual game this show is adapting. It's pure insanity.
Honestly I don't even think they set up Richter's fear all that well with Alrox either. You'd think when he fights he'd be extra protective of his friends, never wanting his friends to get hurt, or him seeing flashes of Alrox in the vampires he hunts or something to imply has been more deeply wounded then just...brooding. I also found it was weird that the pacing of the show would slow down to rant about revolution all the time...and why Richter was a side character in his own show...so I checked to see who is writing. Ah yes, the story writer of the show and show runner is a card carrying socialist and political activist...hm...well I am at least convinced that this guy decided to make this show for the sake of his message first while character and plot was sidelined.
As a card-carrying socialist and part-time political activist, yeah it was too much. The themes of freedom and revolution are fine, but at least focus on the main character and how those themes relate, instead of trying to make a statement.
Constantly bringing up revolution as a good thing in the setting of the French Revolution seems like particularly bad taste as well since there really weren’t good guys in that blood bath, and in the end it achieved nothing with France going back to life as normal once jacobins were eliminated.
@@ChargeQM Freedom and Revolution for their own sake are EXTREMELLY poisonous by themselves, if you freed a bunch of resentful angry people that have been taught all their life that they have been oppresed they will ABSOLUTELY take their chance to destroy not only those who controlled them but themselves, ESPECIALLY themselves. Revolution and Freedom mean nothing whitout responsability and ethics, something this show will NEVER talk about.
Richter should have had survivors guilt and blamed himself for his mothers death while projecting that anger onto Olrox. Instead of running from him first thing he should have tried to fight out of some need for vengeance only to lose because he didn't have his magic. Then his retreat would have been easier to understand. We all know he wasn't a match for Olrox but giving up without even trying. That is NOT what Trevor or any belmont would have done.
I'm saying this as a guy who watched the Netflix show and never played a single Castlevania game: (Spoilers btw) All throughout Nocturne, vampires were praising their "messiah" and how she'd devour the light and make a vampire paradise. When it was explained that she'd drained the blood of an Egyptian diety and gained their power, my immediate reaction was, "there's no way that happened." I was convinced it was hyperbole or false history touted as propaganda. Especially since Nocturne had only shown off her subordinate's power and the results of her cruelty, not her own power. Until the point she caused an eternal solar eclipse, I wasn't convinced she was anywhere near that powerful. But when she did that, my reaction was "Wait... her exposited backstory was real?!" I doubted it up till that point because I wasn't shown anything to verify her power. Do you know why I knew Dracula was a threat in Castlevania, even without playing the games? Because I saw him level a capital city within minutes, and unleash an army of demons on the country, in the first episode of the show. I wasn't told Dracula was dangerous, I was shown it. My point is, it lights been nice to at least have a small flashback of the miss vampire messiah person draining a god of their blood or something. Something to show off their power beyond conjuring a mildly eerie magic orb.
Can we also talk about that fact that Maria speaks of famine, poor people and misery al the time and justify the revolution... while the streets are super clean, people drink beer and eat food every day. Are are we supposed to feel bad for these people? That is probably what I hate most with entertainment these days : They say stuff. Remember the ''show don't tell'' cinema ? I miss it. Here, it was just monologues all over again
She was told things by academics who wanted to usurp power and just believed it even though proof of the contrary was in front of her face (in the Castlevania Universe)
Just like the real French Revolution. Wealthy, affluent, well read, well feed merchants said it was about inequality and freedom of those in need but it reality it was to take down the upper class and substitute it.
I have a ton of issues with Netflix's initial Castlevania adaptation, but Nocturne manages to surpass all of them in severity and transcend to an entirely new level of dumpster fire. I've seen a lot of the discussion of this show revolve around issues with the characters and pacing, but the abhorrent use of setting is far less discussed. Unlike the initial adaptation, Nocturne makes the specific real-world time, place, and accompanying historical events, major elements of its plot and characters. This is a horrendous problem because it is almost immediately clear that the writers behind Nocturne know next to nothing about the 19th century France and French Revolution, nor do they understand much of the actual philosophy that governed the revolutionaries - or wider Europe - at the time. A really good example of this is found in how the writers treat Annette. Annette in Nocturne was an active and willing participant in the Saint-Domingue rebellion - a rebellion heavily characterized by targeted ethnic purges of the French Europes in the colony. While the show writers portray her actions as heroic liberation, the reality is that she was a conscious participant in the mass murder of both slave owners and innocent people alike. Far from being seen as a heroic revolutionary and source of inspiration for Maria and her little pro-revolution clique, Annette would - and should - have been seen as something of a monstrous savage. Another really good example would be the town Maria and Richter live in. Despite France being in the throes of the Revolution, their town appears picturesque and the people in it appear to want for nothing. In reality, their town should be in extremely rough shape - at best. Famine should be commonplace (or at least mentioned as a severe problem in the nation), things should be in disrepair or short supply as a civil war was going on, and random acts of political violence should be extremely commonplace. It's such a colossal waste of potential because you could have had some extremely thought-provoking and potent scenes between a naive revolutionary Maria and a wiser but equally as zealous abbot
That perspective of the Saint Domingue revolution seems to be more Euro-Centirc to me. Because these very slave owners and supposed "innocent" towns people aided in the dehumanization of Anettes people. Europeans use the story of Spartacus' slave revolt as a strong and courageous tale of overcoming your oppressor but conveniently ignore the accounts of rape and innocent people murdered during those slave revolts. Now it's all of a sudden bad when someone else does it? Either be consistent with your logic or just stop talking.
@@innitbruv-lascocomics9910 My brother in Christ, the idea that "slavery bad" is "Euro-centric". Hell, you're entire morality is, more than likely, "Euro-centric". Europeans, for the last 600+, have been a historical aberration with next to no precedent. I mean, God damn, you can't point to another empire that spent 1/3 of its entire budget for years attempting to crush slavery on an international level like the British did. I'm not saying the Saint Domingue killings were somehow uniquely evil. They're not. In fact, they're pretty bog standard from a histocial perspective. My point was that from both our modern perspective, as well as the historical French perspective the show totally ignores, it would and should be seen as horrific, and Annette would and should be considered fairly barbaric. I'm not trying to get into a morality dick-measuring contest here. People have always done shitty things to other people - the right of conquest is just the natural state of the world. What I am trying to do, however, is point out that the writers of Nocturne have zero understanding of the setting of their story and have made a concerted effort to inject their own half-baked ideology into the mix, which in turn, has been disastrous for the internal logic of the story.
Yeah, setting Nocturne in France during the French Revolution could have been a good idea... if the writers actually implemented the history into the story.
@@namishusband818 It's pretty downright insulting as a viewer. It tells you that the writers couldn't even be bothered to do ten minutes of research on their setting. They took a time period with some of the most intriguing and impactful ideological conflicts in human history and boiled it down in the most superficial way according to a near all-consuming ignorance. It's extremely telling that what should have been one of the most interesting conversations in the show made me straight up close my tab and walk away because they boiled a centuries-long argument between rationalism and faith down to - "You're dumb", "No, you're dumb". Frankly, the only thing more offensive then the total lack of historical and philosophical understanding is the awful character writing on display. Take the abbot - arguably tied for the worst character alongside Annette -, for example. Why does he try killing his supposedly much loved daughter at the start of the show? Why does such a supposedly devote man of God possess extensive demonic material, and why does he have a literal hell machine in his basement? Why can't he argue with a girl that's a fraction of his age and who has only had a fraction of the time to accumulate experience and develop a worldview? Why is he helping literal God-hating monsters who wish to destroy the church stop God-hating revolutionaries who also hate the church? The writers' answers to all of these questions is to hope you don't notice or think about them.
I wasn't expecting a one to one interpretation of Rondo of blood, but every decision made was so bad and lacking that it might as well been an AO3 Fan Fiction. I don't know what they plan to do for season 2 but seeing as to how hard they are jumping into Symphony without the proper build up and roles the characters need to be in I doubt it'll be good. Also side note the way they just back handed Juste like that by saying he was a terrible father and lost his loved ones, is such a massive character assassination I doubt they even looked him up further than a quick Wiki dive. It's all so irksome. The only thing that Juste's family would not like about him is the fact that he's a massive Home Decoration snob.
Indeed they removed Dracula forced a new character who killed Annette and took her name and gave her heritage of a slave against people with whips to force a relationship with a white man whose trained to fight with a whip effectively and built up background characters that were built up as integral to Annettes back story because to just have them die immediately little explanation or anything to show significance of the character until after they died which seemed like they were just created to have them do something else than walking and talking there apparently no Dracula but you have Olrox only used a few times but his presence is meaningful so will how season 2 actually work they already worked Alucards family problems from symphony of the night so what will be next unless Alucards only purpose is to Thanos snapped for being a vampire by Annette so they can keep building up her up because the only people with any real development is Annette and Maria's mom 1 episode for richter and juste for the heroes and for the villains there's just Olrox and the other female character and alot of named background characters who were built up like they were significant threats to have them break by a flick of the wrist
@@kei7540 but that's the exact opposite of Juste's story, taking the worst ending you can get in Harmony of Dissonance at worst he would feel guilt for having to take down his own friend but Juste would still be there for Richter because that just the guy that he is. The show made the mistake of making the Belmont's a different flavor of Trevor but that's like making all the JoJo's act like Jonathan which is against what they are about.
I bet they didn't even know Olrox was supposed to be a reference to Nosferatu hence the name and the orignal appearance he had in the games, the moment I noticed they changed him but kept the name I decided not to watch it because they clearly don't give a shit about Castlevania.
15:33 what would have been a memorable line would have been for Richter to indicate that Belmonts are sworn to “hunt the night” as a reference to Leon Belmont from Lament of Innocence
One of the key reasons why the Castelvania Netflix lost its soul was because they made sure to remove all pro-religion elements out of the series. can't have the main characters praying to God and using holy symbols now or else Twitter/X will accuse the show of being propaganda.
@@kingj9664did you watch the video or just come in defense of the show? they're extremely inconsistent with christianity. one day the only good crusader is not only in love with a vampire but sees no blasphemy in enabling the genocidal undead. or the cross is supposedly used to confuse vampires and has no holy attributes but then it works as an invincible ward for annette of course. Even the sun and enhanced vampire killer lash is rng if it works.
@@archeduardo Yeah like they did in the last show and I gotta ask why exactly do you care because you do know this isn't the only media that does this ever hurt of shin magami tense Or devil man.
People will even call you racist if you criticize this show. It's ridiculous that people can't have opinions of what they like and don't like. I have seen the original games and personally I like them a lot more.
@@KaosNova2Sometimes you just are racist You can't just throw you around the sentence. Just because you call me racist. That tells me more about you than it does me.
personally, as someone who's never played the games, my main question was/is: If the church exists in this universe, and their weapons have any effect at all against vampires, how exactly is it that *none* of the church members (or the church itself) came to _any_ vampire fight strapped proper? there is no way that the church can be so corrupt that literally every nearby parish is too foolish to move when a vampire is straight up blocking the sun and turning humans into juice packs.
@@ARStudios2000 was watching the last few episodes of nocturne with my roommate (he was watching it all the way through, i came in on the episode that introduced his grandpa) and i had no idea how many of my questions were accurate criticisms of the show vs the games. from what i could tell, just about every single choice that made me question the series was animation original. where was alucard the whole time? why was the priest stupid enough to trust vampires? why didn't the vampires just kill simon and his grandpa with no dialogue? why didn't the writers just have simon say something like "even when we lose ourselves we get back up" to answer the question of what he "forgot", why was the church so weak in this series? what the hell does slavery have to do with vampires (pretty sure they care nothing about race)? how the hell did erzebet get *goddess* blood? why wait so long to use it? why not open the portal _under_ the hell machine instead of behind it if you can choose where to place it. how did so many villains know where the heroes stay at, but none of them chose to pop in to kill them early? the list goes on. contrived writing doesn't even feel strong enough as a word for how many questions i thought up while watching the show, which is sad, because the first series didn't really give me that many problems.
@@vla1ne The show jumps the gun on so many plotlines because they kinda know it's gonna get canceled. Now in season 2 what can they do but make it worse
The whole show reeks of a writer problem. Warren Ellis, the writer of the original show, had a colorful background writing gritty comic books including many from Marvel. Clive Bradley, the writer for Nocturne, primarily wrote crime dramas. The difference really shows.
I think I noticed something what really really irks me about the show, mainly how Richter gets involved in the French revolution or how they make Maria a political activist a la Greta... except, vampire hunters are *not* supposed to get into human politics or affairs, they're not supposed to pick sides in wars, they are supposed to kill monsters and vampires for the sake of greater good! Like how Jonathan Morris and Eric Ricardo(yes, I've said Ricardo) are in WW1 but they only care about killing the night creatures so they don't sacrifice humans. In no game I played so far a vampire clan got ever even involved in whatever politics. Also how they could butcher Richter like that? He's supposed to be the pillar of purity in the series! He's a sweetroll in the games but they think it's cool to make him a dumbass in here, oh poor Richter. I'm honestly surprised that Adi shankar pulled off this steaming pile, considering how good he got it on the first series, then again, I don't know how these things go behind the scenes, maybe he's forced to do this, or who knows? maybe he's pulling a Daisuke and he's completely responsible for whatever this is... EIther way, go play fan inspired works, like Sondro Gomez, or The Transylvania Adventure, or Komajou Densetsu, hell, why not play Bloodstained, which is literally made by THE metroidvania dev!
I was invested in the first series so this was a shame. It wasn’t perfect, but it felt like it fully utilised its IP’s setting and characters in a creative and amazing way.
Reminder that the first anime had Iga holding back the guy who made the show, Nocturne dosen't have any participation of Iga, I can't say why they didn't gave Iga the team to make the anime at all, but I guess its because the creator is alligned with the agenda while Iga isn't
Iga left as the producer of Castlevania shortly before Lords of Shadow. He couldn’t agree with Warren Ellis on a final script to 3 animated movies based on CV3
I didn't skip a second of the first series. Yet I groaned and skipped a bunch of Nocturne to get to the plot. Yeah they should have just adapted the game's story. Like we really didn't need people's Vampire ocs taking the place of established characters
I won’t lie, I agree with most of the criticism for this review. However, I do feel like the scene where richter was going to finish off the last vampire would have worked really well if he finished it off like this; “There’s something you forgot about us Belmonts…” “Stupid of me, I had forgotten it too…” “That no matter what monsters lurk in the dark, we will be there….to hunt the night.” I think it would kinda fit with the whole theme of getting past his trama and the whole familial mission to hunt the night like in the games.
@@creampop9727 yeah, but they also did hunt other monsters. And they were specifically know as vampire hunters, so it wasn’t always just Dracula in particular.
@@creampop9727 yeah, which basically includes all vampires and monsters. Plus after killing Dracula, it takes him 100 years to reform so it’s not like they stopped being active or hunting.
8:59 Hell yeah. The end of their story really beings home just how bizarrely wholesome a beauty and a beast were as a couple. Also, Castlevania needed more Vlad and Lisa. Also also, I fully undersyand why Vlad would murder humanity in retaliation for some knobs killing Lisa. Just... the writers managed to compress so much into like 15 minutes of interaction and I'm not sure how.
The night creatures thing is they pull a soul from hell and place it into a body, it's supposed to be a random soul. Which means my man hit the one in several billion chance to be resurrected in his own body.
quick note about the race swaps, they made a lot of the vampires black, which is no biggie on itself, the problem comes when you think about it meta, they made the people who are persued with whips black, which would be a great grim joke if it was one, but it is not
@@rootfish2671Race swaps can work, Isaac is proof of it. There are plenty of other examples, Red in Shawshank redemption(played by Morgan freeman) is Irish in the books. Nick fury, James Gordon in the new Batman. A-Train. And there are a few other examples. And these are just the ones where a white guy is turned black.
The previous Castlevania adaptation was shit past the first season too. All of its problems are simply more obvious in Nocturne because people let it get away with them in the first place rather than calling it out for being shit.
lmfao glad someone said it, genuinely confused how so many people criticise nocturne for pacing issues, lame quips and all that when the OG series had all of these flaws too, and people still say "yeah I liked the original series but nocturne? horrible"
I definitely agree the pacing is a major issue. The first 3 episodes are horrible about it, with 3 being the worst by far, since they set up the main plot at the start of 1 but then nothing really progresses until 4. I honestly still don't get why they brought in characters from the Caribbean, and it feel like Olrox being Aztec was just something they did to justify that. Setting it in France also is still an odd choice, given how all the main cast has English names besides Annette, and the setting of the French Revolution was mostly in the background. 10:14 I actually would argue Annette is a pretty terrible person, given how she burned a city to the ground, slaughtering every citizen she saw, instead of taking the fight to the actual individuals who had people in chains. If the opera scene is anything to go by, there were definitely other "born-free" people like Edouard, women and children who had no influence in the evils going on, and a ton of non-vampires. Also, Maria being so extremely anti-church is a bit much. I get her being mad with the Abbot, for several reasons, but for her to say "All of your churches will be burned to the ground" is way too far. Her grudge is against 1 guy and his followers, so her expanding that to the entire religion is literally extremism. 11:13 I think Richter's one-liner could have worked if it was "I was going to say something clever... but you aren't worth it" or "I'll save it for someone else", something to imply that the guy he's fighting is nothing and he's already thinking about his fight with a bigger foe (like Olrox). But the way they subverted it just kills most of the momentum in the scene. Something not mentioned in this review is the voice acting. Most of the characters are fine, but the VA work for Maria and Richter was pretty rough in the first half. They sounded like they had no direction or practice before recording, with Richter's sounding like he had a head cold and Maria's not able to project her voice. They got better as the show went on, and were clearly more comfortable in their roles by the end, but I did find myself jumping between dubs for the first 2 episodes because of how it sounded.
The over-reliance on "Super cool" F-bombs, bizarre happenstances that just kept occurring, and doing Juste absolutely dirty this season pulled me out of the picture way too often to care by the end. I kept getting semi-hyped for stuff just to be let down, or confused on the approaches taken. I'm also firmly in the camp that Richter should have just said ANYTHING meaningful when he got his magic back. What a let-down for writing and character potential. Stake through my heart.
As an african person i hate the race swap thing, the show didn't become about vampires and humans anymore it became about slavery and am sick of being reminded of it, I just wanted to see a good story about the vampires and humans not a history lesson about my people and being reminded each episode that we we're slaves
I'm sorry, didn't you know? Black people aren't allowed to have original characters, you can only have our sloppy seconds. I mean, for awhile you can play with your black Annette, but once the paint peels off you have to return it to its original owner. But don't worry, this is the least racist way to do things, I'm sure, and for those few sweet seconds you had it you surely felt the greatest, surface level, representation ever! And that makes it all so worth it, you know?
Honestly, it feels like about 80% of black media puts a good amount of focus on racism and slavery. I think the best example of a character's race being changed would be The Wiz, because it wasn't lazy about the race-changing and did more than just charge the characters' skin color.
@@SaiyanGamer95 Yeah, and there are a lot of good black characters in comics and movies that are not used, characters like Miles Spiderman, blade, spawn John Green Lantern and so many more
@@kingj9664 i had hope but then season and nocturne happened so definitely a mixed bag and the showrunner is the guy who apparently got apu removed from the simpsons so fingers crossed
Oh, and let's not forget, how lame Olrox's gay romance was introduced. "You know my name, tell me yours." "Nope, let's just f@ck" The christian fanatic with no apparent reason to sleep with a man, let alone a vampire (remember, bible forbids it): "We'll bang, okay?"
Hilariously enough, I wouldn't have minded Nocturne if it weren't for Annette. She just feels kind of...inserted??? As in that she's not really meant to be there. YET, at the same time, it's almost as if the show constantly tries to push her over Richter, making her seem like the main character. Like buddy, the story is designed around vampires and belmonts, not vampires and an angry girl that shoots metal and thinks she's important.
When I first watched the series I assumed the lack of Erzabeth focus was signifying that she was a false antagonist and that Olrox would be backstabbing her to become some overlord vampire. So I was dissapointed that Olrox ended up being not the main antagonist after the opening set him up. I like to joke "the subversion is there is no subversion!"
The reason why original Netflixvania is so good for me because the first and second season isnt a loose adaptation but actually adapting the game Lore with adding new thing
For me, this was a dumpster fire. Me and a group of friends were watching the first episode and we just couldn't bear to watch more. I have a lot of negative things to say about the show. The story should've been more clear this time around, as Richter's era is more fleshed out in terms of lore than in Series 1. But they decided to tie it to the French Revolution. Which isn't a terrible idea, but how they executed it was a bit shoe-horned for my liking. Richter himself is a little bitch. I get that they wanted to build Richter to his Rondo of Blood counterpart, but I'm not gonna lie, I'm starting to hate this trope if I'm going to be honest. Is it really that bad for a Beast to be a Beast every now and then? Must every adaptation of a story have to have the same trope of "Hero is actually a little baby man, and has to fight trauma to become the man we see today"? I came here to see Richter's story unfold in animated form, and I felt swindled. And then there's the supporting cast. Juste was just “there” for like 10 minutes. The pope, again, is another villain. The revolutionaries are cannon-fodder, and Maria is some know-it-all who treats Richter with such little respect. I assume that they try to do something similar with Sypha, but here, she comes off as bratty and more of a Bossgirl. Speaking of “Bossgirl”. Annette... What the FUCK do I say about her? Ok Netflix, you want Annette to have more backstory? Fine. You want Annette to have powers herself? Cool. You even want Annette to be more active in the story in general? I’m down. But the way you guys did it was so spiteful. This Annette is nowhere close to what Annette originally was in the game(s). You turned a kind and sincere woman into another token boss-girl. And I’ll bet you all the money in the universe that the reason why they made such a total shift in design change, is so that they can shield themselves of any criticism by labeling it “Racist”. This show hates being what it’s trying to adapt. By not only the story itself, but also the creators themselves. I did not enjoy my time watching this. That being said, I do enjoy your take on it. It really does feel like you try to dissect with what you got given to you. It’s a refreshing take.
I agree about the "building up a character from nothing" trope. Character development is great, but the character arc doesn't have to go from 'pathetic weenie' to 'badass'; it can go from 'normal dude' to 'badass' and work just as well, if not better. While I do feel like it's a little overblown that some people are calling the show woke, the fact that they started Richter off in the 'pathetic weenie' tier and yet almost NEVER show any of the female characters in need of help...well, what else do you call that if not woke? Strong men and needy women are Kryptonite to those who write for the so-called "Modern Audience" that I'm still not convinced even exists.
Annette was confidently the worst part of the season for me, which sucks because her character had tremendous potential with the premise of her character. Instead of having her motivation for coming to fight the vampires in Europe be ending ALL slavery in the world, which would have fit her character given her background, but to specifically kill one vampire and she happened to get roped into fighting the others. There was a lot of potential to expand on her past and use it as a conduit for her trying to free the rest of the world from any kind of slavery. Additionally, her dialogue is so chaotic, one minute shes criticizing the rest of the team for being immature and unable to act but her emotions are what got her friend killed and she spends as much time crying as anybody else if not more in the season. It feels like the writers tried to make her unlikable, but in addition somehow want to make her the main romantic interest? Like, what could Richter POSSIBLY like about her? There should be zero reason for him to have any interest in her.
I don’t think the point of Juste’s inclusion was to teach Richter at all, so of course he isn’t much of a mentor. His purpose was for Richter to see the result of giving in to fear and trauma, that giving up results in no happier outcome. Richter’s entire awakening happens in part because he doesn’t want to be like Juste.
Honestly he did us a favor with that. Now anyone that missed out or avoided Nocturne because they weren't sure if they'd like it doesn't need to watch the show to understand how bad it is.
The Netflix logo over Dracula at the end had me absolutely in stitches. 😂 thank you Kamen, I needed that. All the memes in this video were great and a good video too!
I like the show. Like I truly enjoyed it. But I also have gripes. For one the pacing is too fast. They turned Edouard too quickly. We didn’t even get to know the guy. The pacing is way too quick for what they were trying to achieve. The death of Annette’s former master was satisfying but too early. They really tried to sneak that in. I also think Richter getting his magic back should have been in a much more meaningful fight. Especially since it currently wont do much against Sehkmet. I just hope we get more character development and slightly slower pacing in season 2.
Indeed. Richter should have gotten to confront his ptsd with Olrox and beat the shit out of him. Instead all he thinks about are his friends with the advice of Juste and that's enough for him to suddenly become the Avatar. It's a very good action scene but very underwhelming in terms of writing since all he kills are just 3 no name vampires.
When I saw that they race-swapped Annette I already knew that she would be insufferable. Western writers don't have a good track record writing female characters, much less protagonists or deutergonists. Annette in Nocturne is just Korra at her most insufferable moments (so basically Season 1-2 of LoK). Funny enough tha tKorra got a lot of bashing when it aired while Castlevania has very similar problems in terms of character writing, pacing, world building and themes, not to mention it has barely anything to do with the Castlevania games.
Honestly if they would have switched her and Tera's names there wouldn't have been any issue :/ Netflix!Tera is basically like the Game Annette (being close to Maria and Richter, related to Maria, gets turned into a vampire, has blonde hair and a green dress) And Netflix!Annette could have been called "Tera" and it would actually work with her earth-based powers in this incarnation.
When the vampire prophet blocked out the sun, you can see it is an eclipse where the edges of the sun can get around. That means the dangerous UV rays are still getting through (hence why you never look at an eclipse), so even though it is dark the dangerous rays are still getting through to burn all the vampires.
We are slowly regressing towards 1993 Mario Movie levels of adaptation creators' respect towards the source material of video games. If 1993 Mario is a 5% and 2023 Mario is a 95%, I think we just passed 50% in the wrong direction. The peak didn't last long, lol
I didn't like that Annette and Richter suddenly crushed on each other. There is no romantic chemistry between them and calls him an idiot coward for wanting a plan and then a coward again for reacting to his PTSD and running away. Then, the moment he returns home and apologizes, she has a crush on him? There's also the fact that I thought he and Maria were already dating. (To be fair as far as I knew, I knew nothing about the characters from the game.) So, when I learned that they were cousins, when his grandpa showed up, I was like; "Huh? Really? Well, the writers didn't make that relationship feel clear in my opinion." Reasons why I was shipping him and Maria until his grandpa showed up: 1) Maybe I missed something in the first episode when he was being sent to France at ten years old. But when we are first introduced to Maria, Richter is kind of observing her from afar, smiling at her. Then when they're are leaving, and see a bar, Maria tells him, "Get a drink if you want" and he says, "Your mom is cooking dinner." Not, "Aunt Tera, or auntie is cooking." Then there's the joke he makes to Maria that killing vampires is the "Most fun with your clothes on." Like, I'm sorry, who say crap like that to their cousin?
"the stories have always been bad" may be one of the most annoying arguments I've seen in support of New Thing across all media that I've ever seen. "You don't like New Thing? Well Thing was always bad, therefore you are not allowed to hate it now if you liked it then lol"
that clip of richter with the quote is one of the things I dislike about modern writing motherfuckers cant have fun with their writing. it's ok to be silly from time to time you know.
And the race swapped character gets all the setup and development while everyone just exists apparently theres a French revolution and its immediately forgotten she knows night creatures and was apparently enslaved by vampires but doesn't know dracula but is the strongest character until the last few episodes its not shes bad its just 3 characters have any development which ritcher doesn't really get and thats a problem
@@animezilla4486 oh I'm sure it was decent it's just a actual gripe/peeve of mine because it feels like such a unnecessary change and also like it's by committee these days and I honestly wanted to watch it but soon as I saw that just made me wanna wretch because it happens far too often these days for the sake of some quota system.
The fact they could have called this show Vampire the Masquerade and making the main antagonist a ministry methuselah shows how little this had to do with Castlevania at all. Heck, a lot of the vampires in tihs series could belong to one of the thirteen clans.
The biggest problem I had with this series is the same problem I had with the original castlevania anime, which is that I don’t think either series integrate the historic settings into castlevania’s own world particularly well. Leaving aside the question of why ordinary people don’t have a greater knowledge of vampires and magic existing in their world (as neither vampires or vampire hunter seem to make any effort to hide the fallout of their activities), I always thought the original anime was at its best when it showed its characters coming into conflict with real world organisations like the church and the various European and North African kingdoms the forge master character had to travel through to reach Carmilla’s castle. Likewise in this series we’re told that vampire have something of an uneasy alliance with Europes royal families, which are now under threat from revolutionaries, but we don’t see more of this. It would have been nice to actually see the vampire’s meeting with these royalists, so we can see what both sides got out of this relationship, and perhaps just how uneasy and prone to fracture this alliance was. (You think it would be in the vampires interests to stir up war and strife between humans, as it would make it easier for them to take victims of the streets without anyone investigating all the blood sucked corpses turning up) Instead the vampires only contact with real world human political power was their deal with what appeared to be one fringe element of the church. Other than that, I thought the characters were OK but nothing special. I liked the vampire queen, though at the moment I think her background and motivations have yet to be fully explored. Overall I thought the hero’s relied to much on magic, and would have preferred to see a greater emphasis on specially crafted weapons and technology (wielded just by normal well trained but still mortal humans) specifically designed to fight vampires and worse.
It's not even Bloodlines plotline, we fans of the original game series need to stop and cope with the fact this is not an adaptation, this is another thing altogether. This is not Rondo, this isnt leading to Rondo, Sotn or anything. And of course, its' not Bloodlines either. This is, as someone said, some sort of fan fiction or a kind of alternate universe where there's some name dropping for the sake of it.
Honestly comparing Belmonts to Joestars, Richter comes across more like Johnathan. I can't think of any Belmont being like Joseph, maybe Trevor, but only a bit, and that's based more off the show if anything.
@@Sir_Bone-Head good point he’s mainly like like part 3 jotaro though the character he reminds me of the most is Gyro Zepeli . Dang will say this I am excited as hell for SBR to come out I haven’t heard any news but I’m hoping they do it right same for the upcoming Fist of the North Star Adaptation, we need more classic manly men style anime nowadays.
Is it just me, or they made an excelent job at expanding (the totally not annete) annete backstory, specially her link to her people's beliefs and how it developed her powers, but at the same time reduced the main conflict of the season to "church bad, they work with vampires"
As a Romanian born in the Wallachia region of Romania, I'm actually kinda glad they moved the scene to France. If you can't help yourself from being Westarded then at least be westarded in the actual West.
The fact that the main cast sneaks to the vampires and crouch while blantantly visible from a few yards away showed me how brain dead their tactical skills were.
They invaded at night too, y'know when vampires go outside??? lol
don't forget the continuity error with the mom. The mom reacts to a male character being dead and when the fight starts she isn't there anymore.
@@pixy3586 With their only path of escape being slow-ass earth bending a bridge.
It's like the writers forgot that vampires have amazing eyesight and hearing.
@@Z-Man7 Comes up a lot. Annoyed me so much.
Part of the issues I have is how everyone treated Richter like he was super incompetent and yet he was the one making plans and killing monsters. Somehow HE'S the incompetent one though. If anything, the girls who were calling him the stupid one were more rash and idiotic, just wanting to rush in! There's even a whole scene where Annette connects with her family spiritually or something and they literally call her out on her bullshit when she got pissed Richter ran. SHE RAN
Because that's his role as the white man in the group, to be put down by everyone else regardless of his efficiency.
@@mupty modern shows these days teaches you to be racist to white men than any other race. 😆
@@mupty
I know to some you sound crazy but I just watched to the part where he gets his powers and holy shit. Annette gets babied so much and can do no wrong. Idk what the writer were smoking but they should never cook with someones IP ever again. I dont remember Castlevania having so much slavery is bad stuff in it at all. Its actually insane how much,idk if symbolism is the right word, but how much stuff about slavery there is. Its literally everywhere in every episode. I dont mind having political commentary about things but there is so much and they bash you over the head so much its actually crazy.
I feel the writing was whats the worst thing about this. I feel like they took apart Castlevania and placed all this messaging first and foremost and then built the Castlevania around it IF it could fit in. From making Richter a little bish to him getting made fun of all the time to the whip seemingly not doing anything at times? Seriosuly, there was a scene where he whips like 4 or 5 vamps and they just fell back like they got blown back by air, wtf is the point of the whip?
The part that got me to stop watching was when he got his powers. Why have juste there at all? All he did was shit all over how evil will win, and then the oh I was gonna say something witty but fuck it. Seriously, can anyone write? Like i feel they put that in because they literally cant come up with something to save their lives. They could have easily made Juste say something like "Evil wins it always wins... But that is why we fight... when evil reigns we will be there... we exist.. to hunt the night...." and then in the same vein Richters line instead of the witty shite could have been " I exist to hunt the night" or something like that. I fail to understand these people get paid for this kind of lazy writing and that some people saw this and said "oh yeah fuck it is fire"
Because it is based on real life
@@martiano13bros This can be chalked up to warren elis being fired
Nocturne feels like it needed 3 more extra epsiodes in it. It felt like it was moving a mile minutes
No I disagreed the story was just all over the place look at the Annette story we have an entire flashback episode the villain Runaway and then she met him by accident in the middle of the street and killed him this is not how you write story
8 episodes was not enough but then again the plot was just poorly planned out, they could've saved some of that stuff for s2 or smth
I agree wholeheartedly.
I heard from another comment that they weren't sure if they would be renewed for a second season so they rushed the first one and the final product suffered as a result.
They didn't want to be cut for another season of big mouth.
@@1Dark.Paradise.Lost1 I did a comparison recently. The difference between this and the length of season 2 and 1 of the first show was 4 episodes. 4 episodes used to define the main villain and the characters. Would have been very helpful
I do agree with this! But their saving this all for season 2.
Honestly it would’ve been nice if they actually had few episodes were there getting to know one another before one of them becomes a night creature so I can feel sorry for him.🐱
Who needs back story of an apparent villain thats integral to the character they forced into and told was a major problem and kept being brought up only for her to breath on him to fade away making background characters named characters to just remove space is bad writing and bad story telling just make to make the characters do more than just walk
They did have an episode showcasing Eduard's back story with Annette. The problem was that they showed it after he died, so the impact of his death was less powerful.
The larger problem is the series' main villain Erzsebet Bathory having little backstory outside of hushed whispers from the heroes and the hyped up exposition from her lackies like Drolta. Bathory needs more story to make her a compelling villain like Carmilla in the first series.
Honestly I don’t need constant attachment to characters. I don’t need to feel something every time a main or side character dies or something.
I also don’t need long drawn out character journeys to hit certain beats.
I thought Ricthor and Maria were fine but IMO Olrox and Annette were the standouts.
I liked the story and the villain Drolta quite a bit. And the idea of a vampire drinking the blood of an Egyptian God and then bringing that god into existence was a pretty cool setup and end goal.
I’m looking forward to a season 2.
That seems more of a production problem than a story problem
Or they could've just told a castlevania story and avoid this plot entirely.
The plot recycles itself at least 3 times in the span of what? 6 episodes?
Richter's mom sacrifices herself to save him
Annette's mom sacrifices herself to save her
Maria's mom sacrifices herself to save her
Like fucks sake, we get it. Killing moms is a cheap way to give your characters motivation, but if you do this a fourth time I'm going to flip
It's crazy tgey gave all 3 main characters the same character arcs and story beats. Just pure lazy writing
Even crazier when you realize what happened to Alucard's mom.
@@RecoveringLoLAddict at least a vampire didn't kill her
@@RecoveringLoLAddictHe was raised by his father though. The others were not
Don't forget "Hey Richter, look at me, I'm your grandpa and look like in the games, just bearded. Why am I here? I don't actually know!"
The fight scene where he rediscovers magic should have been: "There's something you forgot about Belmonts; we kill vampires!"
Have it be a nice call back to an episode ago before he ran away, and a nice, recurring line of the series itself.
ngl, thats a great line
He should have just been like "There's something you forgot about Belmonts - we hunt the night!", briding Leon to this.
@@nbHawkeye That would have required the writers to actually give a damn about the source material.
@@RobBlu-d6u I know, that would've still been awesome. Too bad they don't really care.
“What version of Joseph Joestar is like Richter?”
(Sees Olrox)
Richter: *FEET DON’T FAIL ME NOW!*
one was by choice (Joseph)
the other was by Trauma(Richter)
huge difference
@@Doralga Moreover, Richter even manages to somewhat deal with that trauma firstly by attacking Olrox when he comes to make a bargain, and even cooperating with him against the antagonist. This speaks volumes.
@@szklanylabirynt151yeah.
😂😂😂😂 facts
@@szklanylabirynt151 that was the second time he met him right you know the famous line just read the fucking book-Olrox
My issue with Annette was that she came across as fairly unlikable at times. Such as when she dismisses the difficulties of Richter's traumatic past and loss of magic.
She is literally a mouth piece for white guilt to sell white guilt to white people. If you are not white, her scenes are obnoxious, repetitive, preachy and irritating. It's doubly funny if you know anything about the Haitian rebellion and their ethnic cleansing of whites and mixed people on their half of the island
Agreed. She was supposed to be someone who understood pain and then got super pissed because he ran from the ONE thing that scares him. I literally rolled my eyes at her during those parts lol other than that - she’s a pretty okay character. I’m hoping for more development.
The whole relationship with Richter feels forced, other than that her powers are cool.
Wasn’t literally her whole arc about learning not to dismiss other peoples pain.
How dare she not be a mind reader and know everything about a topic he refused to speak about before hand
24:35 The issue with night creatures goes much deeper than that. In the first series, night creatures are established to be only loyal to their creator/summoner, to the point where the vampires had to put a collar on the forgers, because otherwise the forgers might rebel and take all the night creature servants with them. But now they're just.... not?
ive seen people claim that in Nocturne night creatures have free will because they were made using NightCreature.exe instead of the human touch of a forgemaster. its not a bad explanation but it shouldve been discussed in the show instead of on twitter
@@taddad2641 Is that clearly stated in the show or is that you doing the writers work for them?
@@taddad2641 Source: Your ass.
clearly the former lol, good headcanon though@@ddandymann
@@seanmundyphotoIt isn't headcanon, is obvious, Remember the fly creature that was able to speak in the first show? It wasn't created in its own body, Isaac used some else's body to create it (Like all the others he and Hector made) meanwhile in Nocturne the father used the creatures own bodies to create them and so they still have their memories, this happened because he isn't a true forgemaster, that's the reason.
Is Nocturne a perfect series? No, not even close but some things do make sense and this thing about the Night Creatures does it, it was never told to our faces because there was no need for them to do it, since is so obvious.
It is crazy that Belmont doesn't know what a night creature is but Annette she know them but she doesn't know Dracula who wrote this garbage
A character will always be as smart as the writer. So yeah, don't count too much on the writer's intelligence.
she spent her entire life as a slave in the carribean and literally just got off a ship to Europe. Where could she have reasonably heard of Dracula?
@@juannaym8488 Richter, whose family fought vampires and other creatures of the night and have records of every single monster they've ever fought, and yet he doesn't know what a night creature is.
It's not an excuse when since Richter's mom is an active Belmont who should know their history and has likely taught Richter everything.
The same could be said to Annette, unless she encountered a vampire who has forgemaster like Dracula did, she shouldn't know what a night creature is if someone like Richter, whose family hunts every monster for a living, doesn't know.
@@bunnyleaningonasquishedbun5542 yeah it's dumb that Richter didn't know but that doesn't answer how a random girl from the Caribbean can know who Dracula is
The timeframe is off a world that was a lot less connected than modern times, and even today, in more cut off parts of the world, people won't know about important historic figures. Ask some guy from the Mongolian steppe who Hitler was. Chances are he won't know
I don’t think its that much of a stretch to assume something akin to forgemasters exist outside of just europe isaac being an example and why would colonizers go out of their way to teach locals and especially slaves about a vampire from several centuries ago forgemasters are specifically humans thats why isaac hector and the abbot aren’t turned into vampires as for richter not knowing belmonts are mostly vampire killers forgemasters arent vampires and the only mentor he had was his mother who was killed when he was like 10 so maybe it was never mentioned to him but i think it was likely done to inform people who are not familiar with the previous show even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense richter wouldn’t know
Honestly, one big problem with Nocturne comes from the original show because they wrote themselves into a corner with Dracula's ending. They can't rely on Dracula this time. So they are pulling from vampires throughout history and other games in the timeline. Elisabeth has great potential as a villain, she was the leading lady Castlevania Bloodlines using the current world war to resurrect Dracula. But now it just feels kinda hollow. With how the story they are telling now is it seems like they wanna combine Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night but not build into it. What is their pay off gonna be in the end? They showed off Alucard way too early. Annette is trying to fill in Older Maria's role i guess? It is just kind of a mess.
I think that they should have ignored the first series as it was garbage.
Without Dracula existing in some form of course its hollow thats what drives the belmonts in the first place they are born when Dracula is resurrecting thats why the vampire killer brings the next belmont memories of how to kill vampires and belmonts are stronger than the previous belmonts canonically Without Dracula resurrecting their isnt a need for belmonts or Alucard for that matter both only help the church when Dracula is resurrecting or someone is trying to prepare a vessel like shonoa and Graham in aura of sorrow without Dracula Alucard isnt necessary and neither are belmonts unless something is far stronger like richter being controlled at full strength
Yea it pretty much tramples with the Belmonts’ motives going way back from Leon’s time of preventing anyone from suffering the fate that his fiancée experienced and hunting down Night Creatures and Vampires.
They could've had Orlox and/or Galamoth as the main villain(s), to focus on villains from the RoB/SotN era.
It feels weird that Dracula is not the main villain for Nocturne. It's a tradition that he is almost always the final boss in every game.
The main problem is all the setup is to setup for Annette with very little after thought and an episode for ritcher its like it was supposed to be a movie and were forced to make a series
Indeed
So another main character taking the backseat in his own show to prop up a storng womyn character as the real protagonist
loll@@MrNoot39449
@@MrNoot39449 Yup, the real protagonists are Annette, Mara and Alucard. Richter is just there.
Yeah, I couldn’t get into Nocturne like I did in the previous series. It honestly felt most of the problems that were in that series got amplified in Nocturne, like the F-bombs and weird narrative choices. It’s honestly telling that when you ask some people what the best parts in Nocturne were, they’d ofter say “When Alucard showed up in the end” or “Juste showing up”, instead of anything relating to the new characters. And I say this as someone who isn’t really into Castlevania stuff.
You're insane as if nobody's praising the Richter anime power up scene or his final fight with Drolta. This is a wild reach
I enjoyed Nocturne a lot, and I remember talking to my friends about it. When asked to give my review of the series, I had trouble trying to give the plot of the series other than "they're off to fight for freedom in France". It felt like:
- Ep 1 is the summary of the series
- Ep 1-3, 7-8 is the Story
- Ep 4-6 is Filler
This is without saying how due to the pacing, you can say it's a whole lot of something doing nothing in the episodes that are Story Content.
I had to rely on things outside the story to talk about it, when these are often the "Toppings on a Dessert" in reviewing.
and the best part is that Alucard showed up in the end with an Anime art style that's a bit leaning towards the Soma Cruz games. 🤣
I would say the best part of Nocturne was Olrox, the idea of an Aztec vampire is cool, I like his impact on Richter's childhood, and he works well as an independent force that's not necessarily allied with our protagonist nor antagonist team.
My one nitpick is the character has so little in common with either the character in the games or Count Orlok from Nosferatu, that the character could have easily had his own name. Heck considering we are incorporating other religions into the world building one could have easily made the character Quetzalcoatl, he already had a serpent form that resembles the blood consuming Aztec god, so why not just go all out?
While I agree this show was nothing compared to the previous but f-bombs? Jesus Christ you guys need to watch Spartacus if a few fucks are so offensive
Dang. If swearing made people mature then Travis Touchdown is one the most mature video game characters ever!
The funny part about this comment is that later on in the NMH series Travis gets more mature.
If you want immaturity from swearing but look no further than the failed DmC.
“I was gonna say something cutting and brutal but I couldn’t come up with anything” is how I felt seeing that scene
Also what’s up with everyone and their mothers being magicians?
And also dying
Castlevania Nocturne just feels like fanfiction to me at the end of the day. Doesn’t feel like it it really cares about the source material like the first series. It’s just… playing with it
That makes no sense
The Fuck are you talking about?!
You can say the same for the original Castlevania series. This criticism is weak, as everyone throws it arrownd when it comes to reboots and adaptations and it has nothing to do with the actual quality of the product.
@@manolgeorgiev9664 That's not true at all. Reboots and adaptions always have the same constraints but the difference between respecting the source material , building upon it and this thing we got is obvious. The writing is all over the place and characters all suffer because of it , it's not because it's an adaptation
@@A.Froster What I'm saying is, the quality of the product has nothing to do with how faithful it is to the source material. You said it yourself, it's issues with the writing and characterization. My issue is that people throw arrownd the "It feels like a fan fiction" and "It's not true to the source material" as criticisms, when they are basically worthless. You don't need to be faithful to the source material to make a good show and the original Castlevania series proves this. To me it seems like people who throw this criticism arrownd don't really understand why a piece of art is good or bad.
Nocturne is such a mixed bag. the animation is GORGEOUS, but the writing is awful. The characters are terrible and it wastes half a season on backstories to characters we couldn't care less about, the lead character is mostly a pathetic excuse for a hero who runs away like a coward, has a legit badass fight and comes back as a better character, but we have wasted too much time on dumb opera singers and BS. I give it props for the show seemingly realizing how lame its heroes are and using that to make a logical ending for their ineptitude and reintroducing someone we can actually give a shit about though. The villains also suck, a bunch of rando nobodies who are "somehow" worse than Dracula. Logic is also a flaw, in this universe Dracula survived the end of the last show and went off with his wife yet makes no moves against these new big bad vampires. A beautifully animated and yet anemic sequel to a fantastic series. Season 2 may be able to save it.
Honestly i am the only one who liked the opera singer for me it felt as a evolution of what they did with isaac howewer i agree that rhey could have handled better the characters and overly the villain and i don't think that the show will consider them over dracula in strenght and probably dracula himself could have choose suicide after the normal death of his wife but i agree that for having a complete story we need a season 2 that explore better character like just belmont and because season one felt like the half of a true season
Honestly they should’ve saved some of the backstories for the 2nd or something just to create a tension for certain arcs that will keep you at the edge of your seat.
I tried to give this show a chance, watched until I got to episode 5 (it has 8 for those who don´t know) and dropped it, in case this video didn´t summarize it well enough (which it did), here´s what you get:
*So Richter what´s your problem?*
- "When I was a child a vampire murdered my mother before my eyes"
*Man sorry to hear that, that must have been tough...And what about you Annette?*
- "When I was a slave child, a vampire murdered my slave mother before my eyes, we both were slaves by the way and no one was going to put a slave mark on me"
*But..I can see the mark on your left ha..Anyway that must have been tough...Hey Tera, what abou-*
- "When I was younger, a big, evil, very dangerous vampire that happens to be the one causing all the problems now took my sister away from me and turned her into a vampire, so she sort of killed her, had to do something about it"
*...Oh..But...That means you knew all along and didn´t say anyth-... I guess Maria is fine ri-*
- "ReVoLuTioN GoEs BRRRRRRR"
That´s all you are gonna get, and these are your main characters, wait I miss the singing guy, he sings and seems kinda nice, he sings by the way..A lot
For the bad guys we have: Angry, dumb and cartoonish Church leader guy, who is also a forgemaster (I dunno), Erzsebeth Bathory which you are much better off reading her real story, gay Aztec vampire which...Is just curious as to what´s happening there and Cyberpunk vampire lady, which is just 100% loyal to big cheese vampire lady. And oh yeah, forgot about the equally cartoonishly evil slave holder vampire that lets Annette escape for no reason and decides it´s a good idea to hang around 10 minutes before sunrise to get a snack...Yep
Annette marked herself to show solidarity with the slaves marked by the masters. She goes into how, despite being lead to believe marked slaves are trouble and should be avoided, that she understood that those with the mark truly value their freedom and chose to mark herself as they had been. Kinda like when someone shaves their head when someone they love gets cancer.
But Tera shared everything she knew when she discovered that the vampire messiah was Erzbeth
One can be a compelling character without the need for a tragic backstory, right? right?!
Having all 3 of your main cast have the same backstory is lazy writing
watch everything it all ties together
Sad when even Van Helsing movie from 2004 feels more true to Castlevania than the Netflix shows.
That movie was very good in hindsight
@@mrm0nty550We need an expanded Van Helsing series tbh.
Nocturne to me is the animated equivalent to the Netflix Witcher series: it's an adaptation that obviously hates the original media it's based on and the episodes give the feeling that they are focused on _correcting_ said material rather than telling an interesting story.
I don't know why even bother with the Castlevania label (aside for the brand recognition) if they are gonna deviate so far from the source they might as well made their own show.
But Lords of Shadow gave an interesting alternate take on Castlevania. At least Until LoS 2 where I wasn’t sure what that was. But the first one at least was something reimagined but I could recognize it and Mirror of Fate.
@@AdrianFahrenheitTepes I never dissed Lords of Shadows...
I know why. Because they know there won’t be eyeballs on it unless they use an existing property with brand recognition because they’re terrible writers. They’d rather go the infamous route for clout and for the general audience to talk about their shows faster than try to polish their craft with their own original shows.
@@Xfushion2 Sadly I heard Castlevania fans disliked Lords of Shadow, but at the same time it was the best selling Castlevania game.
These grifting videos have gotten really old but y’all need to stop pretending that majority of the people watching Nocturne even have any idea a game exists. We liked the original castlevania series and tuned into the follow up.
Reminder that the only showrunner left is the guy responsible for kicking Apu off The Simpsons.
You’re confusing Adi Shankar for Hari Kondabolou
@@misterzygarde6431Adi did it.
@@ghostfear2011 source?
Makes sense.
@@ghostfear2011Nah, he's right. Adi was not the one who did that. It was all Hari.
I was obsessed with the Castlevania games in my teens. So I could tell from the trailer that I wasn't the audience they wanted.
Same here. And I laugh at the face of whoever says there wasn't any story in the games.
@Mana7Origin Once I could recite the entire timeline nearly perfect. ☹️
@@Mana7OriginWell walls of text aren’t story to a lot of people today.
@AdrianFahrenheitTepes Yeah, but it's not like there wasn't anything to go by. You can expand on something without tearing it to pieces.
@@AdrianFahrenheitTepes It's because most people can't read now-a-days. They have to audio-book everything because they don't know how to spell.
Man Simon dodged a bullet with them skipping to Ritcher.
He's too gigachad for netflix.
Leon , Christopher and Juste also dodged the bullet .
@@Vrabsher_-Supreme_Perhinther-not Juste, he was in the show.
@@qq5847 And messed with his story, as per usual
@@qq5847Juste had like about 2 or 3 scenes of screen time which don't ruin his character , judging by clips I saw .
I hate that they got rid of Dracula and gave him a "happy" ending , I really wanted to see how they'd portray his curse. The castle slowly taking piece of him each time he was resurrected, even though he was happier dead, until he was an empty twisted puppet of the castle itself to play the role of its "master" his soul pretty much being its hostage until Julius finally ended his suffering and freed his soul
The only good thing they can do with it is make him fight Erzebeth
He's the only dude on her level and I hope they're not stupid enough to let this opportunity pass
@@arkenn3497imagine this
Batory:who are you? No it doesn't matter now knee to me because i am the goddes sekmhet
Dracula:and why i would kneel to a mere pagan god when even satan himself fear me?
Alucard:DAD????
dracula send bathory flyng with a punch
@@massimilianoreali4398
...No, you are technicaly satan an avatar of chaos and the anti thesis to god, ever since you betrayed Leon to become a vampire.
It's probably because resurrecting or reusing the same villain doesn't work in movies or TV show the same way it would work in a video game.
@@kittykittybangbang9367yeah if you don't know what your doing.
I think the erotic pachinko game was less of a slap in Castlevania's face than this show.
Ok that's being mean.
The what now?
@@rootfish2671 ruclips.net/video/1kogOybAjy8/видео.html
@@rootfish2671I just looked it up. Its real
By talos ballsack its real
Castlevania nocturne fights are good and the animations decent too good…. that is honestly all the positivity I can muster from it.
The choreography is mostly great. What I disliked about Nocturne's fights was the irregularity of how impactful the abilities are. Vampire Killer has immense wind up and no pay-off. Richter can sometimes instantly kill a vampire with swift strike but then makes huge waves just to push the enemies back a few steps. There are also a lot of noticeable animation errors. Some carried items like Vampire Killer itself go missing when Richter holsters it. And the sky boxes that they use for rendering the outside fights are missing textures. The resolution of 2d textures in the background is also very inconsistent with some being beautifully drawn scenes while others are low resolution upscaled textures.
@@timon6427 I definitely agree with this
That's literally the only two positives I could give the show as well. It simply looked nice that's it. Everything else was utter shite. The writing is such a complete mess for both story and characters. Also in my opinion there wasn't a single character to care about. They were either unlikeable or boring. Hell I can't even remember half the cast's names they're that forgettable.
I liked the last scene with alucard as well. The other series was a lot better.
This version's Annette is such a weird idea for me. Giving a completely different character the name of one of the game characters is almost the exact opposite thing I like about the previous series, but her case is even more confusing due to how Tera is given Game!Annette's role and design. Nocturne!Annette is a character I find interesting but it feels like she was only given that name because Richter's the main character, which I can't exactly blame someone for being annoyed at.
Fortunately i don't know the og games
@@massimilianoreali4398Annette in the games literally existed to be Richter’s love interest. That’s all she was.
i disagree with the tera thing? you may be confusing yourself with rondo of blood, because she doesn't fill annette's roll at all in this?
@@mauvvesYou do realise Rondo is the original game
@@MrNoot39449 Yeah, when i say "confusing yourself with rondo of blood" i'm talking about the translation differences. when it comes to tera replacing annette, i wouldn't necessarily agree unless he's only specifically talking about the vampire thing. i do think it's weird that they turned tera from one of the rescued npcs to maria's mother but i can see his point.
that being said if they literally just went with the non canon bit of annette being maria's sister in this show i think everyone would be happier tbh
I had a big problem with Annette. She was race swapped sure but, because of that she had an entirely different backstory and ability set. At this point, the only thing she had to do with her namesake was just that, her name. Contrast with Isaac from the first series, he was also race swapped but damn was he an amazing character.
Personally, im still mad at the original Castlevania series for not using Grant at all but, I can respect them for leaving him out rather than do using him where he doesnt fit. Annette should have also been left behind as well but they just couldn't leave behind a potential girlboss.
isaac and her have a different backstory. the original annette whole character was being a damsel in distress. I dont see how thats better than what we got. Seems u just dont like "girlbosses" bc looking at thinhs objectively her and isaac have similar character storytelling.
@themysticwarriorgal9465 Aside from Annette's name, can you think of any other part of her character that was not changed? I can name plenty for Isaac. He was still a Devil Forger loyal to Dracula and had a history with Hector. All of those things are important for his character to still fit into the lore. The things that were changed about Isaac are his race (and character design by extension) and his religion. Isaac's race was never mentioned, and his Islamic faith was mentioned once during his conversation with the sea captain.
Isaac is clearly more lore accurate than Annette. They took a very minor character and gave her a completely different backstory to keep her in the story, whereas Grant is MUCH more important to the story of Castlevania 3, and he was left out of the adaptation.
They just hate on Christianity in this series. Why would the priest need to make a deal with the vamps when he already had the forge?
Thank you that's litteraly my point, like why can't they show some good things about christianity like they did with others belives ?
They just using the same tropes over and over again
@@zonedechris4233the church entire function is always seeking out the belmonts plus the renards i believe are part of the church like belnades clan of witches are there to help the church by contract to help removing demons and monsters
what pisses me off is that there's barely anyone good that's part of the church. In the games the church was a force of good, Sypha was took in by the church and that's potential wasted on a tribe that was present for like 2 episodes ? There could've been conflicts and drama but no, church bad >:(.
@@rattled6732 there’s ppl who truly believe in it and it just became boring to see their believes with an evil eye in every fictional story .
(+ I don’t see why would it be fun to hate ppl bcs of their faith )
@@rattled6732 thats why the church abandoned its people in lord of shadow and kicked everyone out so the priest could live due to the hatred of the people and for some reason wanted sanctuary from demons because the people brought the demons along with the fear from the priest
Castlevania Nocturne is what happens when the showrunners not only disregard and ignore the source material, but also the reasons why people love said source material.
Annette isn't just a raceswap though, she's a completely different character. The only thing she has in common in her gender and her name. If they're gonna use Castlevania as a source material, use it as a damn source material. It'd be fine if they made her a brand new character and kept the original, but nope. It just shows, or at least to mw anyway, that they didn't think the character could stand on their own, which she clearly can't.
When watchning adaptations, I want to be able to pick the characters out that I know without then even saying their names.
I had the same problem with her too. Why didn't they just make her into an original character with her own name is beyond me.
What are you talking about? "Annette" in here is definitely an OC of the writer wet dream. She isn't raceswapped or anything at all.
@@nowaylater6950 Definitely seems like something of that sort XD
It's strange because they basically kept the original Annette as well by giving Tera her bad end (or something comparable to it), which only further supports your point that rhey wanted to introduce a new character that they knew couldn't stand on her own, so they made her the new "Annette".
Did you assume Annette’s gender??? REEEEEE!!!!
Pretty disappointed with Nocturne so far because I really enjoyed Rondo of Blood and Richter as a character. It's not like there wasn't stuff to adapt properly from the original game. In fact, there's should be an easier time to do it compared to Castlevania 3, since we had characters like Shaft to play as the antagonist and driving force for the story before Dracula comes into play, Maria as the heart and potential comedic relief and Richter as the badass protagonist. Instead, Nocturne just feels like they changed things just for the novelty of being different, and some of the decisions don't even make sense. Like, there are more characters from Bloodlines right now then there are from the actual game this show is adapting. It's pure insanity.
Honestly I don't even think they set up Richter's fear all that well with Alrox either.
You'd think when he fights he'd be extra protective of his friends, never wanting his friends to get hurt, or him seeing flashes of Alrox in the vampires he hunts or something to imply has been more deeply wounded then just...brooding.
I also found it was weird that the pacing of the show would slow down to rant about revolution all the time...and why Richter was a side character in his own show...so I checked to see who is writing.
Ah yes, the story writer of the show and show runner is a card carrying socialist and political activist...hm...well I am at least convinced that this guy decided to make this show for the sake of his message first while character and plot was sidelined.
As a card-carrying socialist and part-time political activist, yeah it was too much. The themes of freedom and revolution are fine, but at least focus on the main character and how those themes relate, instead of trying to make a statement.
Constantly bringing up revolution as a good thing in the setting of the French Revolution seems like particularly bad taste as well since there really weren’t good guys in that blood bath, and in the end it achieved nothing with France going back to life as normal once jacobins were eliminated.
@@ChargeQM Freedom and Revolution for their own sake are EXTREMELLY poisonous by themselves, if you freed a bunch of resentful angry people that have been taught all their life that they have been oppresed they will ABSOLUTELY take their chance to destroy not only those who controlled them but themselves, ESPECIALLY themselves.
Revolution and Freedom mean nothing whitout responsability and ethics, something this show will NEVER talk about.
Ha I guessed it from the first episode lmao.
Richter should have had survivors guilt and blamed himself for his mothers death while projecting that anger onto Olrox. Instead of running from him first thing he should have tried to fight out of some need for vengeance only to lose because he didn't have his magic. Then his retreat would have been easier to understand. We all know he wasn't a match for Olrox but giving up without even trying. That is NOT what Trevor or any belmont would have done.
I'm saying this as a guy who watched the Netflix show and never played a single Castlevania game:
(Spoilers btw)
All throughout Nocturne, vampires were praising their "messiah" and how she'd devour the light and make a vampire paradise. When it was explained that she'd drained the blood of an Egyptian diety and gained their power, my immediate reaction was, "there's no way that happened." I was convinced it was hyperbole or false history touted as propaganda. Especially since Nocturne had only shown off her subordinate's power and the results of her cruelty, not her own power.
Until the point she caused an eternal solar eclipse, I wasn't convinced she was anywhere near that powerful. But when she did that, my reaction was "Wait... her exposited backstory was real?!" I doubted it up till that point because I wasn't shown anything to verify her power.
Do you know why I knew Dracula was a threat in Castlevania, even without playing the games? Because I saw him level a capital city within minutes, and unleash an army of demons on the country, in the first episode of the show. I wasn't told Dracula was dangerous, I was shown it.
My point is, it lights been nice to at least have a small flashback of the miss vampire messiah person draining a god of their blood or something. Something to show off their power beyond conjuring a mildly eerie magic orb.
Can we also talk about that fact that Maria speaks of famine, poor people and misery al the time and justify the revolution... while the streets are super clean, people drink beer and eat food every day. Are are we supposed to feel bad for these people? That is probably what I hate most with entertainment these days : They say stuff. Remember the ''show don't tell'' cinema ? I miss it. Here, it was just monologues all over again
She was told things by academics who wanted to usurp power and just believed it even though proof of the contrary was in front of her face (in the Castlevania Universe)
Just like the real French Revolution. Wealthy, affluent, well read, well feed merchants said it was about inequality and freedom of those in need but it reality it was to take down the upper class and substitute it.
@@cosmefulanito5052 which they did yes. But the conditions were still really bad for the poors. Specially about the sanitary of in the cities
Carmilla, a superpowered _Karen_ is more interesting than Erzebet.
I have a ton of issues with Netflix's initial Castlevania adaptation, but Nocturne manages to surpass all of them in severity and transcend to an entirely new level of dumpster fire. I've seen a lot of the discussion of this show revolve around issues with the characters and pacing, but the abhorrent use of setting is far less discussed.
Unlike the initial adaptation, Nocturne makes the specific real-world time, place, and accompanying historical events, major elements of its plot and characters. This is a horrendous problem because it is almost immediately clear that the writers behind Nocturne know next to nothing about the 19th century France and French Revolution, nor do they understand much of the actual philosophy that governed the revolutionaries - or wider Europe - at the time. A really good example of this is found in how the writers treat Annette.
Annette in Nocturne was an active and willing participant in the Saint-Domingue rebellion - a rebellion heavily characterized by targeted ethnic purges of the French Europes in the colony. While the show writers portray her actions as heroic liberation, the reality is that she was a conscious participant in the mass murder of both slave owners and innocent people alike. Far from being seen as a heroic revolutionary and source of inspiration for Maria and her little pro-revolution clique, Annette would - and should - have been seen as something of a monstrous savage.
Another really good example would be the town Maria and Richter live in. Despite France being in the throes of the Revolution, their town appears picturesque and the people in it appear to want for nothing. In reality, their town should be in extremely rough shape - at best. Famine should be commonplace (or at least mentioned as a severe problem in the nation), things should be in disrepair or short supply as a civil war was going on, and random acts of political violence should be extremely commonplace. It's such a colossal waste of potential because you could have had some extremely thought-provoking and potent scenes between a naive revolutionary Maria and a wiser but equally as zealous abbot
That perspective of the Saint Domingue revolution seems to be more Euro-Centirc to me. Because these very slave owners and supposed "innocent" towns people aided in the dehumanization of Anettes people. Europeans use the story of Spartacus' slave revolt as a strong and courageous tale of overcoming your oppressor but conveniently ignore the accounts of rape and innocent people murdered during those slave revolts. Now it's all of a sudden bad when someone else does it? Either be consistent with your logic or just stop talking.
@@innitbruv-lascocomics9910 My brother in Christ, the idea that "slavery bad" is "Euro-centric". Hell, you're entire morality is, more than likely, "Euro-centric". Europeans, for the last 600+, have been a historical aberration with next to no precedent. I mean, God damn, you can't point to another empire that spent 1/3 of its entire budget for years attempting to crush slavery on an international level like the British did.
I'm not saying the Saint Domingue killings were somehow uniquely evil. They're not. In fact, they're pretty bog standard from a histocial perspective. My point was that from both our modern perspective, as well as the historical French perspective the show totally ignores, it would and should be seen as horrific, and Annette would and should be considered fairly barbaric.
I'm not trying to get into a morality dick-measuring contest here. People have always done shitty things to other people - the right of conquest is just the natural state of the world. What I am trying to do, however, is point out that the writers of Nocturne have zero understanding of the setting of their story and have made a concerted effort to inject their own half-baked ideology into the mix, which in turn, has been disastrous for the internal logic of the story.
The fact the series hypes up the French revolution setting and yet does nothing interesting with it is a baffling choice.
Yeah, setting Nocturne in France during the French Revolution could have been a good idea... if the writers actually implemented the history into the story.
@@namishusband818 It's pretty downright insulting as a viewer. It tells you that the writers couldn't even be bothered to do ten minutes of research on their setting. They took a time period with some of the most intriguing and impactful ideological conflicts in human history and boiled it down in the most superficial way according to a near all-consuming ignorance. It's extremely telling that what should have been one of the most interesting conversations in the show made me straight up close my tab and walk away because they boiled a centuries-long argument between rationalism and faith down to - "You're dumb", "No, you're dumb".
Frankly, the only thing more offensive then the total lack of historical and philosophical understanding is the awful character writing on display. Take the abbot - arguably tied for the worst character alongside Annette -, for example. Why does he try killing his supposedly much loved daughter at the start of the show? Why does such a supposedly devote man of God possess extensive demonic material, and why does he have a literal hell machine in his basement? Why can't he argue with a girl that's a fraction of his age and who has only had a fraction of the time to accumulate experience and develop a worldview? Why is he helping literal God-hating monsters who wish to destroy the church stop God-hating revolutionaries who also hate the church? The writers' answers to all of these questions is to hope you don't notice or think about them.
Takeaway from this video: Just go watch Jojo's instead.
Someone gets it.
Or just watch the vampire hunter d movies.
I wasn't expecting a one to one interpretation of Rondo of blood, but every decision made was so bad and lacking that it might as well been an AO3 Fan Fiction. I don't know what they plan to do for season 2 but seeing as to how hard they are jumping into Symphony without the proper build up and roles the characters need to be in I doubt it'll be good.
Also side note the way they just back handed Juste like that by saying he was a terrible father and lost his loved ones, is such a massive character assassination I doubt they even looked him up further than a quick Wiki dive. It's all so irksome. The only thing that Juste's family would not like about him is the fact that he's a massive Home Decoration snob.
That’s Jake Belmont
Juste lost his friends and daughter so yeah if he's washed up that's why
Indeed they removed Dracula forced a new character who killed Annette and took her name and gave her heritage of a slave against people with whips to force a relationship with a white man whose trained to fight with a whip effectively and built up background characters that were built up as integral to Annettes back story because to just have them die immediately little explanation or anything to show significance of the character until after they died which seemed like they were just created to have them do something else than walking and talking there apparently no Dracula but you have Olrox only used a few times but his presence is meaningful so will how season 2 actually work they already worked Alucards family problems from symphony of the night so what will be next unless Alucards only purpose is to Thanos snapped for being a vampire by Annette so they can keep building up her up because the only people with any real development is Annette and Maria's mom 1 episode for richter and juste for the heroes and for the villains there's just Olrox and the other female character and alot of named background characters who were built up like they were significant threats to have them break by a flick of the wrist
@@kei7540 but that's the exact opposite of Juste's story, taking the worst ending you can get in Harmony of Dissonance at worst he would feel guilt for having to take down his own friend but Juste would still be there for Richter because that just the guy that he is.
The show made the mistake of making the Belmont's a different flavor of Trevor but that's like making all the JoJo's act like Jonathan which is against what they are about.
@@falloutsearies the human psyche isn't that simple people respond to things in different ways
Also it would have been interesting seeing them use the French revolution to destroy any power the vampires have over France.🐱
That would've been one of the coolest things
Kinda feels like they *really* didn't think this through.
Oh no castlevania masters of the universe revelation
Are you talking about this show or the previous one?
@@MrSilentProtagonist nocturne
@@vergillives9890
I didn't watch Nocturne. I hated the first show. The first show was also made of contempt for the fans.
I bet they didn't even know Olrox was supposed to be a reference to Nosferatu hence the name and the orignal appearance he had in the games, the moment I noticed they changed him but kept the name I decided not to watch it because they clearly don't give a shit about Castlevania.
The writers did zero research on the series or even it's historical setting
15:33 what would have been a memorable line would have been for Richter to indicate that Belmonts are sworn to “hunt the night” as a reference to Leon Belmont from Lament of Innocence
That would be way better and more memorable. I like that idea. 😄
One of the key reasons why the Castelvania Netflix lost its soul was because they made sure to remove all pro-religion elements out of the series. can't have the main characters praying to God and using holy symbols now or else Twitter/X will accuse the show of being propaganda.
Didn't rector internet literally use a cross symbol to defeat some of their vampires
@@kingj9664did you not hear what the guy said ?
@@kingj9664 They still made sure to have the characters hating on God and the Church.
@@kingj9664did you watch the video or just come in defense of the show? they're extremely inconsistent with christianity.
one day the only good crusader is not only in love with a vampire but sees no blasphemy in enabling the genocidal undead.
or the cross is supposedly used to confuse vampires and has no holy attributes but then it works as an invincible ward for annette of course.
Even the sun and enhanced vampire killer lash is rng if it works.
@@archeduardo Yeah like they did in the last show and I gotta ask why exactly do you care because you do know this isn't the only media that does this ever hurt of shin magami tense Or devil man.
People will even call you racist if you criticize this show. It's ridiculous that people can't have opinions of what they like and don't like. I have seen the original games and personally I like them a lot more.
I have options. It tells me what I need to know about someone if they just throw the racist epithet at me
I agree.
@@Dr.Gold-Dry-BowserYou can't What, the games did and put it on tv cause it only amounts to fifteen minutes
@@KaosNova2Sometimes you just are racist You can't just throw you around the sentence. Just because you call me racist. That tells me more about you than it does me.
@@davidspearim5552 I didn’t say you were.
personally, as someone who's never played the games, my main question was/is: If the church exists in this universe, and their weapons have any effect at all against vampires, how exactly is it that *none* of the church members (or the church itself) came to _any_ vampire fight strapped proper? there is no way that the church can be so corrupt that literally every nearby parish is too foolish to move when a vampire is straight up blocking the sun and turning humans into juice packs.
Welcome to contrived writing!
@@ARStudios2000 was watching the last few episodes of nocturne with my roommate (he was watching it all the way through, i came in on the episode that introduced his grandpa) and i had no idea how many of my questions were accurate criticisms of the show vs the games.
from what i could tell, just about every single choice that made me question the series was animation original. where was alucard the whole time? why was the priest stupid enough to trust vampires? why didn't the vampires just kill simon and his grandpa with no dialogue? why didn't the writers just have simon say something like "even when we lose ourselves we get back up" to answer the question of what he "forgot", why was the church so weak in this series? what the hell does slavery have to do with vampires (pretty sure they care nothing about race)? how the hell did erzebet get *goddess* blood? why wait so long to use it? why not open the portal _under_ the hell machine instead of behind it if you can choose where to place it. how did so many villains know where the heroes stay at, but none of them chose to pop in to kill them early? the list goes on.
contrived writing doesn't even feel strong enough as a word for how many questions i thought up while watching the show, which is sad, because the first series didn't really give me that many problems.
@@vla1ne you're right.
This is just bad writing.
@@vla1ne The show jumps the gun on so many plotlines because they kinda know it's gonna get canceled. Now in season 2 what can they do but make it worse
The whole show reeks of a writer problem.
Warren Ellis, the writer of the original show, had a colorful background writing gritty comic books including many from Marvel.
Clive Bradley, the writer for Nocturne, primarily wrote crime dramas.
The difference really shows.
do not apologize. its how we keep getting into this mess, it gives those who want to have the excuse to overlook the flaw and keep making them.
I think I noticed something what really really irks me about the show, mainly how Richter gets involved in the French revolution or how they make Maria a political activist a la Greta... except, vampire hunters are *not* supposed to get into human politics or affairs, they're not supposed to pick sides in wars, they are supposed to kill monsters and vampires for the sake of greater good!
Like how Jonathan Morris and Eric Ricardo(yes, I've said Ricardo) are in WW1 but they only care about killing the night creatures so they don't sacrifice humans. In no game I played so far a vampire clan got ever even involved in whatever politics.
Also how they could butcher Richter like that? He's supposed to be the pillar of purity in the series! He's a sweetroll in the games but they think it's cool to make him a dumbass in here, oh poor Richter.
I'm honestly surprised that Adi shankar pulled off this steaming pile, considering how good he got it on the first series, then again, I don't know how these things go behind the scenes, maybe he's forced to do this, or who knows? maybe he's pulling a Daisuke and he's completely responsible for whatever this is...
EIther way, go play fan inspired works, like Sondro Gomez, or The Transylvania Adventure, or Komajou Densetsu, hell, why not play Bloodstained, which is literally made by THE metroidvania dev!
Adi Shankar is no longer at the helm, which should tell you all you need to know.
@@lunatic0verlord10 well, the IMDB and Wikipedia pages still list him as an executive producer, so...
Finally, some representation for what Eric's surname should've been localized as as the Spaniard he is.
@@diegordi1394 for some reason US Konami has an allergy or a phobia for spanish names lmao, one of life's greatest mysteries.
"What is a man? Nothing but a miserable pile of secrets! But enough talk; have at you!"
I was invested in the first series so this was a shame.
It wasn’t perfect, but it felt like it fully utilised its IP’s setting and characters in a creative and amazing way.
Reminder that the first anime had Iga holding back the guy who made the show, Nocturne dosen't have any participation of Iga, I can't say why they didn't gave Iga the team to make the anime at all, but I guess its because the creator is alligned with the agenda while Iga isn't
Iga left as the producer of Castlevania shortly before Lords of Shadow. He couldn’t agree with Warren Ellis on a final script to 3 animated movies based on CV3
@@AdrianFahrenheitTepesWarren also wanted to beat the shit out of Koji.
I didn't skip a second of the first series. Yet I groaned and skipped a bunch of Nocturne to get to the plot. Yeah they should have just adapted the game's story. Like we really didn't need people's Vampire ocs taking the place of established characters
Castlevania 3 barely had a story and they still mess up adapting it. CoD was full of cutscenes and they didn't adapted story elements from the games.
Most of the vampires are from the games 😂
@@kei7540 Dracula >>>>>>>>>>> Lesbian Vampire Messiah
@@Prodighee cool
@@MrSilentProtagoniststill better than this mess
I won’t lie, I agree with most of the criticism for this review. However, I do feel like the scene where richter was going to finish off the last vampire would have worked really well if he finished it off like this;
“There’s something you forgot about us Belmonts…”
“Stupid of me, I had forgotten it too…”
“That no matter what monsters lurk in the dark, we will be there….to hunt the night.”
I think it would kinda fit with the whole theme of getting past his trama and the whole familial mission to hunt the night like in the games.
"hunt the night" mean to hunt dracular
@@creampop9727 yeah, but they also did hunt other monsters. And they were specifically know as vampire hunters, so it wasn’t always just Dracula in particular.
@@Zealot4435 yeah it but belmonts clan reason of existing is bring down dracular and all who with him.
@@creampop9727 yeah, which basically includes all vampires and monsters. Plus after killing Dracula, it takes him 100 years to reform so it’s not like they stopped being active or hunting.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees the disappointment in this season
8:59 Hell yeah. The end of their story really beings home just how bizarrely wholesome a beauty and a beast were as a couple. Also, Castlevania needed more Vlad and Lisa. Also also, I fully undersyand why Vlad would murder humanity in retaliation for some knobs killing Lisa. Just... the writers managed to compress so much into like 15 minutes of interaction and I'm not sure how.
The night creatures thing is they pull a soul from hell and place it into a body, it's supposed to be a random soul. Which means my man hit the one in several billion chance to be resurrected in his own body.
I can’t believe they did Richter and Annette like that. I love the games and the 1st series although not perfect was really enjoyable.
At this rate, he might end the series single.
@@lunatic0verlord10 she's already nagging him to death so it'd be for the best 😆
quick note about the race swaps, they made a lot of the vampires black, which is no biggie on itself, the problem comes when you think about it meta, they made the people who are persued with whips black, which would be a great grim joke if it was one, but it is not
Annette’s probably into that kinda thing. She seems like the freaky type to me.
@@kyriss12this comment is crazy
That's the problem with random race swaps it's often tone deaf and borderline racist
@@rootfish2671Race swaps can work, Isaac is proof of it. There are plenty of other examples, Red in Shawshank redemption(played by Morgan freeman) is Irish in the books. Nick fury, James Gordon in the new Batman. A-Train. And there are a few other examples. And these are just the ones where a white guy is turned black.
@@natebox4550 it can work but a lot of modern writers haven't gotten the memo
The previous Castlevania adaptation was shit past the first season too. All of its problems are simply more obvious in Nocturne because people let it get away with them in the first place rather than calling it out for being shit.
lmfao glad someone said it, genuinely confused how so many people criticise nocturne for pacing issues, lame quips and all that when the OG series had all of these flaws too, and people still say "yeah I liked the original series but nocturne? horrible"
I definitely agree the pacing is a major issue. The first 3 episodes are horrible about it, with 3 being the worst by far, since they set up the main plot at the start of 1 but then nothing really progresses until 4. I honestly still don't get why they brought in characters from the Caribbean, and it feel like Olrox being Aztec was just something they did to justify that. Setting it in France also is still an odd choice, given how all the main cast has English names besides Annette, and the setting of the French Revolution was mostly in the background.
10:14 I actually would argue Annette is a pretty terrible person, given how she burned a city to the ground, slaughtering every citizen she saw, instead of taking the fight to the actual individuals who had people in chains. If the opera scene is anything to go by, there were definitely other "born-free" people like Edouard, women and children who had no influence in the evils going on, and a ton of non-vampires.
Also, Maria being so extremely anti-church is a bit much. I get her being mad with the Abbot, for several reasons, but for her to say "All of your churches will be burned to the ground" is way too far. Her grudge is against 1 guy and his followers, so her expanding that to the entire religion is literally extremism.
11:13 I think Richter's one-liner could have worked if it was "I was going to say something clever... but you aren't worth it" or "I'll save it for someone else", something to imply that the guy he's fighting is nothing and he's already thinking about his fight with a bigger foe (like Olrox). But the way they subverted it just kills most of the momentum in the scene.
Something not mentioned in this review is the voice acting. Most of the characters are fine, but the VA work for Maria and Richter was pretty rough in the first half. They sounded like they had no direction or practice before recording, with Richter's sounding like he had a head cold and Maria's not able to project her voice. They got better as the show went on, and were clearly more comfortable in their roles by the end, but I did find myself jumping between dubs for the first 2 episodes because of how it sounded.
The over-reliance on "Super cool" F-bombs, bizarre happenstances that just kept occurring, and doing Juste absolutely dirty this season pulled me out of the picture way too often to care by the end. I kept getting semi-hyped for stuff just to be let down, or confused on the approaches taken.
I'm also firmly in the camp that Richter should have just said ANYTHING meaningful when he got his magic back. What a let-down for writing and character potential. Stake through my heart.
As an african person i hate the race swap thing, the show didn't become about vampires and humans anymore it became about slavery and am sick of being reminded of it, I just wanted to see a good story about the vampires and humans not a history lesson about my people and being reminded each episode that we we're slaves
I'm sorry, didn't you know? Black people aren't allowed to have original characters, you can only have our sloppy seconds. I mean, for awhile you can play with your black Annette, but once the paint peels off you have to return it to its original owner. But don't worry, this is the least racist way to do things, I'm sure, and for those few sweet seconds you had it you surely felt the greatest, surface level, representation ever! And that makes it all so worth it, you know?
It's such a ham fisted thing to shoe horn historical slavery into a show about magical vampires
Honestly, it feels like about 80% of black media puts a good amount of focus on racism and slavery.
I think the best example of a character's race being changed would be The Wiz, because it wasn't lazy about the race-changing and did more than just charge the characters' skin color.
@@SaiyanGamer95 the wiz also handled slavery better
@@SaiyanGamer95 Yeah, and there are a lot of good black characters in comics and movies that are not used, characters like Miles Spiderman, blade, spawn John Green Lantern and so many more
castlevania nocturne but it doesnt feature dante, what a shame.
And they would ruin him too probably make the ninjabee version of dante
@@vergillives9890 Let's just wait and see before we all start jumping to conclusions cause let's Remember Netflix is really a mixed bag of things
@@kingj9664 i had hope but then season and nocturne happened so definitely a mixed bag and the showrunner is the guy who apparently got apu removed from the simpsons so fingers crossed
@@kingj9664moire bad things in the bag thoiugh or good?
Oh, and let's not forget, how lame Olrox's gay romance was introduced.
"You know my name, tell me yours."
"Nope, let's just f@ck"
The christian fanatic with no apparent reason to sleep with a man, let alone a vampire (remember, bible forbids it): "We'll bang, okay?"
Olrox's vampire charm ability is to turn straight men gay
Hilariously enough, I wouldn't have minded Nocturne if it weren't for Annette.
She just feels kind of...inserted??? As in that she's not really meant to be there. YET, at the same time, it's almost as if the show constantly tries to push her over Richter, making her seem like the main character.
Like buddy, the story is designed around vampires and belmonts, not vampires and an angry girl that shoots metal and thinks she's important.
When I first watched the series I assumed the lack of Erzabeth focus was signifying that she was a false antagonist and that Olrox would be backstabbing her to become some overlord vampire. So I was dissapointed that Olrox ended up being not the main antagonist after the opening set him up. I like to joke "the subversion is there is no subversion!"
The reason why original Netflixvania is so good for me because the first and second season isnt a loose adaptation but actually adapting the game Lore with adding new thing
And then comes Season 3, *sigh* I wish it skipped straight to Season 4.
@@nugget3327 at least Season 3 set ups some things, but yeah the characters are kind of dumb on season 3
@@ezelalia5739I understand where y’all are coming from, but pls the monks plot was creepy asf😭 And isaacs plot was chef kiss pls
@Rin-ik8tn Which was just Hector's plot from Curse if Darkness but HE WHITE and we can't have that and of course Issac is race swapped in the series.
@@dr.feelgoodmalusphillips2475 Damn… tbh in this case i dont mind the race swapping only because Isaacs writing was good.
For me, this was a dumpster fire. Me and a group of friends were watching the first episode and we just couldn't bear to watch more. I have a lot of negative things to say about the show. The story should've been more clear this time around, as Richter's era is more fleshed out in terms of lore than in Series 1. But they decided to tie it to the French Revolution. Which isn't a terrible idea, but how they executed it was a bit shoe-horned for my liking.
Richter himself is a little bitch. I get that they wanted to build Richter to his Rondo of Blood counterpart, but I'm not gonna lie, I'm starting to hate this trope if I'm going to be honest. Is it really that bad for a Beast to be a Beast every now and then? Must every adaptation of a story have to have the same trope of "Hero is actually a little baby man, and has to fight trauma to become the man we see today"? I came here to see Richter's story unfold in animated form, and I felt swindled.
And then there's the supporting cast. Juste was just “there” for like 10 minutes. The pope, again, is another villain. The revolutionaries are cannon-fodder, and Maria is some know-it-all who treats Richter with such little respect. I assume that they try to do something similar with Sypha, but here, she comes off as bratty and more of a Bossgirl. Speaking of “Bossgirl”.
Annette... What the FUCK do I say about her? Ok Netflix, you want Annette to have more backstory? Fine. You want Annette to have powers herself? Cool. You even want Annette to be more active in the story in general? I’m down. But the way you guys did it was so spiteful. This Annette is nowhere close to what Annette originally was in the game(s). You turned a kind and sincere woman into another token boss-girl. And I’ll bet you all the money in the universe that the reason why they made such a total shift in design change, is so that they can shield themselves of any criticism by labeling it “Racist”.
This show hates being what it’s trying to adapt. By not only the story itself, but also the creators themselves. I did not enjoy my time watching this. That being said, I do enjoy your take on it. It really does feel like you try to dissect with what you got given to you. It’s a refreshing take.
I think they will use juste more in season 2
@@massimilianoreali4398 Even so, I'd rather not care at this point.
@@fogblades6811 A part of me wonder if they should have used the adorable anime Maira, instead of her Dracula X Chronicles redesign?????
I agree about the "building up a character from nothing" trope. Character development is great, but the character arc doesn't have to go from 'pathetic weenie' to 'badass'; it can go from 'normal dude' to 'badass' and work just as well, if not better. While I do feel like it's a little overblown that some people are calling the show woke, the fact that they started Richter off in the 'pathetic weenie' tier and yet almost NEVER show any of the female characters in need of help...well, what else do you call that if not woke? Strong men and needy women are Kryptonite to those who write for the so-called "Modern Audience" that I'm still not convinced even exists.
@@thethrashyone I never understood the gripes with Damsels in Distress as a trope. It's pretty realistic if you ask me.
Annette was confidently the worst part of the season for me, which sucks because her character had tremendous potential with the premise of her character.
Instead of having her motivation for coming to fight the vampires in Europe be ending ALL slavery in the world, which would have fit her character given her background, but to specifically kill one vampire and she happened to get roped into fighting the others. There was a lot of potential to expand on her past and use it as a conduit for her trying to free the rest of the world from any kind of slavery.
Additionally, her dialogue is so chaotic, one minute shes criticizing the rest of the team for being immature and unable to act but her emotions are what got her friend killed and she spends as much time crying as anybody else if not more in the season.
It feels like the writers tried to make her unlikable, but in addition somehow want to make her the main romantic interest? Like, what could Richter POSSIBLY like about her? There should be zero reason for him to have any interest in her.
they turned a masculine whip cracking holyman warrior into a blasphemous kpop sadboi
I don’t think the point of Juste’s inclusion was to teach Richter at all, so of course he isn’t much of a mentor. His purpose was for Richter to see the result of giving in to fear and trauma, that giving up results in no happier outcome. Richter’s entire awakening happens in part because he doesn’t want to be like Juste.
Which the show tells poorly.
I find it funny he said he's going to have limited spoilers but he ended up explaining the entire story lol.
I didn't bring up Olrox banging a dood. I didn't spoil that lol
Honestly he did us a favor with that. Now anyone that missed out or avoided Nocturne because they weren't sure if they'd like it doesn't need to watch the show to understand how bad it is.
@MangaKamenTheRealOne that is true lol.
Just began watching and Papa Bless for the JJBATAS reference
Just wanna say love your comic and your videos dude
how the main cast always inadvertently cause the death and harm to thier loved ones. like all three of them. should call them the survivors guilt club
The Netflix logo over Dracula at the end had me absolutely in stitches. 😂 thank you Kamen, I needed that. All the memes in this video were great and a good video too!
Jojo's bizarre adventures is a better castlevania anime then the real castlevania anime.
I like the show. Like I truly enjoyed it. But I also have gripes.
For one the pacing is too fast. They turned Edouard too quickly. We didn’t even get to know the guy.
The pacing is way too quick for what they were trying to achieve. The death of Annette’s former master was satisfying but too early. They really tried to sneak that in.
I also think Richter getting his magic back should have been in a much more meaningful fight. Especially since it currently wont do much against Sehkmet. I just hope we get more character development and slightly slower pacing in season 2.
Exactly, the pacing was too fast, they should’ve saved some of those moments later for a better buildup
Indeed. Richter should have gotten to confront his ptsd with Olrox and beat the shit out of him. Instead all he thinks about are his friends with the advice of Juste and that's enough for him to suddenly become the Avatar. It's a very good action scene but very underwhelming in terms of writing since all he kills are just 3 no name vampires.
I would've given them a pass for making Annette black had they make her a good written character
When I saw that they race-swapped Annette I already knew that she would be insufferable. Western writers don't have a good track record writing female characters, much less protagonists or deutergonists. Annette in Nocturne is just Korra at her most insufferable moments (so basically Season 1-2 of LoK). Funny enough tha tKorra got a lot of bashing when it aired while Castlevania has very similar problems in terms of character writing, pacing, world building and themes, not to mention it has barely anything to do with the Castlevania games.
Honestly if they would have switched her and Tera's names there wouldn't have been any issue :/
Netflix!Tera is basically like the Game Annette (being close to Maria and Richter, related to Maria, gets turned into a vampire, has blonde hair and a green dress)
And Netflix!Annette could have been called "Tera" and it would actually work with her earth-based powers in this incarnation.
When the vampire prophet blocked out the sun, you can see it is an eclipse where the edges of the sun can get around. That means the dangerous UV rays are still getting through (hence why you never look at an eclipse), so even though it is dark the dangerous rays are still getting through to burn all the vampires.
It's literally magic, why are you trying to use irl logic against it?
It's magic that makes an eclipse. Eclipses are well understood, and it's common knowledge that uv is what kills vapires@@P4PmmaFan
@@P4PmmaFan Because it's interesting.
@@P4PmmaFanbecause these writers made a scientific explanation on why vampires fear the cross.
@@saldzbob9972 A cross isn't a magical spell like we're talking about here....that's a terrible argument, 2 very different things
We are slowly regressing towards 1993 Mario Movie levels of adaptation creators' respect towards the source material of video games. If 1993 Mario is a 5% and 2023 Mario is a 95%, I think we just passed 50% in the wrong direction. The peak didn't last long, lol
Thank christ someone else was critical on this show. I felt like a crazy person for being the only one who wasn't in love with all the choices
As the ending of Kingsman proves, you can make an epic one liner while pointing out the absurdity of one liners.
I didn't like that Annette and Richter suddenly crushed on each other. There is no romantic chemistry between them and calls him an idiot coward for wanting a plan and then a coward again for reacting to his PTSD and running away. Then, the moment he returns home and apologizes, she has a crush on him?
There's also the fact that I thought he and Maria were already dating. (To be fair as far as I knew, I knew nothing about the characters from the game.) So, when I learned that they were cousins, when his grandpa showed up, I was like; "Huh? Really? Well, the writers didn't make that relationship feel clear in my opinion."
Reasons why I was shipping him and Maria until his grandpa showed up: 1) Maybe I missed something in the first episode when he was being sent to France at ten years old. But when we are first introduced to Maria, Richter is kind of observing her from afar, smiling at her. Then when they're are leaving, and see a bar, Maria tells him, "Get a drink if you want" and he says, "Your mom is cooking dinner." Not, "Aunt Tera, or auntie is cooking." Then there's the joke he makes to Maria that killing vampires is the "Most fun with your clothes on."
Like, I'm sorry, who say crap like that to their cousin?
Yeah last time i checked maria is 16 ! And richter is 19 i almost thought that he was somewhere around in his 20’s since he looks so muscular
I keep seeing people saying this is like fanfic, but Id specify that its *bad* fanfic, because Ive honestly seen fics better than this wacky mess.
"the stories have always been bad" may be one of the most annoying arguments I've seen in support of New Thing across all media that I've ever seen. "You don't like New Thing? Well Thing was always bad, therefore you are not allowed to hate it now if you liked it then lol"
They gave Belmont the He-Man treatment.
By ignoring the literal He-man of the Belmont clan.
Adi shakar wasn’t involved in this series and it shows cause he left to do the devil may cry animated series
that clip of richter with the quote is one of the things I dislike about modern writing motherfuckers cant have fun with their writing. it's ok to be silly from time to time you know.
What if that was their way of having fun
Not gonna lie, minute I see race swapping of characters I know I just nope right out but appreciate this vid.
I don't care about race swapping characters that much I care about the writing and I can tell you the writing for this show is good
And the race swapped character gets all the setup and development while everyone just exists apparently theres a French revolution and its immediately forgotten she knows night creatures and was apparently enslaved by vampires but doesn't know dracula but is the strongest character until the last few episodes its not shes bad its just 3 characters have any development which ritcher doesn't really get and thats a problem
Yeah I can’t really blame about race swapping when one of my favorite characters issac from previous series was one and he was a fantastic character.
@@animezilla4486 oh I'm sure it was decent it's just a actual gripe/peeve of mine because it feels like such a unnecessary change and also like it's by committee these days and I honestly wanted to watch it but soon as I saw that just made me wanna wretch because it happens far too often these days for the sake of some quota system.
Issac from the first series was race swapped and he was easily the best character
The fact they could have called this show Vampire the Masquerade and making the main antagonist a ministry methuselah shows how little this had to do with Castlevania at all. Heck, a lot of the vampires in tihs series could belong to one of the thirteen clans.
It has been a strange thing to observe, that often times the British accent is used generically for any region.
The biggest problem I had with this series is the same problem I had with the original castlevania anime, which is that I don’t think either series integrate the historic settings into castlevania’s own world particularly well. Leaving aside the question of why ordinary people don’t have a greater knowledge of vampires and magic existing in their world (as neither vampires or vampire hunter seem to make any effort to hide the fallout of their activities), I always thought the original anime was at its best when it showed its characters coming into conflict with real world organisations like the church and the various European and North African kingdoms the forge master character had to travel through to reach Carmilla’s castle. Likewise in this series we’re told that vampire have something of an uneasy alliance with Europes royal families, which are now under threat from revolutionaries, but we don’t see more of this. It would have been nice to actually see the vampire’s meeting with these royalists, so we can see what both sides got out of this relationship, and perhaps just how uneasy and prone to fracture this alliance was. (You think it would be in the vampires interests to stir up war and strife between humans, as it would make it easier for them to take victims of the streets without anyone investigating all the blood sucked corpses turning up)
Instead the vampires only contact with real world human political power was their deal with what appeared to be one fringe element of the church. Other than that, I thought the characters were OK but nothing special. I liked the vampire queen, though at the moment I think her background and motivations have yet to be fully explored. Overall I thought the hero’s relied to much on magic, and would have preferred to see a greater emphasis on specially crafted weapons and technology (wielded just by normal well trained but still mortal humans) specifically designed to fight vampires and worse.
My question is that since they decided to use Bloodlines's plotline, why didn't they just adapt Bloodlines itself? Why get Richter involved?
Probably because people know Richter more than they do Jon Morris and Eric Lacarde
Like the other person said, hes simply here to get eyeballs on the show. Regardless of how they treated him.
It's not even Bloodlines plotline, we fans of the original game series need to stop and cope with the fact this is not an adaptation, this is another thing altogether. This is not Rondo, this isnt leading to Rondo, Sotn or anything. And of course, its' not Bloodlines either. This is, as someone said, some sort of fan fiction or a kind of alternate universe where there's some name dropping for the sake of it.
These poor attempts at being relatable reveal a lot about the writers 😅
Honestly comparing Belmonts to Joestars, Richter comes across more like Johnathan. I can't think of any Belmont being like Joseph, maybe Trevor, but only a bit, and that's based more off the show if anything.
I’d say Trevor is Jotaro stoic with a bad attitude at times.
@@Riseofziggy I was thinking, that, but with a bit of Part 4 and Part 6 Jotaro added in as well.
@@Sir_Bone-Head good point he’s mainly like like part 3 jotaro though the character he reminds me of the most is Gyro Zepeli . Dang will say this I am excited as hell for SBR to come out I haven’t heard any news but I’m hoping they do it right same for the upcoming Fist of the North Star Adaptation, we need more classic manly men style anime nowadays.
Is it just me, or they made an excelent job at expanding (the totally not annete) annete backstory, specially her link to her people's beliefs and how it developed her powers, but at the same time reduced the main conflict of the season to "church bad, they work with vampires"
As a Romanian born in the Wallachia region of Romania, I'm actually kinda glad they moved the scene to France.
If you can't help yourself from being Westarded then at least be westarded in the actual West.
Also no sun no food no food no humans and then no blood.
For people who have not seen the OG series I will implore you to do so if for some reason you watched nocturn with no context of the original series