Here's an extra post to celebrate; a tragic lovestory.
I love the Castlevania series, but tragically this attempt at an origin story was not as great at it could have been. It was definitely a Castlevania game, but the gameplay and story just felt a bit unpolished.
If the developers would have put more time into this I think it would have been great. That being said, it was probably the first Castlevania game to make it to 3d without being totally awful.
Still, having a polished version of this game (and with polished I don't mean graphically but rather gameplay and story) would have been better than the U.S. made reboot from 2010.
Castlevania: Lament of Innocence was released in 2003 to the PS2, in Japan, Australia and Europe it was titled simply Castlevania.
The story is about Leon Belmont setting out to save his betrothed Sara Trantoul from the vampire Walter Bernhard in 1094.
This is the story of how the Belmont clan became vampire hunters and how the legendary whip "Vampire Killer" was made.
It plays like any classic Castlevania game, but in 3d. Exploring the castle "Eternal Night" and fighting monsters and bosses and fighting bosses.
This game removed the leveling system that was used in earlier games (from Symphony of the Night), due to complains of some fans that it made the games too easy. The idea was that you instead could equip different gear to alter the difficulty according to your taste.
At the time this game was released I played Final Fantasy XI, and there was actually a rumor going around that Koji Igarashi was playing on the same server as me. If that was true (although doubtful) it could explain the lack of "polishness" of this game, since many players of FFXI where really addicted, wasting way more time in the game than doing what they where supposed to.
Expect to pay about €50 for a used copy of this game.
*Major Spoilers following this point*
The heart wrenching climax of the story is when Leon realizes that the only way to kill the vampire is to use alchemy to enhance his whip by killing someone infected by the vampire.
This is when he finally manages to rescue his betrothed, but finds out the vampire has turned her.
The fact that he consciously has to make the choice to kill her, despite the fact that only reason he went after the vampire in the first place was to save her, makes this story much more heart wrenching than Lords of Shadow could ever be.
The fact that it was Leons best friend Mathias Cronqvist who manipulated him from the beginning made a good plot twist, however it's as if the story fizzles out in the end where it is just causally mentioned that he became a vampire and later changed his name to Dracula.
This is of course the origin story of how the Belmonts acquired the whip called the "Vampire Killer" and became vampire hunters with a personal vendetta against Dracula, but somehow it feels somewhat disappointing to have it end like that.
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