Castlevania: Nocturne

I feel like I enjoyed the flagship Castlevania series, especially the earlier seasons, and I'm not certain what happened here. The voice acting is decent - especially Zahn McClarnon as Olrox - and the animation is okay. The storyline is a big whiff at the plate.

My biggest pet peeve is the stakes (no pun intended) are so low: characters seem to be both invincible and never removed permanently from the storyline. After this happens over and over you start to feel like what's the point of these battles if there's never any real consequences. I'm also a stickler for consistency so if you're a mortal and are hit by a goddess.......you should probably die (granted so many shows are guilty of this).

The Edouard storyline is grimacingly bad and at the end of the second season I just started skipping all his scenes, which seemed artificially emo. The storyline jumps all over the place, especially in the second season, and I feel like they really did Erzsebet a disservice. She is such a bland and one-dimensional antagonist, there was a real chance to make her complex and interesting.

Finally, the show should have leaned more into Belmont/Alucard, who deserved so much more screen time than they received, this is Castlevania after all.

I really loved the first series as far as adaptation goes, back when Nocturne got announced I was stoked to see how they could keep the plotlines fresh. In this case, Nocturne is a beatifully animated show, with a few hiccups which don't retract from the experience, the sound is good, however voice acting ranges from good to fine.

As for story, this is where I'm conflicted, on one hand the plot is good and Erzebeth Bathory is a good pick for a villain, but... what the actual hell is up with the writing? Dialogues seem stiff, leaving little depth, they get so bad at times that it just took me out of the experience. With that said, I like Nocturne despite these issues, I hope that they will improve when the second season comes out, there's still a chance for it going from good to great..

What I heavily enjoyed about the first Castlevania and its characters was regardless of ethnicities, it didn't detract from the identity of the series. The dungeon crawling grimdark fantasy vibes focusing on a band of adventurers coming together to cleanse the world of greater evils. It was bleak, it was fun, it was action packed, and it never detracted from staying on target. All the characters, even the villains, had their roles to play in this setup and it was executed perfectly. Each season had substantial plot progression and action, from the main cast getting acquainted to raiding Dracula's castle all by the end of the first season. It was an incredibly fun watch, that only continued to build up with the following 2 seasons.

Meanwhile Nocturne has turned the series into your typical political drama, pulled straight from the news networks of the modern day. No longer is every episode about venturing into some new bleak unknown territory of a grimdark fantastical world; instead, it's about corrupt political figures, slavery and the complacency of white people, the ethics of conquest etc. Every episode seems to have sacrificed the adventurous dungeon crawling aspects instead for monologue about the ethics of the listed talking points above. I didn't mind it at first, but when it dragged on the entire season I'd long since grown tired of it. Especially when you consider how much plot was covered in the first season by comparison, from meeting in a village plagued with demonic undead to storming Dracula's castle. Let's just say, the main cast barely accomplished anything by the end of this first season, one could argue they didn't actually accomplish anything at all.

Overall, the animation was beautiful, but the plot in itself dragged and didn't seem to accomplish anything substantial. It's obvious the creators have a new vision in mind when it comes to what they want this story to accomplish. Less adventure and action, more political talking points and debates about religions, race, conquest etc. 80% of this series is them monologuing about these topics while remained secluded in the same village throughout. What little action there is feels like meaningless filler that doesn't really progress the plot in any form outside of the last 1min of the season for spoiler reasons. However, the rest is meaningless. Definitely in no rush for a Season 2 and I "may" check it out, but overall, this series has pretty much killed my interest in following the plotline of Castlevania.

This show LOOKS amazing, but the storytelling and dialogue fall short. It struggles to keep an interesting pace and the characters have little to no chemistry that doesn't feel extremely forced. When lines are delivered that are meant to be strong and impactful they instead fall flat and sound cliche. It doesn't help that sometimes this show seems to be preaching to its audience instead of letting them create their own opinions. The animation is still great in most places and the fight scenes are excellent, but the story drastically suffers from my before mentioned points. Some interesting concepts are sprinkled throughout, but they are too few and far between to keep some viewers interested.

The drawing style is pretty good though I feel the previous series was slightly better as it had better atmosphere.

The main issue is that the story moves too far from the original formula.

The new story is set in Revolutionary France but everything is "micro-adjusted" to fit a specific artificial narrative. Feels a like like the characters, story, dialogue all are forced into specific boxes.

The characters are more diverse cast now. Dracula no longer relevant instead is been replaced by another antagonist and she's not as scary to be honest. Belmont has been nerfed into a an insecure, young weakling. They tried to make it look strong by giving him raunchy lines but just looks bad.

The show keeps trying to associate revolution with emancipation and freedom and monarchy with vampires and evil at every corner.

Overall I'd say is not worth watching. The quality of their shows is getting worse and worse. The dialogue of the show is just terrible.

Animation 9/10 Characters 5/10 Story 2/10.