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Post by munchy on Apr 1, 2014 23:20:37 GMT -5
But I don't think Castlevania is dead, no. Konami wouldn't give up so easily, not when they had LoS1's success so recently. Is it in the same ring of z-tier developer Hell that Silent Hill has been sent to? In all likelihood, yes. Alternatively, they'd foist more lazy cash-ins on us like Harmony of Despair and that iOS Super Puzzle Fighter ripoff. Like a Fruit Ninja knock off where you cut the heads off of various Hudson characters? Oy... It's really sad when news like IGA leaving Konami has me excited. His not-Castlevania will probably be way more interesting than anything else Konami will do in the foreseeable future.
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Post by Super Orbus on Apr 2, 2014 0:08:26 GMT -5
Has there actually been an announcement, or are we all just assuming IGA will go make a not-quite-Castlevania? He clearly couldn't possibly have any original ideas that Konami's been stifling all these years.
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Post by lanceboyle94 on Apr 2, 2014 2:34:16 GMT -5
How could you even mess up a game where you play as Dracula? It would have to top this. I unironically enjoy that game. Nothing beats a game where Dracula himself uses fucking Reebok Pumps. NOTHING.
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Post by derboo on Apr 2, 2014 3:11:36 GMT -5
Has there actually been an announcement, or are we all just assuming IGA will go make a not-quite-Castlevania? He clearly couldn't possibly have any original ideas that Konami's been stifling all these years. No "official" announcemenets I think, but the man has stated in interviews that that's what he wants to do.
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Post by vetus on Apr 2, 2014 3:29:20 GMT -5
Alternatively, they'd foist more lazy cash-ins on us like Harmony of Despair and that iOS Super Puzzle Fighter ripoff. I don't mind Castlevania Puzzle: Encore of the Night. I like puzzle games and this one looks decent. Not to mention that I love Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. The problem is...that there's not an Android release. Only for iOS and Windows phone.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 2, 2014 10:09:39 GMT -5
Ohoh! Here's where I get to be a Konami showoff nerd!
Castlevania Puzzle is secretly a Taisen Puzzle-dama game, a long running series that have included other Konami properties including Tokimeki Memorial and Twinbee. It actually predates Super Puzzle Fighter Turbo II, so it's probably more accurate to say that it rips off Puzzle-dama rather than the other way around. (Or rather, both of them rip off Puyo Puyo, if you want to go further back)
/SEMANTICS
As far as puzzle games go, it's pretty good, even though it suffers from the usual touch control issues and the "upgraded" sprites look terrible.
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Post by Seth0708 on Apr 2, 2014 10:41:47 GMT -5
It would have to top this. I unironically enjoy that game. Nothing beats a game where Dracula himself uses fucking Reebok Pumps. NOTHING. Please tell me he can stop the action to "pump up" his Reeboks.
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Post by lanceboyle94 on Apr 2, 2014 10:57:19 GMT -5
I unironically enjoy that game. Nothing beats a game where Dracula himself uses fucking Reebok Pumps. NOTHING. Please tell me he can stop the action to "pump up" his Reeboks. Unfortunately, nah. They do increase Drac's speed, though. Temporarily.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 2, 2014 16:03:04 GMT -5
I picked up the Lords of Shadow artbook a little while back, and there are some pieces written by the development discussing the game and its reception. David Cox said something to the effect that it initially received a lot of negative reception from fans but felt much better when the sales came back and they were told it was the Best Selling Castlevania of All Time. All complaints were just written off as just being bitter fanboys.
While yes, fans are often resistant to change, but the way these complaints were written off is really, really irritating. He's using the rationale of "It sold well, therefore it must be good", which I'm sure looks great for his career as a producer, but it comes off as really hack-y. It's like all of those showrunners and directors that make terrible movies and TV shows, but oh, they're resistant to criticism because they make a lot of money.
I think Lords of Shadow did well because of its positioning. It attracted both lapsed Castlevania fans, those that hadn't followed it to the portable entries, as well as longtime fans wanting to see what would be done with a bigger budget game. It was also a cross platform action game that was relatively decent (compared to something like Dante's Inferno) that came out at a strong point in the system's lifespan. It doesn't surprise me that it sold well.
But the real mark of whether people actually LIKE your product is if they'll buy a sequel, and that's where this reasoning falls apart. It's not really clear how much of a failure Lords of Shadow 2 is, but it's also not a success. This can probably blamed on generational fatigue, along with the fact that people are smart enough to know that games drop in price very quickly, and are not willing to pay $60 for something like this. But this still feeds into the fact that not enough people liked the first one that they were convinced to buy the second one at full price.
It's interesting to see how polarizing the game is. For example, take some NeoGAF threads. A Lords of Shadow 2 thread will have people wondering why it got so critically savaged and assumed all of those people that give it mediocre ratings are morons. Then go into a general Castlevania thread, and a fairly large percentage of people loathe it. There's little middle ground.
I only ended up on the middle ground myself because I forced myself to play them in order to write about them. I hated them at first but then grew to...not really LIKE them, but accept what they were and what they were trying to do.
What this all wraps around to is that there are certain baseline things that fans expect from a Castlevania game. You can't just ignore them and write them off as whining fanboys. If you don't want the baggage that comes with a long running franchise, don't make a new entry in a long running franchise.
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Post by TheGunheart on Apr 2, 2014 16:30:33 GMT -5
Another issue I imagine is that the demo is exactly the same as the first game. The only real change is that the Light and Dark magic give your weapon a new skin. If you didn't like the first one, this won't convince you. And if you did like it, it's just more of the same. More baffling is that this is supposed to be Dracula in his prime, and he just fights exactly as Gabriel did in the first game.
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Post by Joseph Joestar on Apr 2, 2014 16:39:30 GMT -5
Another issue I imagine is that the demo is exactly the same as the first game. The only real change is that the Light and Dark magic give your weapon a new skin. If you didn't like the first one, this won't convince you. And if you did like it, it's just more of the same. More baffling is that this is supposed to be Dracula in his prime, and he just fights exactly as Gabriel did in the first game. That was one of the big problems I had with Mirror of Fate; they tried to make a big deal about the multiple characters but they all played the same, had the same weapon, and were basically all reskins.
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Post by Scylla on Apr 2, 2014 18:16:09 GMT -5
I guess by Cox's logic, Enter the Matrix must be a fantastic game. :/
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Post by munchy on Apr 2, 2014 22:50:06 GMT -5
If you don't want the baggage that comes with a long running franchise, don't make a new entry in a long running franchise. Yep. They probably would have gotten a lot less shit if LoS just stayed its own series. But instead, when faced with this comment, most producers just say "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE CHRISTOPHER NOLAN BROADEN THE USERBASE CALL OF DUTY NUMBERS" and so on. I do appreciate LoS for A) bringing back some mainstream popularity to Castlevania, even if only for a few seconds, and B) being in essence "Castlevania: The Official Game of the Movie", which is kind of hilarious.
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Post by Discoalucard on Apr 2, 2014 23:04:31 GMT -5
and B) being in essence "Castlevania: The Official Game of the Movie" I've never heard this before, and I think it's a very adequate descriptor of what it ended up being.
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Post by TheGunheart on Apr 2, 2014 23:19:42 GMT -5
I love how the plotline boils down to a prophecy that ends up being followed to the letter. Because nothing says good writing like having the events all transpire because some ancient nameless dude said it would.
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