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foxinthestarsCastlevania playthrough link time! I am on the downslope of it now, and especially after this entry it should get pretty easy...
Today it's the Eighteen-Hundreds, era of hard Metrovanias, mass timeline confusion, and questionable canonicity. Although Richter was last seen in 1797, we return to find the Belmonts having mysteriously vanished long since, and uncorroborated sightings of their whip turning up willy-nilly... Depending on what games you believe.
Our first stop is an unspecified point early in the century with Order of Ecclesia, the most recent and one of the most challenging of the Metrovanias, and a favorite of mine. I couldn't help getting attached to Shanoa. First you have to see the intro cinema (posted by RedQueeney), because it is just so freakin' awesome; also a beautiful showcase of Shanoa's theme music, "An Empty Tome." As for playthroughs, the ones I had originally posted all broke, and now I'm finding this one by Cychreus; the video is pinched to include both screens, but it's the best that came readily to hand. I also don't know if it includes both endings, so just in case, here they are, from Blackwyn.
Next we come to 1830 and Circle of the Moon, starring Nathan Graves, the other of the most challenging Metrovanias. For the playthrough, TheRagnarokSeeker comes to my rescue. This was the second Metrovania made, and as I remember, at the time I snapped it up because I'd loved Symphony so much, but... Well, if you want and expect another Symphony of the Night, that's really not what Circle is at all (plus there were the visibility issues of the early GBA models). I was pretty disappointed and never played it much. It's in my queue at present, and I'm sure it's a good game now that I know what to expect of it (and have plenty of other "another one like Symphony" games so I don't feel stuck with it, you know), but I'm not prioritizing it against Dawn of Sorrow or Portrait of Ruin. That this would be in my story-canon is also highly unlikely, but in some ways that matters and in others it really doesn't.
Finishing out the century's games are two that I will effectively treat as one: Castlevania 64 and Legacy of Darkness. CV64 was set in 1852 and included the two heroes Reinhardt Schneider and Carrie Fernandez (a belatedly-accurate transliteration of "Belnades"). Legacy was essentially a "director's cut" of the first game and included Carrie and Reinhardt, but also Cornell's prequel story set in 1844, and Henry Oldrey on his own mission in the first game's timeframe. For Carrie and Reinhardt, the changes between versions aren't significant enough for me to bother about which I can find, but I do want to cover all four characters, since they have at least slightly different stories. First, here is a CV64 Reinhardt Schneider run by UnitedVirusX, then a Legacy of Darkness Carrie Run by Torentsu (the order of the videos is jacked up so you'll just have to click through them). As for Cornell and Henry, DarkMandrill is working on a complete run of Legacy and has both their stories finished (plus, at present, a partial Reinhardt run, if you want to see the other version of him)---eta: all four characters now complete.
These games are also the moment when EvilTim really shines, having full hilarious-as-ever Let's Plays for three of the four characters---and he shows all the endings for the characters he plays, so it is to him I turn for that. Here he is LPing C64 as Carrie (serendipitously covering both versions of her), and Legacy as Cornell and Henry. He doesn't cover Reinhardt (although you will hear what he thinks of Reinhardt), which means we haven't yet seen Reinhardt's bad ending; the best I can do there (click through to the second part) is a guy who shamelessly rips off EvilTim's jokes and isn't as good at it, but the video quality, despite some glitchiness toward the end, is the best I can find, and Reinhardt's bad ending is all about a certain not-so-compression-friendly visual detail, so......
These games are probably what inspired this whole linkblogging project; I decided to do this after actually watching all the stuff I just linked to, wasting way too much time I'm sure, but especially the EvilTim stuff was great fun, and it resolved the question I had by putting this safely out of my own Castlevania canon. The writing is even lamer and the plot even more absurd than usual; Carrie and Reinhardt especially suffer for their two "different" stories having verbatim-identical scripts for most events, and as for Dracula's apparent plan, well... Let me get this straight. Dracula gets revived in 1844---call this Dracula A; typical Rondo-esque random maiden sacrifice brings him back as the usual eight-foot-tall Gothic badass. He then enacts some gambit and turns into Krang the Legless Bat-Winged Rhinoceros Man and gets himself killed just to scam Cornell out of his wolf-self, which is then used as the uber-sacrifice to immediately revive him again as Dracula B. Given this setup, you would expect Dracula B to be something really special, just totally unstoppable, right? But in fact, Dracula B is a villager baby, whom his villager parents helpfully labelled by naming him the Latin word for "Evil." Eight years on, he hasn't got his act together, so his underlings Actrise and Gilles kidnap a bunch of village kids to find him as though he wasn't helpfully labelled. Gilles then impersonates Dracula A (really well! some player's guide is the only reason we "know" that's who that is), giving Dracula B time to get lost in a hedge maze and be vaguely creepy before flying around on a unicorn and finally turning into a barechested prettyboy followed by an atomic-powered dragon with a centipede for a butt, none of which seems to help noticeably more than the Rhinoceros-Krang thing did or indeed any of his incarnations have. Maybe I'm giving the rest of the series too much credit but that really does seem more absurd than usual. In general, the rules seem different in this story than the ones I've already internalized, and while fun in its way, this isn't worth tying myself in knots to incorporate into what I'm doing.
BTW, this is also where the post title came from. Between his underlings' gear and the "Room of Inventions," Dracula has, in 1844, motorbikes with mounted machine-guns, chainsaws, a zeppelin, a telephone, a radio, what appears to be a flippin' difference engine, and atomic fire-breath. So he invented everything. Except that this isn't canon, so he didn't. (I'm used to a certain amount of anachronism in a Castlevania game, of course, but they took it a little too far.)
So, those are all the games that take place in the 1800s, but there is one more piece to the puzzle that I'd like to just throw in here as a bonus... However loosely, Dracula by Bram Stoker---yes, the novel---is canon to the Castlevania universe, a fact which will become important in our next entry. As far as I can tell they didn't do a very good job of incorporating it (It takes place in 1890 not '97! Read the epilogue, dammit! ::cough:: Sorry, pet peeve...), but there it is, and I bring it to you as a free public-domain audiobook from the good folks at Librivox! I used to be one of those good folks myself, and in fact, that silly girl trying to sound variously like a British tourist and a Hollywood vampire in Chapter 2? ::nod:: (ETA 14 July: Librivox now has another version of Dracula, this one done as a dramatic reading, since it is an epistolary novel.) Of course if you prefer plain text, it's Project Gutenberg to the rescue, or the nearest competent bookstore. There's even a furry webcomic version, partial but good, and uncommonly faithful. For God's sake, don't watch the movie. ::shudder::
Into the home stretch!
Today it's the Eighteen-Hundreds, era of hard Metrovanias, mass timeline confusion, and questionable canonicity. Although Richter was last seen in 1797, we return to find the Belmonts having mysteriously vanished long since, and uncorroborated sightings of their whip turning up willy-nilly... Depending on what games you believe.
Our first stop is an unspecified point early in the century with Order of Ecclesia, the most recent and one of the most challenging of the Metrovanias, and a favorite of mine. I couldn't help getting attached to Shanoa. First you have to see the intro cinema (posted by RedQueeney), because it is just so freakin' awesome; also a beautiful showcase of Shanoa's theme music, "An Empty Tome." As for playthroughs, the ones I had originally posted all broke, and now I'm finding this one by Cychreus; the video is pinched to include both screens, but it's the best that came readily to hand. I also don't know if it includes both endings, so just in case, here they are, from Blackwyn.
Next we come to 1830 and Circle of the Moon, starring Nathan Graves, the other of the most challenging Metrovanias. For the playthrough, TheRagnarokSeeker comes to my rescue. This was the second Metrovania made, and as I remember, at the time I snapped it up because I'd loved Symphony so much, but... Well, if you want and expect another Symphony of the Night, that's really not what Circle is at all (plus there were the visibility issues of the early GBA models). I was pretty disappointed and never played it much. It's in my queue at present, and I'm sure it's a good game now that I know what to expect of it (and have plenty of other "another one like Symphony" games so I don't feel stuck with it, you know), but I'm not prioritizing it against Dawn of Sorrow or Portrait of Ruin. That this would be in my story-canon is also highly unlikely, but in some ways that matters and in others it really doesn't.
Finishing out the century's games are two that I will effectively treat as one: Castlevania 64 and Legacy of Darkness. CV64 was set in 1852 and included the two heroes Reinhardt Schneider and Carrie Fernandez (a belatedly-accurate transliteration of "Belnades"). Legacy was essentially a "director's cut" of the first game and included Carrie and Reinhardt, but also Cornell's prequel story set in 1844, and Henry Oldrey on his own mission in the first game's timeframe. For Carrie and Reinhardt, the changes between versions aren't significant enough for me to bother about which I can find, but I do want to cover all four characters, since they have at least slightly different stories. First, here is a CV64 Reinhardt Schneider run by UnitedVirusX, then a Legacy of Darkness Carrie Run by Torentsu (the order of the videos is jacked up so you'll just have to click through them). As for Cornell and Henry, DarkMandrill is working on a complete run of Legacy and has both their stories finished (plus, at present, a partial Reinhardt run, if you want to see the other version of him)---eta: all four characters now complete.
These games are also the moment when EvilTim really shines, having full hilarious-as-ever Let's Plays for three of the four characters---and he shows all the endings for the characters he plays, so it is to him I turn for that. Here he is LPing C64 as Carrie (serendipitously covering both versions of her), and Legacy as Cornell and Henry. He doesn't cover Reinhardt (although you will hear what he thinks of Reinhardt), which means we haven't yet seen Reinhardt's bad ending; the best I can do there (click through to the second part) is a guy who shamelessly rips off EvilTim's jokes and isn't as good at it, but the video quality, despite some glitchiness toward the end, is the best I can find, and Reinhardt's bad ending is all about a certain not-so-compression-friendly visual detail, so......
These games are probably what inspired this whole linkblogging project; I decided to do this after actually watching all the stuff I just linked to, wasting way too much time I'm sure, but especially the EvilTim stuff was great fun, and it resolved the question I had by putting this safely out of my own Castlevania canon. The writing is even lamer and the plot even more absurd than usual; Carrie and Reinhardt especially suffer for their two "different" stories having verbatim-identical scripts for most events, and as for Dracula's apparent plan, well... Let me get this straight. Dracula gets revived in 1844---call this Dracula A; typical Rondo-esque random maiden sacrifice brings him back as the usual eight-foot-tall Gothic badass. He then enacts some gambit and turns into Krang the Legless Bat-Winged Rhinoceros Man and gets himself killed just to scam Cornell out of his wolf-self, which is then used as the uber-sacrifice to immediately revive him again as Dracula B. Given this setup, you would expect Dracula B to be something really special, just totally unstoppable, right? But in fact, Dracula B is a villager baby, whom his villager parents helpfully labelled by naming him the Latin word for "Evil." Eight years on, he hasn't got his act together, so his underlings Actrise and Gilles kidnap a bunch of village kids to find him as though he wasn't helpfully labelled. Gilles then impersonates Dracula A (really well! some player's guide is the only reason we "know" that's who that is), giving Dracula B time to get lost in a hedge maze and be vaguely creepy before flying around on a unicorn and finally turning into a barechested prettyboy followed by an atomic-powered dragon with a centipede for a butt, none of which seems to help noticeably more than the Rhinoceros-Krang thing did or indeed any of his incarnations have. Maybe I'm giving the rest of the series too much credit but that really does seem more absurd than usual. In general, the rules seem different in this story than the ones I've already internalized, and while fun in its way, this isn't worth tying myself in knots to incorporate into what I'm doing.
BTW, this is also where the post title came from. Between his underlings' gear and the "Room of Inventions," Dracula has, in 1844, motorbikes with mounted machine-guns, chainsaws, a zeppelin, a telephone, a radio, what appears to be a flippin' difference engine, and atomic fire-breath. So he invented everything. Except that this isn't canon, so he didn't. (I'm used to a certain amount of anachronism in a Castlevania game, of course, but they took it a little too far.)
So, those are all the games that take place in the 1800s, but there is one more piece to the puzzle that I'd like to just throw in here as a bonus... However loosely, Dracula by Bram Stoker---yes, the novel---is canon to the Castlevania universe, a fact which will become important in our next entry. As far as I can tell they didn't do a very good job of incorporating it (It takes place in 1890 not '97! Read the epilogue, dammit! ::cough:: Sorry, pet peeve...), but there it is, and I bring it to you as a free public-domain audiobook from the good folks at Librivox! I used to be one of those good folks myself, and in fact, that silly girl trying to sound variously like a British tourist and a Hollywood vampire in Chapter 2? ::nod:: (ETA 14 July: Librivox now has another version of Dracula, this one done as a dramatic reading, since it is an epistolary novel.) Of course if you prefer plain text, it's Project Gutenberg to the rescue, or the nearest competent bookstore. There's even a furry webcomic version, partial but good, and uncommonly faithful. For God's sake, don't watch the movie. ::shudder::
Into the home stretch!
