foxinthestars

So I did finish FMA Brotherhood, and yes, it was awesome. I think kumpania lending me .hack//SIGN reminded me how wonderful anime was after I hadn't watched much for some time. But the way this past week went, yes, it's wonderful, but I need to either get some self-control or be careful about going there...

(BTW, before anyone jumps in, I currently have no plans to watch the first series' FMA Nazi movie, so don't worry about that.)

While I'm posting, I'll link a couple choice bits out of the online comics I've been poking around.

First is MYth by Zelda Wang. It's a shoujo-inflected Greek Mythology adaptation; I read the first two arcs and liked it a lot.

Then one from the scanlation site: Adventure Boys by Mitsuru Adachi. Poking around the site, I was interested in the more adult genres (seinen and josei vs. shounen and shoujo), and I like more understated kind of stories that still have an element of fantastic wonder, and this fits that description well. It's a series of self-contained stories with shared themes of adult men having some kind of encounter with their own youth.

And finally, actual art, and maybe a consolation prize for the folks I've been standing up this past week on the Castlevania front (see first paragraph), another ATC with a cat, but this time the cat is not alone. This is Maria from Rondo of Blood (I started with her original Rondo costume and tweaked it to be a little more period).

Another week, another overdue post...

I've become a bit more aggressive about seizing the living room for DDR, so I've been working on that. I decided to go through and post a score on every Beginner-mode song (even if it was an E); Saber Wing and SAGA seriously kicked my ass, but because I have the global setting on easy (dance meter drains as slowly as possible) I managed not to fail them, and so far I think I have an A or B on everything else. A lot of the challenge songs live at the bottom of the list, so that's sure to change soon; I may use Training Mode to work on some of them. I should also try Street Master Mode when I get through the list, and maybe see what I can do with MAX2...

I've also gotten back into it and am plugging along in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (currently in the always-annoying machine tower section; moving platforms, spikes, medusa heads, blargh). As predicted, for fanfic purposes I've gotten attached to its story now, but with some tweaks; some of it just seems unnecessarily complicated, and I had my own ideas to make it mesh with, so I'm ending up with a take on it where most-to-all of the same things happened, but not for the given reasons. Anyway, I'm loving it like a Metrovania, although I was miffed to find that it's kind of buggy, apparently rushed to market, and I had one of my spells lock it up. Grr... C'mon, make us a "Greatest Hits" version and fix it up! (Except maybe the Quest Reward glitch, I can live with that one. ^_~ I haven't tried it yet, but apparently there's an instance coming up where it's so very tempting...)

I actually got out of the house yesterday. In Jessie's town there's a church whose people tend to be very nice and relatively freethinking. Formal services still don't seem to float my boat but more informal get-togethers with people from there tend to be nice (I especially like the Pastor), and they had a "writing as a Spiritual Practice" thing so I decided to go. Pastor Ellen had been reading "Writing Down the Bones," and we just did prompts with ten-minute free-writings, no religious overtones at all, actually. It was a lot of fun. The first couple I did in a totally conversational kind of tone, but after complaining about my writer's block wherein recently it seems like I can write diaristically or in summary, but not an actual fictional scene, the last prompt ("Drop this"; from "drop this ticket . . ." written on a coil of tickets from a fundraiser that was sitting on the table) then inspired me to a little piece of flash fiction, below the cut.

Today I wasn't with people being given prompts, but something sprung up in my head which for me was rather emotionally loaded ("I want you to read this book"---I am always conflicted, always want to but am always very self-conscious about sharing music/movies/books/etc that I like with people, like I'm imposing on them) and I jumped off from it in a similar way, but as a more direct free-verse poem.

( For those who want to read the results.... )

So, having finished the Castlevania timeline via playthroughs, today I'm going to wrap it up with a little omake.


First, a footnote. I haven't posted any links to Castlevania: Judgment, and I'm not going to. To put it bluntly, I am not touching that shit. From everything I can tell, at once the most generous and most damning thing you could say about it is that it was a fan-service game that the fanbase hated. For me personally, it would be like taking the pain that I expect Curse of Darkness to cause me, boiling it down into a solid mass, and constructing a game entirely of that. Plus I fucking hate Death Note. Completionist impulse be damned, I see no good reason to do that to myself. (Ironically in my fanfic universe there is a thoroughly rewritten version of Judgment's basic idea that I am actually going with, but that does not change the foregoing...)


Okay, now let's cheer up with the promised special extra! I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find this, but I did: Akumajo Special: Boku Dracula-kun! (roughly translated: "Castlevania Special: I'm Kid Dracula!"). The first was never brought to the US, but here it is in a Let's Play by DeceasedCrab, apparently using a translated rom. Notice that the first stage music is a bouncy remix of "Beginning" (the first stage theme from Dracula's Curse), and watch for the "boss" game show hosted by the Statue of Liberty (in cutesy chibi form of course).


The sequel for GameBoy did reach American shores under the title Kid Dracula, and it comes to us in a Let's Play by TheHelldragon.


Kid Dracula also appeared in some of the Parodius games. I couldn't find full playthroughs, but here is Parodius: Forever With Me in a perfect boss run as Kid Dracula by Shadowserg. I have to say, though, I'm beginning to understand why they never ported Parodius to the States as this stuff is both intensely Japanese and really flippin' weird... ^_^;;


(If I told you that Kid Dracula was in some way canon to my Castlevania universe, you'd think I was totally out to lunch, wouldn't you? Well, it's a long story... Maybe some other time.)

And with that silly little cherry on top, my linkblogging project is complete. Anyone else who was reading might have found it totally boring, but that's why I pulled back to the DW account, so that if I enjoy it I can just go with it and not worry about it, and I'm giving it its own tag for easy reference in the future, which could be handy for me. But seriously, if you're reading this, I hope you did enjoy it.

Now I'll have to come up with something else to post about... ::chin scratch::


ADDENDUM: Oh, one more Librivox public-domain audiobook for you: Carmilla.


MUCH LATER ADDENDUM: I don't expect anyone to keep track, but just so you know, I have occasionally gone back through these playthrough link posts to clean up the inevitable link rot. I actually haven't been keeping up with Castlevania so much lately, and at this time I am not going to add the games that have been released since I posted these (e.g. Harmony of Despair, Lords of Shadow).

The Castlevania Timeline via Playthroughs now brings us to the Twentieth Century... The one in which I spent the first twenty years of my life. Ooh, it's too close to home, it's getting creepy... ^.~


Turns out vampires just love World Wars, so we begin in 1917, during World War I, with Bloodlines and its two heroes. John Morris (aka Whip Dude) is a relative of Quincey Morris from Stoker's novel, and it turns out the Morrises are related to the Belmonts, or babysitting Vampire Killer for the Belmonts, or something; now, supposedly John is Quincey's son, but since John was born in 1895 and Quincey died in 1890 (see yesterday re: "the epilogue, dammit!"), I've had to finesse the whole thing quite a bit... Also chasing Dracula is John's friend Eric Lecarde from Spain (aka Spear Dude), who wields the Alucard Spear (the Genesis spelled it wrong, and yes, there is a connection, but AFAIK it is at present unexplained); the instruction manual says Eric's motivation is a dead girlfriend, but the game itself doesn't think this worth mentioning. ::eyeroll:: Bloodlines is also I believe the only appearance of Dracula's "niece," Elizabeth Bartley, as his second-banana villain.

Cutting to the chase, kingarthurpendragon posts the intro, and syxx573 brings more absurdly-proficient playthroughs, complete with endings, as John and as Eric (whose hair changes color for the cutscenes and who I choose to believe is wearing suntan-colored pants).


However, things didn't turn out so well for those two, as we learned in 1944 with Portrait of Ruin, starring Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin. Now, I actually haven't played this one and plan to soon (Christmas present from my sister and all), so I'm handling it gingerly trying not to spoil myself. Here's the intro via VideoGameOpenings (interesting username ^_~), and here once again is RodriguezJr with the playthrough---it includes both main endings at least; I'm told there's something else you can do that changes the ending a little bit, but I'm not going to fuss over it...

ADDENDUM: After playing Portrait myself, the story endeared itself to me as I rather thought it would. There are things about it I don't care so much for and that conflict with my own ideas, but overall I see a lot of potential, and am ending up with a take on it where almost all of the same things happened, just not for the given reasons.


And that's it for games this time! I told you we were into the home stretch now.

Before the century is over, however... Dracula dies. Really actually dies. Off-camera. In 1999 he was finally utterly defeated by the first actual Belmont since 1792 (where Richter went and where Julius came from are, AFAIK, not currently explained). They haven't made a game about it, we've only heard about it because even that didn't end the story! Indeed Dracula's death is only backstory for what is to come, as tomorrow we forge ahead into the future!

Our walk through Castlevania playthroughs now brings us to the Seventeen-Hundreds, a time when androgynously beautiful men with long, white hair roamed wild and free, despite being stuck in a Demon Castle---two of them, forming a sort of inverse oreo around a crunchier, more pigmented classic.

Also solidifying for myself a policy or two I was already following here (because if I let the obsessive completionist impulse take over, this thing will drive me crazy): for games with multiple endings, I will try to link all the endings, but for the cases of a bonus playable character mode, I won't bother with it unless I just want to; eg, I posted all three endings to Simon's Quest, but not a run through Lament of Innocence as Joachim (let alone Pumpkin). Also, in a linear game with alternate routes, I won't worry too much about showing every single stage, because that would also drive me crazy; I think there may be a stage or two of Dracula's Curse that we already didn't see, and it becomes a big issue today with Rondo of Blood and its remakes. So, on with the show!


When we last saw Dracula's hand, it still needed fifty years and the unintentional help of a Belmont family friend to dig the rest of him out for Harmony of Dissonance (1748), starring Simon's grandson Juste Belmont. By story chronology, this is the first "Metrovania" style game, and being that those are what I really like, I actually don't need the playthrough so much, because I do have the inclination and skill to do it for myself. But for completion's sake, or when I want to see bits again without having to replay the whole story, still posting them. This one by TheRagnarokSeeker is Hard Mode for a little added spice, although actually I picked it because it was the one I could find that didn't rush the dialogue scenes. And it has three endings (courtesy RetroDude83): Bad, Middling, and Good.

Actually having played this one, I have more to comment on it; while I still like it, it's probably the weakest Metrovania I've played (that is, vs. Symphony, Aria, and Ecclesia). The plot is all right but nothing that special---you have a mind-controlled friend and a girl to save (the girl almost seems like a third wheel by the end). The localization is half-assed, with 18th-century Wallachians spouting Japanese audio and a script that vacillates laughably between the overwrought and the vernacular. The dual-castle concept (with actions in one effecting the other) could have been better than that; as it was it felt confusing to me, and I think I finally figured out why this didn't work for Harmony where it did work for, say, Zelda: Link to the Past. Namely, there's no overarching cue as to what castle you're in at any given time---you bounce around between them before finding out what the deal is, so one isn't even uniformly harder or unfamiliar compared with the other---and which map screen has the flashing dot cannot make up for that. In Link to the Past, or indeed in Symphony of the Night, you would be hard put to forget which of the game's two worlds you're in; in Harmony, not so much. It's still a fun game though. Except maybe that brakka-frazzin' ball race maze in Castle A... ::grumble, growl::


Now, for the crunchy center, Dracula X: Rondo of Blood (1792). It introduced us to Richter Belmont and Maria Renard, and featured branching paths, cinematic cutscenes (although I have to say the '90s anime style hasn't aged well and, as appealing as they were at the time, they now look kind of ugly), and the first appearance of item crashes. Unfortunately, American fans didn't get this game for years, and I can't seem to find a playthrough with any kind of translation, not even the original game as included in Dracula X Chronicles (I once watched one with voiceover commentary that translated it, but I can't find it again). Failing that, I found this longplay by ScHlAuChi with everything: all the stages, cutscenes, endings, even, at the start, the Akumajyo Dracula Peke minigame. (I was told that "peke" is Japanese for the X shape; I looked it up and, well, it does mean "an X"... in the sense of your teacher drawing one on your paper. Thus, a perfectly adequate translation of "Akumajyo Dracula Peke" would be "Castlevania FAIL." Which is only fitting since the "game" actually was an elaborate failure message, what you got if you tried to play the original Rondo of Blood on a system without the upgrades needed to support it. And they put the thing on Dracula X Chronicles somewhere. ^__^ )

ADDENDA: I actually got a chance to watch that longplay and it doesn't include Maria's maiden rescue cutscenes, so here's a playthrough by TheDSGamer that does (in their own well-marked videos). Also, the review at Castlevania Dungeon includes an important missing piece: a translated script. (Suddenly I think Maria is only supposedly related to the Belmonts because they were too dang cheap to give Dracula different lines in each ending. Keep this in mind when I gripe about CV64 doing that stuff...)

As a bonus, my favorite Let's Player EvilTim has a partial run of Rondo, including little "lessons" on the "science" behind it, so here that is: Part One, Two, Three, and Four.


Rondo takes us back into remake territory, twice in fact! The first was its rather ignominious Super NES adaptation, Dracula X, in which Maria was not playable and the art seemed determined to mock my assertion that the original Rondo might ever look ugly. ArtificialRaven posts the objectively wrong intro (not Medieval times by a long shot), and for the playthrough we turn to this perfect run by Rugal and marvel at the dirty tricks he can do with the Key. Cychreus brings the three endings, Worst, Still Bad, and Good (I think it's only the final image that changes). But in the end, people who wanted Rondo were disappointed, and people who wanted an act fit to follow Super Castlevania IV were disappointed too, leaving many doubly-disappointed.


The first set in that Venn diagram finally got their wish when... Well, when emulators became common and robust, I expect, but they were officially granted their wish with the release of Dracula X Chronicles. It included the original Rondo and Symphony as unlockables, but the main event was a remake of Rondo, with new Ayami Kojima art and 2.5-D graphics, which make quite a lovely package (even if you shouldn't look too hard at Annette's neck). This playthrough by Rodriguezjr uses Richter but has all the stages and all the cutscenes, including Maria's versions. (The English voices make my ears bleed, but that's what the mute button is for...)


But we have one more game to finish out the century, and it's something very special to me. This is the game that made me a proper Castlevania fan, and still today my favorite, Symphony of the Night (1797). For having been asleep, Alucard sure has come a long way since Dracula's Curse! The story, while it has its flaws, is still gripping: the "mind-controlled friend" conceit hadn't yet been overplayed, and putting Richter in that role gave it some real pathos. And, this was the first Metrovania game, the one that wouldn't be equalled until the DS came along. For our playthrough, here's one by ZeromusX by DarkEvil87, including all four endings*. There was a Sega Saturn version in Japan that added some new content, but I really don't think that's worth bothering with. More interesting is the updated translation in the Dracula X Chronicles version. The original English script was pretty lame on close inspection, and the voice acting often laughably bad. The new voice acting is, for me, still not good but now not funny, but the update to the script itself is sometimes a real improvement. All I can seem to find is just a taste, from Xztophe. (I'm currently playing the Saturn version, and one of the enjoyable things about it is what I can pick up of the original Japanese dialogue, which might still be the best... ^_~)

ADDENDUM: I did turn up a Saturn-version playthrough by kubevubin, so I thought I'd just post that. It has commentary (not what I'd call a "Let's Play" though), and I don't think he shows all the endings, but wth.

And if I were to post a "my reactions" section for Symphony, I'd just end up gushing like a fangirl, so that's probably good for today. I might take a day off tomorrow since Jessie's visiting, but should be back Sunday at the latest with the last really game-heavy century.


*Prior to link-rot I had to post the "next-to-best" ending separately and realized that "next-to-best" is of course relative. Going through this describing games' various endings ("Bad, Middling, Good," "Good, Bad, Indifferent," "Good but premature, Bad but stylish, Best"), well, Symphony's four endings pretty much boil down to "Implicitly possibly good, Bad, Worse, Suicidal." I love him, but when they gave that game an angsty hero, they didn't kid around...


ADDENDUM: There was a radio drama that was a direct sequel to Symphony of the Night, "Nocturne of Recollection," which is now on YouTube with English subtitles, from DanceofGold. I haven't actually watched it and have generally not heard good things about it, but it's interesting to have.

It's confirmed. The "Green Tea" is actually Sake.

ETA: And, least surprisingly of all, the "Grape Juice" you can get in the confessional is actually Wine.

The new bed is supposed to be arriving today, finally, which led to some drama about what to do with the old futon in this overstuffed slide-puzzle of a house; only when moving it into the living room proved utterly untenable was that plan abandoned, and I still couldn't talk them into just having the furniture people haul it away... There's a chance they might not make it today due to weather, in which case I'll have to figure out where to sleep until they do, but it'll be fine.


Anyway, continuing the walk through the Castlevania timeline via online playthroughs, I've decided to take it century by century, and so today we have the Fourteen-Hundreds---before Transylvania discovered witch trials, but no need to go into that...


This brings us first to one of the old-school classics, Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse (1476). This was probably the moment when the series first began expanding from the episodic and infinitely-rehashed adventures of Simon (the only non-Simon game released before it was The Castlevania Adventure, and it didn't become entirely clear that its hero was not Simon until Belmont's Revenge came out later) into the elaborate mythos we know today, and was also the first to branch out into different kinds of playable characters. Many of its concepts have been shuffled around a lot since, but at any rate it introduced us to Trevor Belmont, Alucard (who would be much more important and awesome later), Sypha Belnades (founder of a heroic lineage to rival the Belmonts themselves), and some pirate guy. I kid Grant... ^_^; It also had incredibly awesome music for an NES game, just want to mention.

First, I feel like I should include the cinematic intro; written by a third-grader as it may appear, it's still classic. As for the rest, I turn this time to Tom Votava's runs at Speed Demos Archive (ETA: Since writing, Tom Votava's times have been beaten by Josh Ballard). The downsides are that the dialogue scenes do get rushed (they're all there but worrying the pause button might help in reading them fully) and he doesn't use Sypha much at all. On the other hand, all four endings are included in full unhurried glory, and he exploits Alucard and Grant in ways that can be fun to watch; the first time Grant climbed up through the status area to take a short cut I was like "He can't do that! Can he??" For this kind of old-school game, the sacrifices for speed don't detract from the experience the way they do with a newer, story-heavy type of game.

As for reactions, well, what can I say about this? It's one of those things I take for granted, a matter of course, but especially an old-school game like this, I take its depiction of events as a rough sketch and feel free to finesse things and improvise around it.


But speaking of newer, story-heavy games, there is one more entry from this era, far more recent but a direct story-sequel to CV3, Curse of Darkness (1479). I'm flying blind here because I haven't watched it. I have this playthrough by Rodriguezjr filed away to watch, but I'm currently resting up before I do so because, er... I expect this to hurt. A lot. (Not that I expect it's a bad game, but the story is pretty much certain to cause me some dissonance issues and I'm not the best at dealing with that kind of thing.) On the upside, when I manage it, then this will probably become even more hilarious than it is now. And any reactions should wait until then.

ADDENDA: Curse of Darkness had a preorder manga by Ayami Kojima, which helps it make more sense as the game throws you en medias res. Vampire Killer has a translated version (which reads Western-style, left-to-right; I got all confused... ^_^;). There's also another prologue manga of two volumes by Kou Sasakura, available in translated form from TokyoPop. I have it but I've only read the first half.

ADDENDA 2: Okay, I have now watched the playthrough; it hurt about as much as I expected, and I concluded that the thing is essentially bad fanfiction. By and large, not canon in my CV universe; it is possible that Hector and Isaac exist in some capacity, but the events of the game certainly don't happen.

I have fallen back into insufficient posting and insufficient Castlevania blathering, so here goes...

It occurred to me that, much as I love Symphony of the Night, the second half makes no sense. So, you don't want Dracula to be revived by Shaft, right? And he can't be just yet because his body parts are scattered through the inverted castle. So what do you-as-Alucard do? Collect all those bits together in one place! That much actually works, because if you didn't, then Shaft might do it instead and that would be bad. But once you've got them, all, then what do you do? You take them all to where Shaft is! How was that supposed to work? Wouldn't it be a lot smarter to, like, burn them, or toss them off the cliff into the body of water that's down there, or leave the castle, drop those off with Richter and Maria, and then if the castle was still there go back and deal with Shaft with those out of the picture?

I just can't figure out how it makes any sense. Except of course on the level of that being the task a video game presents you with and it's a fun game and stuff, which shouldn't be sold short after all, but I've saddled myself with trying to make more conventional sense of this crazy series, so... ^_^;;

Back in the day, the ex and I had a whole list of unintentionally humorous big name screams, and when we saw a character do that sometimes we would go through them all.

1. KHAAAAAAAAAAAN! (you should know that one)
2. COOOOOO! (obscure anime of the same name)
3. IKARAAAAAAAAAA! (first season Babylon 5 episode)
and perhaps for good measure:
4. SQUANTOOOOOOOOOH! ...a warrior's tale... (self-consciously funny MST3K version)

Well, I've got one to add to the list now. I guess my desire to fold Lament into the fanfic universe hit critical mass, my ability to play it was falling short of requirements to just see the story already, so I watched a YouTube playthrough of it with all the cutscenes, wth. I'll just say someone screamed someone else's name in that ham-and-cheese kind of way.

I think there's also a rule somewhere that all Succubi must have annoying and laughable voice acting. I expect the whole thing plays better in Japanese with subtitles.

The plot did strike me as kind of dumb in places. It's fun to go through it replacing every mention of "the Ebony Stone" with "the MacGuffin" and "the Crimson Stone" with "the Super-Deluxe MacGuffin." In general it was like it had trouble threading the needle between clichéd and contrived, but there's definitely stuff here I can work with. Maybe some finessing and retooling, but nothing too drastic...

Of course this one was made during my long hiatus from CV from about 2001-2008 (from Circle of the Moon to Order of Ecclesia in game-release terms). They did a lot with the series in that time and it was a lot to absorb and try to work in. I'm still not done sussing it all out; Portrait of Ruin is completely up in the air whether I'll use it. Curse of Darkness I still think is going to get trashed (or at least mostly trashed), but you never quite know...

Of course some of them, my knee-jerk is to ignore them, then I play them and get attached to them and decide to work them in and it generally comes out to my liking. (When I get around to playing Portrait of Ruin I think the odds are in its favor in this kind of way...) My first instinct was actually not to use Lament at all, but then I thought of how it could work quite nicely together with how I had finessed the Sonia thing, and started liking the idea and here I am now...

BTW, by "finessed" the Sonia thing I mean I took a wrecking ball to that game and left nothing standing but the fact that there was a Sonia Belmont who fought Dracula before Trevor did. (Alucard, btw, not involved; he wouldn't be born for another century or so in my timeline.) The idea was that, as legend had it, the Belmont vampire hunting legacy began with her, previously a poor peasant-type-person, when an angel appeared to her and told her to destroy the evil creatures of the night, and when she protested that she had no money for a sword or anything, the angel told her that the whip she used to drive animals would be her sacred weapon, and so off she went.

I still liked that, and then I thought, I could use Lament and still keep it. So... What do you suppose that "angel" looked like? (And how horrified do you suppose he was to find the kids, er, using his whip for a whip? We might get a reprise of that cheesy name scream...)

When challenged by a woman cow-herder, Dracula thought it was pretty damn funny that Leon's promised vengeance showed up looking like that. Funny until she kicked his ass, anyway.

(Just telling little bits of the story on my blog might not be interesting to anyone but me, but I remember, when I started this blog, I had tried to resolve not to care about such things; I'd rather blather about things no one else cares about than not blather at all, if it comes to that...)

I do like to do little bits and pieces of the research, but let's be honest, in any terms distantly approaching historical accuracy, Castlevania is a hopeless case. I fired up this video via Google, L'ed MAO within 20 seconds, and haven't even tried at the rest yet...



Crusades won't begin for a year. That is indeed important.

(Also on the accuracy front, I was actually looking for a Lament vid because while my copy of it is right here, my PS2 is 20 miles away, so the internet is the easiest way to check the sound of Leon's whip. It's amusing to me that while so many Castlevania heroes use basically a bullwhip, seldom if ever do we hear said whip crack. Most of the time it acts nothing like a real whip whatsoever, mind, and makes a nifty-in-its-own-right, perhaps even better than realistic sound, but I'm amused that in this respect it would act more boring than realism would recommend. ... Found a more mundane Lament vid now; Leon doesn't seem to actually crack the whip either, it just makes swooshing sounds unless it hits something.)

There's also the fact that, as has been pointed out, pretty much every female character in the CV3/1470s timeframe has faced the threat of being burned as a witch, one being killed that way even somewhat earlier. I just got done taking a "History of Witch Hunts" course*. Witch-burning didn't actually hit the bigtime as we think of it until about 1550, and came later in Eastern locales like Transylvania and Wallachia than to the French and Germans who pretty much thought it up. (Persisted a little later by similar token---which is why the supposedly-backward east takes so much of the rap for stuff that more western Europeans actually invented and did more of.) 1470s or earlier, you would not have had witch trials in what is now Romania. None.

Witch beliefs and reactions thereto are another matter of course; in my fanfic universe I finessed this with Lisa being burned by a vigilante mob rather than the Inquisition. Like I said, doing bits and pieces of the research makes me feel better...

Trying to make it all square, tho, will just drive you nuts---I knew that even before that Lament vid. There are no Ottomans, there are no Habsburgs, everybody's nominally Catholic, it's a videogame story, just relax... Hell if you go back to the original Castlevania the whole thing seems to have started as a lark; "Let's have some guy fight every movie monster, and base the title and credits roll on lame wordplay."

Basically my rule of thumb is that historical research is to be a creative not a destructive element. It's working pretty well so far. Like the above adjustment with Lisa I rather like. I had thought that Maria got Alucard a necklace, but it was research into period jewelry that suggested it might be a tiny painting of her in watercolor on ivory, which is like way cooler than what I would have just made up. (Okay, so portrait miniatures at that time were probably not as common in now-Romania than say England but still, people and stuff get around...)


*Must remember to talk later about the whole classes and history business...


ETA: I actually did watch the rest of the vid; pretty entertaining but I never did quite lose it again like that first 20 seconds revelation... The other highlight is at 17:45 where he covers the Sonia issue, and, er... I pretty much concur with his assessment. I finessed that too, but I think the original creators don't have the options I do, and it's easier for them to just give a game an "in or out" than to say "Yes but it was way different, see what really happened is..." Whereas me with my fanfic, I can just rewrite anything I want to, hah!