Wherein a Mexican Punches The Devil In The Face

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

That's out of the way, I figure I might as well post that before some zealous advocate of video game story writing decides to put my head on a pike.  Unlikely for various reasons, but I like to cover my ass all the same.

About 4 months or so ago, I borrowed my brother-in-law's copy of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow because, you know, I live with them and it's significantly cheaper then buying or even renting my own copy.  I'm poor, my options are limited.  I'd been wanting to try the game out for a while, and I had...  minimal hopes for the game.  Plus, Patrick Stewart.

You're now reading this in his voice.

So, I popped in the game, booted it up, and was greeted by the standard credits spiel.  Also was assaulted by the 'KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS' icon, but I shrugged that aside, having been made painfully aware of this fact some time ago by rabid fanboys and the internet in general.  The two terms are mutually inclusive, I know.  Regardless, I started up a new game, serenaded by the sensual tone's of Sir Patrick Stewart's monumentally comforting voice and after few cutscenes, I find myself in control of Gabriel Belmont, wielder of the Vampire Killer!

Only he's not really a Belmont, it's just a name he chose when he was adopted by the Order.

And it's not really the Vampire Killer, it's the Combat Cross.  But that's okay, because we're still freely exploring the environment oh it's stage based gameplay okay.

Oh, and it's an action title, I remembered that much, so let's see how unique you play oh right it's just God of War with gothic elements.

....You know, I liked God of War as much as the next guy, and it really was a fun game.  I enjoyed it immensely, and you know, as much as it's contributed to the action genre of gaming, it's done that much more to ruin it.  Snappy, responsive controls keep Castlevania from getting frustrating, and the camera, while fixed, does a mostly competent job of staying centered on the action, though the often small hallways and environments tend to do really hinder the action and clutter the combat.  Combat itself is fairly interesting, deviating from GoW's Light/Strong attack paradigm and more on Single/Area attacks.  This is actually fairly interesting on paper, since you could forego heavy strikes in favor of keeping enemies away to stay alive to inflict more pain...  But your area attacks, even the more advanced ones you get, are severely underwhelming, and you'll end up spamming the same moves over and over again.  This gets alleviated a bit since there's little to no delay in your strikes, so it's less of an annoyance, but it's still irritating when you've burnt 6000 Experience Points on an area clearing super finisher that gets overshadowed by it's simpler, less time consuming Chain Shield.

Defense is standard fair, hold L to defend and use it at just the right moment to parry and create openings.  This'd be great and awesome if you didn't accidentally roll out of the damn way whenever you block and face an enemy.  Forgoing GoW's right stick dodge for some silly ass reason, despite NEVER using the right stick at all in game, it's a really clumsy mechanic, and it harms the player more than helps.  My real beef though, and this is just me being a pedantic asshole I think, is the ever present Quick Time Events that rear their ugly heads like some hellish hydra of mediocrity.

"Argh!  This shitty metaphor tastes like pain!"

I know that gaming technology has become a lot more sophisticated from the 16 bit scrollers of yesteryear, and as such, production and even shock values have risen appropriately with them.  God of War managed to  make itself relevant and even game changing though with Quick Time Events that were short, easy, and were fun to pull off (smashing an oracle's face into a book lolololol)  Also yes, I'm aware the Shenmue was the first one to technically do this, but let's face it, Shenmue was less than stellar in that and many respects.  The mechanic was done in God of War competently, and while still present in Castlevania, it's clunky, uninspired, and frankly cumbersome, and the scenes that it's used for belong in Devil May Cry, which doesn't use QTE oddly enough.  For example, one scene involves you grappling up a giant collossus (sorta awesome) breaking it apart bit by bit (still awesome) only to culminate in getting to the top, swinging out...!

And grabbing a crystal thrown at you by the mute psychic girl down below to stab into it's face.

It should be mentioned that most of climbing up the boss is done in QTE, so it doesn't really carry much of the grand and sweeping nature that most Colossi slaying should carry.  As a point of order, and as Yahtzee has mentioned in his own review of the game, the game seems heavily derivative of other games, but doesn't really manage to pull off any of them with a particular bit of flair.

Still, their were some amazing portions of the game that I genuinely enjoyed.  The environments made my jaw drop, and for good reason.  The production sketches (which you can also unlock for relatively cheap) show some painstaking work on the areas, enemies and even scenes, which I just found myself staring at in artistic bliss.  While the actual castle of legend itself is only referenced in passing, the castle stage was the most intricately designed place I'd seen in a game to date, and you could tell that even though the designers may not have had fun with the design work, there was a lot of love and care put into it.

Which staggers me as to why the last area of the game seemed so phoned in.  This isn't me being a stickler, because yes, I'm aware that there is a LOT of work and planning that goes into a single level in any game, and I've had designer friends make this argument to me; I'm aware of all this.  The Valley of the Dead, or whatever it was, is a particularly egregious example of cutting corners.  The game's Lords of Shadow are the meat and bones of the bosses you fight, and there are three of them.  The Lycan Lord, the Vampire Lord, and The Necromancer Lord.  You fight two of them, and their areas are phenomenally designed.  Once you get to the Land of the Dead though, it becomes, appropriately, a barren wasteland devoid of life...  and that's about it.  You don't even get to fight Death, which is unheard of in a Castlevania game!  And his design is so fucking generic and simple in the cutscene you see him in that it just screams COP OUT from all sides.  I felt like I was being menaced by a fucking sock puppet!

He babbles in tongues and the language of the damned.

And the highly anticipated final fight just left me confused and bewildered.  The big bad (who you WILL see coming from a mile away if you're up on video game betrayals and characters) comes out of fucking nowhere, and suddenly you find yourself fighting SATAN.  Not even Dracula, not even the true Belmont or whatever, no.  You're pitted against Satan.  Who was rallying to fight against God because he was a fallen angel, or his son?  Shit, I don't know, the whole thing just crumbled like a Jenga tower made from matzoh.  Anyways, you punch Satan in the dick in a very animu style because hey, it's Satan.  Some kind of rhetoric about mankind, forgiveness, and being granted your own fate, yadda yadda, and then ending.

Oh, and apparently the stinger (which lasted a good ten minutes) reveals that Zobek is still around, he's younger now, and that Gabriel has become Dracula.  Oh, and they're supposed to fight Satan again.

I'm not going to bother with a quote beneath that one because I was too fucking dumbstruck by this revelation.  And you're supposed to be playing as Alucard in the next game if what my sister tells me is accurate.  (She got to go to E3.  I didn't.  Go figure.)

I could go into an angry tirade against the direction the series has gone, and that Kojima should stick to Metal Gear or whatever, but it's getting late and I have to fulfill the quota of my presence to the people in my life, lest I become some kind of fetid social vagrant or hobo.  The bottom line is that games should make you feel like something was achieved, and they give you a sense of accomplishment upon completion.  CV: LOS just left me uncomfortably numb after I was done with it, and made me want to demand my time back.  All (cumulative) ten hours of it.  Seriously, the game, for what it was worth at the time, is heinously short.