Those games were shit but I dislike LoS more.
I can’t let that shit go. They made it trying to be hip and new while jocking GoW. In can pay homage all it wants but at its core Lords of Shadow just ain’t castlevania.
Both were attempts to redefine what CV was for a new generation in the same way SoTN redefined the franchise when it came out - borrowing the template from another franchise and then improving on it. The problem was that neither improved on the GoW template tge way SoTN did on Super Metroid.
FWIW, I’ve always felt that the Souls games would have been a better template to copy from.
At least we know its an extreme bias thats getting in the way of the conversation, and not the actual quality of the product at hand.
Now that we know its a crime for CV to have a bit of a similarity to another game, you’ll all have to excuse me while i throw all my Iga CV games in garbage for ripping off Metroid. I can not be a part of this hypocrisy any longer!!! I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!!!
being a total dick about it
Dislike LoS more than those two? LoS wasn’t a strong outing but had it’s moments of being good. Hating LoS more…are you retarded? Is your favorite color 12?
I’m biased as fuck.
I’ll give some leeway and say LoS 1 was better than those 2.
Still dislike the direction those games took over anything the series has done.
Eat your words sir, SOTN did not improve on Super Metroid at all, in fact it does a lot of shit way way worse. It did exaclty what these guys are crying LOS did, which was ape the Super Metroid format without understanding a lot of what made that game great. Much worse level design being only the beginning
Sooooo…what’s everyone’s opinion on Curse of Darkness?
Personally I thought LoS did improve on GoW. It had it greater degree of depth to it’s combat then GoW, enemies would force you to switch up your tactics and light and dark magic make things interesting.
It’s awful.
Could have been decent, if they bothered to actually playtest the familiar system.
That was one of the things that bothered me the most. They could’ve come up with some way for you to control some of the familiar’s abilities, but it the system was a direct copy of SOTN.
(I legitimately wasn’t even aware that Curse of Darkness existed until like a month ago.)
It seems to have good music, but that’s all I know about it and apparently that’s probably the extent of what the majority of people seem to think is good about it. Shrug.
Is not great, but i like it
I can’t believe some of the stupid shit I’m reading here. The bias is so strong with some people it’s ridiculous. LoS games have bad music? You fucking kidding me? I have to wonder if anyone has actually sat down and listened to the music on its own and judged it for itself. Stuff like the The Ice Titan theme is fucking awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4-AVow9WBc
There is a lot of great material in the music. The production values are phenomenal for a game soundtrack and especially a series that was always 2nd tier low budget. A full orchestral score using live musicians? I love Yamane’s music but 90% of the time it was all samples and Iga never pushed to get live music for what’s some of the best music in the history of gaming.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tug9a0X-mM4&list=PL79DA330B8AE4C836&index=11
Compare this Cv4 song to The Ice Titan. Both are pretty similar styles, using strings for fast staccato, thunderous percussion, horns for lower harmonies and so on. Anyone who likes Cv4’s music and then says LoS’s is shit is retarded. Flat out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESuCH2E1k5U&index=12&list=PL21791DA20B55E7E9
Just stupid epic music right? I mean so epic, there isn’t anything calm or tranquil about it…
Then I see some of you writing the atmosphere was nothing like Castlevania? Did you fuckers even play LoS? A whole 3rd of the game takes places on a castle owned by clan Bernhard that just happens to be called Castlevania… I mean it’s not like you didn’t slay vampires there, stroll across massive chains in the full moonlight. The second game didn’t totally take place inside a castle at all, either…
Then ya’ll compare the combat to GoW claiming it’s a rip off? Hooookay…
Curse of Darkness sucked. Atrocious game. Somehow they made the levels have even lower texture quality and compression than LoI (seriously, compare both games, it’s actually WORSE in CoD) and dumbed the combat down. Then they made the game 4x longer than its successor. It’s like when making CoD they took all the praise LoI had, crumbled it up and threw it out the window, and then took all the criticism LoI had and turned it up to 11. Wait, you guys like the combat in LoI and thought it was pretty freestyle and cool? Nah, we’re going Dynasty Warriors. Wait, you guys hated the levels in LoI? Fuck you, we’re going to make them even more copy & paste boring and make them like 500x longer.
CoD had 4 good things going for it. 1, the music was really good. 2, the character and enemy models were really good for the time, minus the pea sized heads. 3, the boss battles were really cool, especially the zombie dragon. Dracula was actually pretty hard in that game, too. 4, the crafting system was great. It was fun to make new weapons and pick a style you liked and go with it.
Other than that? All the things that actually make a game a game, like level design and interacting with enemies and obstacles in your path? Pathetic.
While Lament was a very flawed game from a level design standpoint, the levels being rather small stopped it from being too much to play through the game. It did what it needed to do, which was set up combat arenas for you to kick the shit out of enemies with a pretty cool combat system inspired by DMC. You also didn’t have to grind for XP and shit so you could actually play through the game based on skill and blow through it entirely in about 4 to 5 hours, which isn’t too bad for what it was.
The LoS games pretty much shit all over Iga’s 3D attempts (including Nanobreaker, another formulaic Iga game with atrociously flat level design) from almost every single design perspective you could throw at it with the exception of art design and music, which both Iga’s and MS’s attempts excel at.
Castlevania should have never went 3D. 
Thats an argument that could be made for a lot of games.
Street Fighter 
Now KoF too. 3s and 13 were such a beautiful games, too. I want my 2D games back.
One thing SM did so great was pacing. Everything in SM was designed around the tools you have. There was no leveling up, there was no grinding, there was only well designed levels and enemies for what you were given. SotN has a ton of completely useless shit in it thrown in as an after thought. I love the game but this is one aspect of it that SM spanks it. SotN has so many worthless weapons and items that people probably got only for the sole purpose of a 100% complete save. I know I did it. Out of hundreds of items, only a handful had real uses. Some stuff was really cool but also impractical such as the Sword of Dawn. Probably the most time spent on SotN for everyone was the gotta-catch-em-all aspect to item collection. Every Iga game has that, and it’s a pretty huge time sink. Imagine instead if they had focused giving Alucard a smaller great set of tools instead of an extremely large mostly worthless set of tools? The game could have been that much better, and that’s saying something considering how good the game already is.
There difference in both game’s level designs are easier to separate from each other once you start playing Richter. Richter doesn’t level up and the game is much more like Metroid in that aspect. You collect health and ammo and that’s about it. SotN still has pretty good level design, but getting around isn’t nearly as fluid even though Richter is just as fast as Samus. It’s a bit more clunky in comparison.
I feel SOTN also has too many long straight mostly empty hallways. Its something Super Metroid did a great job of avoiding, useless rooms, and im not even refering to the loading hallways.
Yeah, in the upright castle you have the marble corridor and 2 very long rooms with 2 flea men each… that’s a pretty big waste. I also wish the entrance had a cool boss at the top of the tower or something to make getting up there finally really feel like an accomplishment. Instead it was just an owl knight, and how many of those did you kill?
I think the biggest offender was upright Library. Lots of long corridors with jack shit enemy placement. The upright Chapel staircase was well though out though, I like how they mixed the enemy types and tactics up there, but there wasn’t enough of it…
Of course, one thing I can give SotN major points for over SM is the more freestyle play it had. If you wanted to make yourself OP you could do it easily. If you wanted to make the game balls to the wall hard you could by not using anything but a barebones Alucard. The problem with that is it takes all the fun out of the game if you do that. Still, you could play a myriad of styles. Be a summoner with the Sword of Dawn. Play low stats with Alucart items, which by the way is probably how most everyone who did item hunting used as default equipment anyway. Lots of free style in that game.