Then I heard about Castlevania Judgment.
Go ahead and google it if you don't already know, Castlevania is getting a fighting game. And unlike Square's PSP only pseudo-fighting game Dissidia, Judgment appears to be the real deal. Two characters, armed with an array of special moves, enter an enclosed arena and proceed to beat the piss out of each other best 2 out of 3 times. When I first heard this, I was intrigued. Castlevania is one of the few non-fighter franchises that I figured could be turned into a real solid fighting experience. Lots of characters, lots of environments, lots of lore. If Megaman, Luke Skywalker, and Shaquille O'Neal can all claim to have tested the fighter genre, why can't the Belmont family?
Well, as it turns out there's a good goddamned reason why Konami never got around to it, and thats because they have no idea what the fuck they are doing.
Publically revealed at this years E3 show, this video marked the first time I had heard of it and the last time I gave a shit about it. Now, I run a fighting game website, so I had to cover it at least a little bit, but once I turned away I forgot about this thing entirely. Recently, more news has come out about the game, so unfortunately my attention was turned back to it, and let me tell you, everytime I hear about this it gets worse.
Now this is the latest and "greatest" trailer for the game, but 50% of it is a shameless cg movie that probably doubles as the games opener. I can only assume the media guys knew it would only take a minute and a half for fanboys to give this game the finger, so they padded it with footage of what it should be, presuming we would forget what it is. Now thats not to say some of those other fighters I mentioned don't have their flaws, but it seems to me that Koji Igarashi has gone out of his way to make sure this is absolutely unnenjoyable.
Take the tight responsive controls a fighting game should have and replace them with the awful Soul Calibur Legends controls nobody ever wanted to see again, make it look worse than the last PS2 game, and sound worse than the last DS game. Then, just to make sure it has no redeeming qualities, take all the fan favorites people totally want to play as, then re-imagine them into generic anime rejects that nobody will want to play as.
For example, Maria Renard (co star of Dracula X and SOTN) and Eric Lecarde (co star of Bloodlines and Portrait of Ruin) are now...
...prepubescent teenagers with comically oversized weapons. And don't get me started the Grim Reaper himself...
Now transformed into some sort of half-Giger, half-Skellington stilt man with a sewing needle for a weapon.
Seriously? This is the "clash of epic proportions that will span the depths of time"?
Fuck this game.
-F.
