Topic: Castlevania: Umbra of Sorrow (1999 Fan Project)

[theplottwist]

Nifty castle    I like the parchment touch to it as well. But didn't IGA say that the castle in AoS was in fact the very same incarnation that appeared in 1999? With that logic shouldn't the castle resemble the one from AoS?

You're correct, but I don't remember IGA saying it. I do remember some people (including myself) reaching the same conclusion: The castle in AoS should be the same because had it crumbled, there would be no castle to seal. Plus, Julius Belmont remembers where the whip is, something that'd be impossible to do had the castle changed too much.

However, there are some things we must take into account:
-Genya Arikado says that the castle currently inside the eclipse is a spiritual world.
-Graham says that Dracula's TRUE castle exists somewhere else (possibly in the mentioned "spiritual world").
-Alucard in SotN says that the castle "may take many incarnations."

This all lends some credibility to the idea that the spiritual castle rebuilds a different physical shape for itself everytime it reincarnates, so it can act on Earth. Therefore, when Dracula's Castle physical form is destroyed, its spiritual form is kept intact in the spiritual plane to reincarnate later. The spiritual form would be the one we see in AoS, and the physical forms would be the ones we see acting on Earth in the other games (this would include 1999). What the Hakuba Priest did was seal the spiritual form to prevent it from rebuilding new physical forms for itself.

As for Julius remembering the whip's location: Some places, regardless how many times the castle returns, never disappear from the it's general makeup. This makes it possible for Julius to remember where the whip is, even though the room/domain itself changed places. Specially if this place is of high importance, like the throne room, the giant clock or the entrance.

But, even on top of all this, the previous logic of being the same castle is most likely the one I will be (kinda) using in this story too. The castle must be kept intact to be sealed, but only after Dracula is destroyed and unable to prevent its sealing. However, I choose the route to create a new one due to creative freedom. The castle in Aria is too small for four characters to explore, and if this turns into a game, I believe people wouldn't be too happy to play Aria all over again. I'm using three bold-faced excuses to do that:

1. As the castle gets sucked into the eclipse, numerous towers crumble and fall off, forcing the castle to remake them or move entire places around to compensate and avoid total crumbling;
2. The paths they take inside the castle in AoS and in UoS are different. The castle isn't a perfect 2D plane;
3. The castle regenerates over time, filling in some places with new domains, but some scars are too deep to regenerate (see AoS entrance with all the destroyed walls);

The fact that the castle is alive and is fuelled by chaotic power helps alot 

But still, regardless of what path I follow, many details/places/rooms from Aria will remain the same (specially the ones where you meet Julius Belmont). I'll even show how the Floating Garden came to be, as it's "not floating" by 1999, and how it's possible for Julius to remember where the whip is, even if the castle has changed.

[Castle34hk]

This looks so AWESOME;)   Thnxs

[BLOOD MONKEY]

Hey plot, I'm working on an open-source metroidvania style engine right now. When I have time to polish it, wanna check it out?

[theplottwist]

Hey plot, I'm working on an open-source metroidvania style engine right now. When I have time to polish it, wanna check it out?

Of course, send it my way!

[NetSphereEngineer]

Hi! I'm new here and I'm justing passing to tell this project looks great and I also loved the Alucard art made by Junki Sakuraba!!! This is what I wanted to see in Dawn of Sorrow!

Would be great to be able to hack the game and change all artworks by new ones made by Junki Sakuraba

[BLOOD MONKEY]

My apolagies, plot. I lost the source code while reformatting. Luckily I have been able to get the basic physics down, but sliding, ladders, menus, and other stuff i had programmed is gonna take a while. Sorry.

[theplottwist]

My apolagies, plot. I lost the source code while reformatting. Luckily I have been able to get the basic physics down, but sliding, ladders, menus, and other stuff i had programmed is gonna take a while. Sorry.

No problem, dude
What you have here is already very nice! Once you have all there basic things done, please show it so we can discuss it.

I have some too-ambitious ideas for this in case we can work a game out of the idea, but we can make a relativelly simple classicvania out of it, too. I have no qualms about it at all.

[BLOOD MONKEY]

No problem, dude
What you have here is already very nice! Once you have all there basic things done, please show it so we can discuss it.

I have some too-ambitious ideas for this in case we can work a game out of the idea, but we can make a relativelly simple classicvania out of it, too. I have no qualms about it at all.

Thank you! I plan on having the engine with options for classic style and metroidvania style.

[eryson]

A Classicvania Filled with Deep-history can be cool indeed, and more easy 

[piscesdreams]

My apolagies, plot. I lost the source code while reformatting. Luckily I have been able to get the basic physics down, but sliding, ladders, menus, and other stuff i had programmed is gonna take a while. Sorry.

What engine are you building this in?

[BLOOD MONKEY]

What engine are you building this in?

I planned on using Unity with C++, but ultimately decided with gamemakerStudio.

[AuraTeam]

I planned on using Unity with C++, but ultimately decided with gamemakerStudio.

Game Maker : Studio ! great decision Man and i'm glad that people still use GM:S 

[theplottwist]

Small update:

This has not stopped. In fact I'm discussing many different plot details with some few people here trying to coalesce everything before I post it. I know I promised Julius' origin to come soon, but I still can't show it yet. There are too many intrincate details surrounding Julius' rise as the last Belmont to face Dracula that will play important roles in the main storyline itself, and I'm trying to be extra careful with what I write, because people can get touchy lol.

Prediction for the Julius' origin reveal: Possibly before July 30. And I warn you beforehand: The thing is HUGE.

Now, for something I can already tell about:

While developing Julius, I've written more or less about how Dracula achieved his ranking as the Dark Lord amongst such powerful demons, how did he acquire the power of Dominance, and what exactly is the nature/origin of Chaos and its relationship with the Count. These are some key details in the 1999 plot itself, and if you wish to know about it, I can send it to you through PM. I can't post it yet due to spoilers, and due to the fact that things must be kept in an orderly fashion here, but I can still show it to you and explain how these things connect with 1999.

What I can make public for now is this: The Dark Lord title is not something only Dracula has owned. Before Dracula, there was another Dark Lord, and his name was Amatsu-Mikaboshi.

[theplottwist]

While you wait for Julius, here is Umbra's explanation for how Dracula became the Dark Lord.

Dracula:

(click to show/hide)

Before his confrontation with Trevor Belmont, Dracula was not the Dark Lord, but rather a powerful vampire sorcerer living in relative harmony with humans, even managing to have a son with a human woman named Lisa.

However, after being accused and persecuted for witchcraft, Lisa was unfairly executed by the people, sending Dracula in a path of bloodlust and vengeance. He then declared war against mankind.

Dracula was aware that, even with his vast powers, he was unable to face and destroy all humans. Therefore he sought to increase his own dark power and build an unstoppable army of darkness, and to achieve this goal he held a ritual to summon the greatest darkness of all - The god of primordial chaos and the stars, and current Dark Lord Amatsu-Mikaboshi.

As the Dark Lord, Mikaboshi possessed the Dominance, a power that crowned the entity who owned it as the King of Demons and forced all other demonic entities to bend to the Dark Lord's every will.

Dracula urged Mikaboshi in conceding him control over the demonic legions in the Demon Realm, and the Dark Lord agreed, but not for free. Coveting Dracula's blackened, powerful soul, Mikaboshi offered him a deal:

The Dark Lord would bind Dominance by proxy to Dracula's soul, enabling him to summon and command the demonic legions of the Demon Realm to wage his war. But once the war was over by either him winning or losing, Mikaboshi would rise from the depths to claim ownership over the soul belonging to Dracula, stripping it from the power over the demons it had been granted by the pact, and taking it to serve under the Dark Lord for all eternity.

Dracula agreed to the contract's terms. Yet, with no plans to have his soul become anyone's eternal servant, he devised his own scheme.

With his newfound power, Dracula summoned legions of demons from the Demon Realm to Earth, and in the ensuing chaos, he covered Europe in darkness, gradually increasing his strength. His war would come to a halt, however, as Trevor and his conrades would defeat him in combat. Before disappearing, Dracula uttered a vile curse that would eat away at men's hearts in the years to come, seeking to speed up his own revival in the process.

As per the pact's terms, Mikaboshi rose from the Demon Realm to claim his prize - Dracula's soul - upon Dracula's downfall, yet he found something else: The weak soul of Walter Bernhard, with the power he had bestowed upon Dracula nowhere to be found to be stripped from him. Having indeed sold a soul that belonged to him, Dracula had abided to the contract, but in Mikaboshi's eyes, he had been cheated. Growing wrathful at Dracula's deceit, Mikaboshi ignored the useless, powerless soul before him and returned to the Demon Realm seeking retribution against the King of Vampires, unaware that Dracula had already antecipated his every move.

As the pact was being agreed on, Dracula surmised that if the proxy power of command over demons he was granted were to clash in the Demon Realm against the Dark Lord's Dominance, his power would surely be overridden or stripped from him by the Dark Lord. Therefore, by offering a soul belonging to him in place of his own, Dracula forced Mikaboshi to leave his domain to take it while he gained entry in the Demon Realm. Mikaboshi would be forced to refuse the soul offered to him, since it did not have the power that the he had granted to Dracula.

With Mikaboshi's refusal to take this soul, the pact was not given closure, allowing Dracula's soul to descend into the Demon Realm with the power the pact had granted him. Once there and with Mikaboshi out of his domain, Dracula exercised his power over the demonic population uncontested. When Mikaboshi realized Dracula's deceit and returned to the Demon Realm, it was already too late to reverse Dracula's control over the legions of darkness, and the Dark Lord Mikaboshi was overwhelmed by the countless waves of demons under the vampire's command before being able to react.

Solidifying his victory over the fallen Dark Lord, Dracula stripped him from his power, his identity and his will. He fused the mangled essence of Mikaboshi with the magical structure he had created to be his fortress in the war against mankind, fuelling it with chaotic power and providing it with a mind of its own - the Demon Castle was reborn as a creature of chaos, and as the symbol of Dracula's magic and cruelty. With Mikaboshi permanently unable to give closure to the contract, the power of the pact bound the Dominance to Dracula's soul, making him the Dark Lord for as long as his soul exist, and effectively nullifying any chance for any other demon to achieve the position of Dark Lord.

Dracula now would be resurrected as the Dark Lord, and his castle would become the inexhaustible source of the chaotic power that would bring him from the dead through the hearts of humans when their chaotic desires became uncontrolable.

Detail explanations:

(click to show/hide)

Why a Dark Lord previous to Dracula is needed:

In Castlevania III, Dracula is said to have made a pact with an "Evil/False God" to obtain his power (the precise term used in the manual for this entity is "ankoku jashin" or "False/heretic god of darkness"). I considered this idea to have been scrapped until I discovered that IGA actually reinforced it in the Curse of Darkness manga endossed by him:



This page reads:

In the beautiful landscape of southern Romania,
since a few months ago, a horrible curse has been treatening the people
The undeniable darkness at night...
Demons who were just believed to appear just in legends
suddenly started to reveal themselves to humans
The leader of the grotesque creatures was a black clothed count known as Dracula...
Borrowing the power of the false god, he summoned monsters one after another
The entire land of Wallachia was changed with darkness and slaughter.

On this manga, it is explicitly mentioned that Dracula is "borrowing" the power of a "False God" to obtain his demonic troops. If Dracula was already the Dark Lord - the demon atop the food chain - why would he need to make a pact with another, lower being to obtain demonic troops, if the Dark Lord alone has the power to do it through the Dominance? Furthermore, why would the harbinger of mankind's destruction live among humans, even fathering a child with a human woman, if his entire purpose is to destroy mankind?

These things seem awfully out of place for someone who is the Dark Lord. The only answer is that he was not the Dark Lord before Lisa's death - and this is confirmed by the story contained in Castlevania Adventure's japanese manual. Dracula was "transformed" into the Demon King. And by Christopher Belmont's time, he's already the Demon King.

Credit for the CVIII translation goes to Nagumo.
Credit for the page translation goes to Shiroi Koumori.

The choice for Amatsu-Mikaboshi to be this previous Dark Lord:

Amatsu-Mikaboshi (AKA Amano Kagaseo) is a Shinto deity related to the primordial chaos and the stars. He's a "star god" (deities meant to be defeated due to their rebellious nature - heretic gods ) and having existed before gods like Amaterasu or Susanoo as a primordial entity, he's referred to as the August Star of Heaven/Brilliant Male. The star associated with him is either the North Star, or Venus (which is not a star, but is symbolically recognized as one due to its shine). Different from what Wikipedia will have you believe, though, Mikaboshi is not inherently evil, but he does stir/feed from emotions of destructive nature inside humans. As the lore goes, he's the "lack of good", therefore being a sort of an "unintentional evil" that spreads/grows with each evil deed perpetrated by human hearts. However, in some stories concerning the battles between the gods, he is indeed referred to as an "evil kami" that must be banished.

Through this part of the plot, I considered many entites to be the previous Dark Lord to Dracula. The top ones were Satan, Pazuzu, Ahriman, Azatoth, and Susanoo, but they were discarded in favor of Amatsu-Mikaboshi for two reasons:

1. In 1999, a Shinto ritual was needed to banish the castle from this plane. Althought the eclipse itself could be a reason for requiring Shinto knowledge to banish the castle, there is something else: Exorcizing/cleansing rituals tend to have an intimate relationship with what they are exorcizing and the lore this entity is associated with, and eclipses are not specific enough to require a Shinto ritual, since they are symbols of darkness in many different cultures. Mina Hakuba's mention about the Tensho Daijin (Amaterasu and Susanoo's story) being required for the banishment is incredibly specific.

Therefore I choose Mikaboshi to be the entity that would become Chaos, the force feeding the castle from the chaos in human's hearts. The Hakuba ritual was the only able to banish the castle because the castle was possessed by a Shinto entity all along. Thus the need for a very specific ritual to banish a very specific entity.

2. In Aria of Sorrow, the Chaotic Realm displays some very interesting imagery beyond the obvious chaos. I'm specifically talking about the stars.

Right at the entrance of the Chaotic Realm we see a motif of stars and the moon:

Even though this could be interpreted as a reference to Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, Shinto deity of the moon, or simply as meaningless decor, I have more evidence showing otherwise.

Then, throughout the entire Chaotic Realm, we see that there are patterns of a starry sky/space as the background for decaying rooms, suggesting that this is an alternate reality composed of whatever chaos represents:


In the room containing the portal to Chaos, there is a single light in the middle of the darkness that could be easily interpreted as a single, brilliant star's light (the August Star of Heaven, one of Mikaboshi's names, sometimes depicted as a very bright star through the Pole Star or Venus):


Finally, Chaos' true/last form is that of a black sun in the middle of a heavily distorted, Giger-esque background representing its chaotic nature:


But when Chaos is defeated, the black sun breaks like a mirror. In japanese mythology there is a black, round mirror that once was used to lure Amaterasu out of her hiding - The Yata no Kagami. Mina Hakuba mentions this specific story's lore (the Tensho Daijin) to have been used as a base for the castle's banishment ritual:

Notice the sun motif in the middle of the mirror.

In the end, the connections are too many to overlook, and Mikaboshi fit all the requirements to be the deity chosen to be the dark entity with which Dracula sealed his pact for power, and eventually topped. He fits both the need for a Shinto banishing-ritual and fits the symbolism of the chaotic realm through his association with the stars and the chaos much better than any other entity could, in my perspective, and in retrospect.

The Dominance grants the position of Dark Lord and Dracula becomes its eternal owner:

First, the Dominance granting its owner the throne of Dark Lord is explained in Aria and Dawn of Sorrow. Dmitrii explicitly mentions that the Dark Lord's power is needed (the Dominance) but Dracula's soul is not, and therefore if he can obtain the Dominance, he can become the Dark Lord. Obviously we saw how that turned out, as Dmitrii was not able to have the true Dominance by his side on top of his soul not being able to contain it.

Secondly, Dracula has already been defeated numerous times, and even reincarnated, and the Dominance is STILL strapped to him. Why would that be, if not for the fact that, possibly, Dracula CAN'T be separated from this power anymore?

So I provided this answer too, and it is due to the pact's power. Until the pact is rendered void, Dracula cannot be separated from the Dominance. And with Dracula's strategy, he ensured that this is never going to happen.

How will this factor on Umbra at all:

The story for Umbra will introduce the Hakubas, and how they were summoned by and experienced Charlotte to banish the castle. Originally, Charlotte will be the one to discover about Mikaboshi's existence, so she'll employ the separation of Dracula from his power, and the Hakubas will employ the sealing of the castle inside the eclipse.

Any and all critique is welcome.

[X]

Interesting    Although I can't stress enough about Chaos as Chaos itself is not a demonic being but merely the opposite of Order. I feel that the final boss you face in AoS is not Chaos but a creature born out of Chaos itself. Also if you look at it the creature itself is also very orderly in nature as well, and there is no order in raw Chaos whatsoever. Amatsu-Mikaboshi (as you mentioned) is the primordial god of Chaos and the stars, but he is not Chaos itself. IGA never thought this one element through and I wish he had as it doesn't make sense that Chaos itself would be the main enemy when Chaos has no form to recognize, let alone be recognized. Yet we clearly see a uniform boss at the end of AoS. It contains Chaotic elements, but in the end it is far more orderly then chaotic.

Also about the demon castle. Liked the info you did for this one. However I think Dracula would have made Castlevania already before Trevor and Co. stormed the place. The Castle from CV III already contains the elements of an active creature of chaos so I do believe that everything you mentioned happened before Trevor arrives.