I might have done a similar thread before but I don't remember, so here I'm again.
I come to break the "I'll defend what IGA did to the series" streak I'm known for, to speak about something that IGA did (or didn't do, in fact) that really bothers me -- not using the Nazi theme on Portrait of Ruin.
So IGA goes to the lengths of placing a Dracula resurrection in 1944, the climax of Nazism and the Second World War, but does a plot that has nothing to do with it. Nothing. Not even the villain's background has anything to do with the WWII (but with WWI instead). One of the lowest points of humanity and one of the greatest displays of human cruelty and malice, but lol nope. Have a vampire painter instead.
The only thing the WWII has to do with the plot is Brauner using the souls of the dead to revive the castle offscreen. That's it. That could've been accomplished by literally any other plot device, as the series does on other games, and no difference would be felt.
IGA could have done literally anything, from using a villain who IS a Nazi and "wants Dracula's power to win the war", to using a soldier fighting the Nazis who got lost, to using a dude who is a former Nazi that rejected Hitler's ways, to using freaking zombie soldiers referencing the current ongoing war, but no. There is not a single significant thread connecting Dracula to the war.
Is it a low-hanging fruit? It is. Nazis have been explored over and over by fiction. Hellsing has Dracula AND nazis trying to return. But bear with me here: Dracula is called "the root of all evil", he feeds off of human chaos, you do a story about him during the same time of a genocide caused by human prejudice and power corruption, and you can't bother to draw a SINGLE clearer connection between both?
Plot-wise, for me, Portrait of Ruin is the biggest miss on the entire series. Had IGA moved the plot one or two years fowards, and I wouldn't complain one line.
I'm not even saying the plot it has is bad. It sets out to accomplish one theme (the meaning of "Family") and it does it. What I'm saying that you can't go to a restaurant specialized in Brazilian cuisine, and ask for goddamn Sukiyaki. You can eat Sukiyaki another time, but if you go to a Brazilian restaurant, try making an effort to eat Feijoada.
I have some ideas of why this could've happened. Maybe IGA thought this was too sensitive of a subject to delegate to "lol WWII is Dracula's fault because he's eeeeeeevil", or maybe he didn't want to represent anything nazi or war related on the game itself, or maybe even he thought the series had already done something like this (Bloodlines) and didn't want to repeat it. But I dunno. We'll probably never know what he had on his mind here.
EDIT: I also should mention the castle was revived in 1942, and destroyed in 1944. The castle stood there TWO YEARS, basically all through the most relevant part of the WWII, and nothing was done with it WWII-related.