Castlevania Dungeon Forums
The Castlevania Dungeon Forums => General Castlevania Discussion => Topic started by: Inccubus on July 21, 2021, 03:30:19 PM
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Haven't seen things this dead in like ever.
It's like a veritable graveyard in here. Where's the ducks?
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And so the story of the Forums' struggle against the lack of ANY kind of Castlevania related info begins. However, Castlevania and the Forums will not meet again for hundreds of years, the IP goes into hiding in foreign lands and continues to curse its fanbase for eternity. Eventually it names itself "Lord of the Pachinkos", "King of the cancelled Mobiles". The years before their next meeting pass slowly, and quietly, but with finality. The intermission in this exquisite play from which a forum and a dormant IP will never escape.
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Maybe we should buy some ads for the forum :P
I kid, but... how would anyone from the outside hear about the forum's existence anymore, aside from word-of-mouth? The Castlevania community isn't dead, and message boards are not a dying format.
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For the love of God, no ads! :P
Reddit is technically a message board.
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When the next iteration of the Netflix show comes out, and Symphony gets another re-re-re-release, then Castlevania discussion will revive once again.
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Just not a lot to talk about without games or media.
Just wait for the next Netflix season. There comes a point where all that has to be said is said about a franchise. I've seen it with Mega Man forums before too. Tons and tons of lore discussion, game discussion, both combined, etc. But you get a significant enough drought, and eventually chatter dies down.
To say nothing of the impact of things like 4chan, Reddit, and lately, Discord. Which absorb conversation and have been part of a larger discussion about the death of forums and fansites for a long time.
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Maybe I could write some new fanfics to keep it alive?
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Maybe I could write some new fanfics to keep it alive?
Will you include illustrations?
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Forums are a relic of the earl 2000's internet. I remember when this place was really something to see. I'm talking dozens of posts a day. It's been a long dwindle, but people just prefer Facebook groups, reddit, and twitter these days. This place is almost like a museum.
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I honestly prefer museums over the whole social media mess that is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Museums like this have a refinement of sorts while the aforementioned social media sites are now a breeding ground of all that human garbage that's been making the rounds lately. Here, things are a lot more controlled and that is a good thing. No real luck with that on other media platforms, and if it is they are not doing a good enough job of it.
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We only had Bloodstained, the Netflix show, and mobile games to keep the deeper vania community active here, so when a sequel to Bloodstained is a way's away, and the mobile vania front appears to be double dead, there's not much to talk about. We'll probably see the Richter Netflix arc before anything else, and we don't got much to go on with that either.
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There's not much to discuss about Castlevania proper other than yet another season of the series. Konami isn't doing much to keep the series relevant these days, which is why you're seeing this influx of indie games that scratch a similar itch like COTM for the classic titles and too many exploration platformers to count.
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I joined these forums only a few years ago, long after Konami abandoned the series, but the reason I started posting here to begin with is because I use to frequent this site a lot as a kid. The turning point for me as a Castlevania fan was when I finally tried Super Castlevania IV for the first time. I loved that game so much I wanted to delve deep into the rest of the series, and this website was the best source of information. I wouldn't post here but I would occasionally lurk, and I do remember seeing how active the community was back in those days. I also remember how frequent page updates were, as new Castlevania games were coming out consistently. This site still remains my favorite source of information on the series, but like everyone has mentioned here, this place was so active because there was so much to look forward to and talk about back in those days.
The same thing happened to one of my other favorite fan sites, Shining Force Central. It was a thriving, active, website with a huge forum community, but pretty much everything went straight downhill as soon as Camelot stopped working with Sega and the Shining series morphed into something completely unrecognizable to the fans of the series. I consider Shining Force II to be my favorite game ever, so I frequented that community very often, and I have a lot of good memories of those times, but Shining Force as I knew it is long dead. I actually tried the demo for Shining Resonance on the Switch and all it did was remind me of how the Shining name has been repurposed to sell games that have zero relation in any way to the classic Shining games.
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I know how you feel, Vlad. Well, we're almost certain to get a boost of activity when the Netflix Rondo anime comes out, though I think it would require another CV game to really get this forum back up with as much activity as it used to have back in the glory days...
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Thing is, a single game wont do much.
Mega Man 11 certainly didn't reinvigorate Mega man forums.
Forums like this are from an age when we got regular game content.
Between 1986 when the franchise started, and 2010 when Lords of Shadow came out, there was a new Castlevania game every single year
Same goes for Mega Man, which was even more prolific, peaking at 6 (read SIX) games coming out in 2003 and 2004 each
There's a reason forums like these were so chatty and active, it's because there was a TON to talk about, with a constant supply of fresh meat. A big release, like Lords of Shadow, will provide big discussion, especially since it was divisive and controversial, but once it's passed on, so does conversation.
You need that constant supply to get constant conversation, IMO.
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Will you include illustrations?
I could come up with an original character (or an original redesign of an existing character) and commission a cheap drawing of them. I do that sort of stuff from time to time.
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You do also need a site regularly posting content so Google pays attention to it. Back in the day the Castlevania Dungeon sat atop the Google search for "Castlevania". But a site that hasn't updated in close to a decade doesn't rate high on the search meter anymore. Much as I hate the Castlevania Wiki, it does at least get regular updates.
Just gotta kick the site into shape and start getting interest in it again. That would help some and drive some traffic over here.
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You do also need a site regularly posting content so Google pays attention to it. Back in the day the Castlevania Dungeon sat atop the Google search for "Castlevania". But a site that hasn't updated in close to a decade doesn't rate high on the search meter anymore. Much as I hate the Castlevania Wiki, it does at least get regular updates.
Just gotta kick the site into shape and start getting interest in it again. That would help some and drive some traffic over here.
I'll be cheering for you! :)
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I'd be happy to do so. I've been doing that over on the Inverted Dungeon, taking that site from a cheesy parody site and crafting it into what I'd love to see the actual Dungeon become... but I'm not in control of the site. Jorge needs to make the call on what happens as he has the keys to the kingdom.
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- Honestly, I feel like Discord and Reddit are kind of taking over the old message board/forum world.
- Things are recentralizing around new sites and iterations of the community, I feel, and this site may no longer be as close to the epicenter as it used to be.
- The newer Castlevania fans weren't around for when Konami was shotgunning new content out on an annual basis, and with that comes a certain casual approach to it. I mean, we all basically grew up (or at least spent a good chunk of our important, younger, formative years) with Castlevania and this community, these new guys didn't. It's not as big a part of their lives as it is for us. I'm glad to see that Netflix has brought new fans in, but while I understand the WHY, it still aches a bit that they don't love it the same way and may never do so. And it certainly hurts that so many of them won't arrive here to meet our smiling faces.
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- Honestly, I feel like Discord and Reddit are kind of taking over the old message board/forum world.
This is definitely true. I've mentioned this to my friends in the Bloodstained fandom, but almost all the action there nowadays is on the discord. Discord provides so much stuff, like custom emojis, voice chats and streaming, and so on that forums are almost obsolete. They're better when you want to store stuff for reference, I guess, but when you can search through Discord easily it's not such an advantage, and since Discy is real time, well...there's not much a forum can do that Discy can't.
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Man, I'd love to see The Dungeon surpass the wiki as an information center for all things Castlevania.
Turn this place into a real virtual museum of sorts. And not just info pages either.
A repository of sprites, 3D models, story synopses, translations, historical inspirations, the whole shebang!
It'd be glorious.
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LRG gave a shimmer of CV hype until the games they were releasing were the same, rehashed games with not much extra (wall)meat to it.
I suspect the dungeon will only materialise on the night of a full, blood moon, when ROTN 2 releases….
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Not exactly Castlevania, but a Belmont player got 4th at the Ultimate Summit LCQ (Smash Bros) and there was like 300 people in that tournament.
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Man, I'd love to see The Dungeon surpass the wiki as an information center for all things Castlevania.
Turn this place into a real virtual museum of sorts. And not just info pages either.
A repository of sprites, 3D models, story synopses, translations, historical inspirations, the whole shebang!
It'd be glorious.
Honestly I feel like this is the best way forward for the site under current circumstances: as an absolute resource and documentation of the series, its rise and fall, the varying attempts at a resurgence, and the rise of "offspring" franchises like Bloodstained.
And if a new game ever DID come out, we could easily go back to doing what the site used to do as well.
After Fandom took over the old Wiki concept, I've kind of given all those sites the evil eye. There's gotta be demand for something like this, right?
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Not only that but the games themselves as well as the series on a whole could be specifically categorized.
What the series was before IGA took over: All the pre-IGA games could be slotted here.
What the series was while IGA was in control: All of the games IGA made would go here.
The miscellaneous games that were not made by IGA and his team: All the games IGA did not direct while he was still working at Konami would go here.
And the series that was made after he left Konami: The MercurySteam series would obviously fit here.
And of course all those patchislot games would have there own section.
The site could also put together specific timelines for each category as well. We know all about the IGA timeline but there were also other timelines that tried to address the series before and after he became director. The Konami timeline that I had seen on this site before it was changed was one of those. All sorts of information could be inputted to help all newcomers get the most knowledge out of the series. It's just a question of putting in the work.
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...yep, that's all a lot of stuff I'm already doing on the Inverted Dungeon.
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...yep, that's all a lot of stuff I'm already doing on the Inverted Dungeon.
...well, consider me officially out of ideas for the regular Dungeon then.
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Mr P's. Castlevania Realm has done a good job of categorizing the series games individually and as a whole. A similar set of ideas could be incorporated here.
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They need to give CV the Metroid Dread treatment rather than pulling a Valis and palming the franchise off to some cheapsh1t mobile developer that nobody cares about.
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...well, consider me officially out of ideas for the regular Dungeon then.
Hey, they're good ideas. ;)
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At this point, the word "Castlevania", as an IP, is officially dead. I'd rather let any indie studio's sidescrollers fill the long void instead of checking things related to Konami because every time there's disappointing news it wasn't enough; there tend to be more disappointing news following them later.
Or it's worse, a dead silent, long and sorrowful.