Let's face it, LoS as a whole was a miserable little pile of wasted potential. :PAll with a powerful anti-climax that left a hole in our hearts, I think the worst part is that it had the potential to be the best CV story-line but shitted away.
Yes.
Ladies and gentlemen, the shortest and least contributing response ever. Come and see the wonder, the amazement, only $5 a ticket!
All with a powerful anti-climax
i always liked the idea of Dracula usurping Satan for Hell's throne, which i thought what would happen in the LoS saga.
One of the most disappointing fact of Los series is the feeling that big names(names of famous characters in the series) were thrown in the middle of the game without being really developped.The countess Camilla for example. Since she is a recurrent ally of Dracula in other games, i was expecting a bigger role for her. Also, the way Gabriel became a vampire (drinking laura's blood) lacked epicness. I would have wanted him to make a pact with a powerful and ancient vampire, or perform a dark ritual in Scholomance.(i just read Dracula and its mentionned he may have got lessons in Scholomance)
And then Satan was GENUINELY out of left field as he's not alluded to at all in any way prior to his appearance (definitely qualifying as the Giant Space Flea from Nowhere (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GiantSpaceFleaFromNowhere)), but nevertheless is given the same excellent writing and voice acting as Cornell and Carmilla did -- you sense a lot of his past, the broken feelings he possesses, his vindictiveness towards God, and you get a real impression of a truly fallen Angel. Jason Isaacs gives probably one of my top 3 performances as Satan (probably number 2; Al Pacino's just kind of unbeatable) and manages to make the Big Bad both sympathetic but also a force that you must oppose regardless of your feelings.
she goes on to rant about how Gabriel is doing Lucifer's job.
After he leaves, Zobek kills her for speaking too much.
But yes, I agree that this is not enough foreshadowing. Satan doesn't feel like the logical conclusion here.
Really, the plot of Lords 1 is a whole bunch of people trying to outscheme each other with the exact same plan and Gabriel is the dupe who falls for ALL OF IT. Even Zobek says, quite literally, "And YOU were the perfect. dupe."
Gabriel even winds up a vampire, exactly as Carmilla desired.
And then, according to Mirror of Fate, the Brotherhood of Light were pulling this on Gabriel more or less the whole time. It's unclear when the Mirror precisely told them about Gabriel becoming Dracula, but they definitely knew before they even sent him on the mission seen in Lords of Shadow 1... which meant the MIRROR OF GODDAMN FATE WAS DOING THIS TO GABRIEL TOO.
Seriously, that guy had a lot of shit coming his way from day 1.
She mentions "the king of angels" being her master and having told her Gabriel was coming.
by making LoS into a AAA title utilizing other games' elements, the true identity of Castlevania was lost in translation somewhere. As other have pointed out, the game is Castlevania in name only.
Lords didn't lose the "true identity" of Castlevania in translation. Castlevania never HAD a "true identity" it could lose.
At their most basic gameplay descriptions, you have
Castlevania is Contra with a Whip
Symphony of the Night is Metroid with a Sword
Lament of Innocence is Devil May Cry with a Whip
Curse of Darkness is Dynasty Warriors with Vampires
Lords of Shadow is God of War with Patrick Stewart
Thing is, it's a pretty brilliant riff on Castlevania at most points. It may be seriously flawed, but that didn't undermine that it was widely bought, and, outside of us core fans, it was well enjoyed.
In that same "does it feel like Castlevania" debate that went on for YEARS, someone pointed out that if you took the Original Castlevania, Symphony of the Night, Lament of Innocence, Curse of Darkness, and Lords of Shadow and put them in a showdown of gameplay, you'd have almost no idea they were all in the same series just by how they play -- you'd need the Castlevania branding and story conventions to effectively communicate that, because boy howdy, they don't really play all that similarly.
At their most basic gameplay descriptions, you have
Castlevania is Contra with a Whip
Symphony of the Night is Metroid with a Sword
Lament of Innocence is Devil May Cry with a Whip
Curse of Darkness is Dynasty Warriors with Vampires
Lords of Shadow is God of War with Patrick Stewart
Honestly, the series has jumped play styles a LOT since its inception.
Is Lords of Shadow a Castlevania? Hell yeah it is. There's just enough narrative echoes there to qualify. But it's like Circle of the Moon -- yes, it's Castlevania, but it's also its own self-contained thing; divorced from the primary series into which it doesn't factor, attempting to carry out its own narrative arc (this thread kind of proved it failed though) while not being beholden to anything specific from prior games before.
Lords didn't lose the "true identity" of Castlevania in translation. Castlevania never HAD a "true identity" it could lose. It's been a lot of things over time, and it really has to be able to change and adapt like that because that's the only way franchises survive.
Now, whether Castlevania survives this current incarnation of Konami is the big question. If, when Konami decides to stop letting the inmates run the asylum, they decide to make another Castlevania, it'll happen. It'll also be pretty good most likely, as a company with an apology to make makes a DAMN GOOD APOLOGY.
But it WILL be different. It won't be what we had before. And that's good. That's natural. If you like what we had before, those games still exist. If you like the style of those games that came before, GOOD NEWS! We have Bloodstained coming and a whole bunch of REALLY AWESOME fangames!
But Castlevania's true identity is that it changes with the times. It's not one thing, or even one thing constantly evolving like other series like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden. Castlevania's life story is one of sudden and violent mutation -- after years going in one direction and steadily refining itself as evolution dictates, suddenly POW! shifts and changes rapidly into this whole new thing that kind of looks like what came before but not really.
These seeds were laid in the beginning with Simon's Quest and Vampire Killer, and they contribute an inescapable and necessary component to the series longevity.
No offense, but this just really seems like an attempt to justify the huge changes that came in LoS, and I would call it a very innacurate view of the series' history and evolution. There simply was never anything even close to the jump we had to LoS. Sure change has been a constant throughout the series, but not such drastic change. Sure we've had other final bosses then Dracula, stories that don't fit into the overall continuity, drastic changes changes in tone, art style, musical style, etc... But never so many drastic changes at once.
The games you listed as being seemingly non related is really just a false equivalency. Anyone who played LoI would instantly know that Cod was the same series, the gameplay was a little different, but their was enough the same to make it obvious. I would say the same thing in terms of Cv1 and SoTN (even though it is a little unfair given how much the series had eveolved in the interim.) While there was a very different gameplay style we still had the same enemy types, same basic level layout structure, and above all a continuing continuity. Some people like to say that story doesn't really count in linking games but I call BS on that. Story is as much a part of a game or series as anything else.
The sorrow games gave us a new setting (futuristic)
And while several games have adjusted the art style, music stye, and the cinematic style of the games, none of these things had been so dramatically changed all at once as they were with LoS. And it is certainly no coincidence that virtually all of these changes moved into the direction of "what's popular at the moment?" And while this is fine from a business perspective, it is utterly putrid from and artistic perspective, and even worse from the perspective of respecting the series.
LoS was a fun game, but the truth is that if it didn't have the Castlevania in the title no one would have made much of a connection. And while this might be true to some extent in some of the previous games, it never came close to the level that we see in LoS. If you really want to see an example of just how much LoS strayed, compare it to MoF. MoF it is a dramatic reinterpretation of what Castlevania has always been, shaking things up while still retaining enough to feel like it is part of the series.