Topic: Where do you think Castlevania ranks in vampire fiction?

[Lumi Kløvstad]

And I mean the Japanese series as a collective entity. Where do you think it falls, in terms of quality?

A seminal example of an episodic vampire narrative to rival Stoker and Le Fanu's legends? Somewhere in the middle, not great, not terrible?

Or... down at the bottom? Next to Twilight and the Ignite series?

I think it's more of a middle fiction, honestly, sitting above BloodRayne and Underworld in terms of depth and writing, but a LONG way from the bottom. Castlevania is pretty good-- it shows it's debts, most definitely, but added things together in novel ways without strictly repeating what it used for inspiration. I prefer the Lament of Innocence take on Dracula's vengeful origins much more than I prefer Coppola's version that was undoubtedly the inspiration.

Wherever it lay on that scale, Castlevania is one of the longest running modern adaptations of the Dracula legend.

Thoughts?

[Nagumo]

I personally wouldn't consider Castlevania to belong to vampire fiction myself since even though the main antagonist is a vampire, vampirism barely plays a part in the story itself. The only game I think deals with vampires in a meaningful way is Lament of Innocence since it contains bits of vampire lore and even has a character getting bitten, a surprisingly rare event in the Castlevania series. I do would like to see a Castlevania game where there is more focus on vampire hunting and just vampire lore in general. 

[Belmontoya]

Castlevania 64 and the CV LOS series have vampire lore aplenty. The vampire seems less important primarily in Iga's CV plots.

Again I will say that a CV covering the events of bram stokers book would have been a vampire hunt of legend.

[coinilius]

I agree with Nagumo that the Castlevania series doesn't seem to engage with Vampire fiction all that much - it seems more like it has a general Halloween/Monster theme than specifically Vampire.  And there is a distinct lack of people actually getting bitten by Vampires from what I've encountered so far, which is interesting for such a long running series with the worlds most famous Vampire as its big bad.  I'm looking forward to Castlevania 64, as I'd heard before that it has quite a few Vampire's and Vampire lore throughout it.  The Radio Drama was also a good source of actual engagement with some of the more usual Vampire tropes.

[Lumi Kløvstad]

That was actually one of the things about Lords of Shadow that I appreciated: the trilogy brought vampires back to front and center in a way that hadn't been done since the N64 games. Between the Land of Vampires arc in the first game, to Alucard meeting his "brothers" in Mirror of Fate, to the general "VAMPIRES ARE AWESOME EVERYWHERE" tone of LOS2, vampires were not left out in the LOS saga. For once, the Belmonts got to be vampire slayers who slay vampires.

[Kamirine]

To be honest, I suppose in the middle of the scale.  Not groundbreaking or really adds much to the vampire lore (or really does it seem to concentrate on the vampiric lore save the main boss is a vampire) but it doesn't shit all over it either.  It's just a fun story about someone, usually from a particular family, kicking Dracula and his minions collective asses. 

Though I have to agree with LumiRockets: Lords and the 64 games were expectional when it came to vampires and vampirism as a whole playing a role in the story and even the gameplay.  I really wish they had adapted some of the ideas from the 64 games and put them in another, new CV game before they essentially dropped the franchise.

[zangetsu468]

Games that involve people being turned into Vampires or being bitten by them as I recall:
LOI
CV64/ LOD
POR
Rondo/ X Chronicles (bad ending)

Walter from LOI seemed to be the cliche Vampire who liked biting women on the neck, more so than Dracula is.
With the whole POR

(click to show/hide)

Sanctuary spell

vampire bites became irrelevant after this.

It would be nice to have a 2d Castlevania where the focus is more about Vampire/ Wallachian lore. I'd be down for this.

[Lelygax]

I personally wouldn't consider Castlevania to belong to vampire fiction myself since even though the main antagonist is a vampire, vampirism barely plays a part in the story itself. The only game I think deals with vampires in a meaningful way is Lament of Innocence since it contains bits of vampire lore and even has a character getting bitten, a surprisingly rare event in the Castlevania series. I do would like to see a Castlevania game where there is more focus on vampire hunting and just vampire lore in general. 

As Montoya said, CV64 have some vampires that bites you and Vincent can even become one of them. Also lets not forget PoR that shows Stella and Loretta being bitten and turned in vampires.

SotN shows some new vampire weakness that is "flowing water". In lore flowing water hurts them, That is why Alucard loses so much health on water.

I think that it sits below Bram Stoker's Dracula, even if at the beggining of the series it was meant to be only a game where you fight against a lot of monsters from famous movies, the main antagonist was already Dracula. At the second game you use wooden stakes and garlic too.

[Nagumo]

Well, I'm already aware of all that, of course. But like I said, I wouldn't consider Castlevania as a whole as belonging to vampire fiction just because vampires occasionally show up. I think when in the plot itself vampirism plays a role that I would personally rank it as vampire fiction, like in LoI.

[zangetsu468]

To add to Lelygax, presumably the Nova Skeletons in SOTN fire beams of concentrated light which is why Alucard takes so much damage.

[Lelygax]

To add to Lelygax, presumably the Nova Skeletons in SOTN fire beams of concentrated light which is why Alucard takes so much damage.

This is unexpected, but make a lot of sense. I've never thought about it in this way.

[Ratty]

The games vary so widely in tone it would be hard to put them into one basket that way. Though maybe if you split them into pre-and-post IGA eras.

I don't know that I'm familiar enough with the genre to rank it properly. Though I have re-read Dracula a few times, read a collection of pulp vampire stories and am about 300 pages into the 900-page behemoth "The Vampire Archives" anthology. (It claims to be 1000 pages but 100 are just a bibliography of vampire related books.)  I feel the old world of darkness/vampire the masquerade stuff was pretty deep, but since that was a long running roleplaying game with a behemoth storyline stretched over countless supplements it better be. My only real exposure to it is the excellent "Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines" game anyway.

But yeah if I had to guess and from my experience I'd say the overall storyline of Castlevania is very above average, with some exceptional entries.

[Super Waffle]

I think it ranks between https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8275335/1/Dream-Eater and https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6860267/1/Late-Arrival