This game is really a fun 3D arena fighter. What was with the hate back in the day?
It really deserves a sequel or a remaster at least.
Castlevania Judgement
Kevin Morales
Juan Gutierrez
It was fun but the character designs were pure trash.
Jose Jenkins
is that light yagami from hit anime series death note
Luke Scott
the character design was fun, but the gameplay was trash
Nathaniel Rodriguez
No that Iori from the international hit fighting game series King of Fighters. Good try though
Bentley Cruz
look at the design of that belmont on the cover. that really should tell you everything you need to know.
Angel Howard
no its simon belmont from castlevania.
Nathaniel Fisher
Piss off.
The idea of an all star fighter can work but not the way they did Judgment.
Caleb Jackson
>the character designs were pure trash
Nah... That's just a meme created by 30-something fedora menchildren like (you).
The only character designs in Judgment that were actually bad were Alucard who looks like a copy of Sephiroth, and Trevor who looks like an early 2000s Tetsuya Nomura abomination. Besides that, I think that all the other character designs look perfectly good on their own. The thing about them is that they look nothing like their original designs because the game takes place in an alternative timeline separate from the main series, and also because the art style itself is very "over the top shounen style", while the original games were a lot more "seinen" on that front. All that said I genuinely don't understand why anons say that all of the Judgment designs look like Death Note characters, considering that Death Note designs are relatively down-to-earth and normal looking.
Michael Sanchez
You could remove the "castlevania" out of the title and no one would even relate it to castlevania, the designs are all absolutely fucked up by the death note guy.
Grayson Taylor
>All that said I genuinely don't understand why anons say that all of the Judgment designs look like Death Note characters
might be because the artist for death note worked on the game BUT I DUNNO LOL
David Hall
There's also a fact that the character designer does not always have full creative freedom. There are always higher-ups telling the artist how to design characters in certain ways. If you look at a lot of Judgment's concept art you can see that Takeshi Obata originally wanted to make them more faithful to their original designs like with Simon who was originally going to have more distinctive and masculine facial features and body type.
Aaron Thompson
>Ignoring the last part of the statement
Speed readers? On my Yea Forums? Impossible
Aaron Jones
obata's style stands out to anyone who has functioning eyes
Caleb Nguyen
>belt straps
heh
Kayden Sullivan
Dis nigga lookin like Gene Starwind went through a goth phase.
Cameron Price
Art style and character designs are two different things. That's why you see different artists drawing characters made by other artists all the time, especially among the mangakas.
Carson Anderson
The duality of man
Levi Allen
Has there ever been a shittier redesign in gaming history besides this and Bomberman Act Zero?
Christian Stewart
Bless you Mr. Sakurai for bringing back our boi in full glory.
Dylan King
>Bomberman Act Zero
This doesn't even compare to the abomination that was Bomberman Act Zero
Blake Lewis
but seriously the gameplay wasn't fun at all. I bought it from the bargain bin for $5 and most of the enjoyment I got out of it was playing the story mode and watching Maria complain about Sypha's fat tits. If I didn't know the characters I wouldn't give it a second thought.
Connor Sullivan
No, but is there anything worse than Judgment that isn't Act Zero?
Kevin Young
The character designs and genre made fans of Castlevania write it off, and it didn't pull outside people in either. That said, it's one of the best Power Stone-esque games out there, with good controls and killer music. Not 8ing's best but you can feel their touch in how fun it is to try and figure out combos for how simple the controls are.
I have to agree here though. Conan Simon is the shit, Richter is the prettyboy Belmont.
Julian Stewart
Most Death Note characters are just normal humans wearing normal modern down-to-earth clothes, while all the characters in Judgment look as over the top as possible (again I don't think that's a bad thing, it's just a different style). The most "extra" looking character in Death Note that you can find is Misa, and even then she wears a rather generic gothic lolita clothes that were popular in Tokyo in the 2000s.
Julian Jenkins
>entire game is just an elaborate Kid Dracula sequel
Jacob Phillips
>Sakurai, a man known for years for bringing classic vida characters in the most faithful to the original game way possible into Smash decided to bring the first introduced protagonist in the Castlevania series in the.... Well... "Most faithful to the original game way as possible" into Smash
WOW. Just WOOOOOW. Who on earth would've predicted something like this?! Man Sakurai really is a genius when it comes to this stuff.
Jeremiah Moore
>fun
Until someone starts exploiting shit. It's been ages, but I think that, basically, by the end of its run, online only had Simons abusing item interaction, Shanoas abusing dash attacks, Aeons being pricks in general really, and eventually just fucking Grant and his Godforsaken knife & dagger shit that there was little if any escape from. Really it was the way subs worked in particular that half the game tended to be centralized around.
And the thing is, once you do all there is to do in single player, there wasn't much reason to go back. Time Reaper gets solved even in Brutal mode, Castle mode has coughed up all the collectibles you can get, and Survival or whatever was just damn boring.
>sequel
I wouldn't mind that happening, all that said. Personally, while I get that it was meant for balance purposes, simplifying the PS2 games lead to boring game with, and I say this as a casual, stagnant meta that just wasn't fun to play ironically because it ended up unbalanced anyway. Gives us something like the PS2vanias in terms of player character control, or hell, take the focus magic system of Lords of Shadow and see how you can spin that for different characters. No, the game wouldn't have to be LoS-centric and I wouldn't want that however much I love the LoS games but a crossover would be cool.
Carter Gomez
As far as character redesign? I really can't think of one. Especially to a beloved and/or acclaimed franchise.
Ethan Scott
Why weren't Simon and Richter a bigger deal when they were revealed? I wasn't expecting them to "break the internet", but they got more of a lukewarm response. Now that I like about it so did
Joseph Lewis
Zoomers aren't familiar with them and the only other people playing Smash consistently are Meleefags and Nintendorks, neither of which give a shit about Castlevania
Jaxon Taylor
Simon was leaked shortly before the Direct and was subsequently overshadowed by K. Rool. Richter was probably just shrugged off as a JoJo meme.
Jason Gray
I never finished my sentence and was planning to erase it. I'll finish it.
Now that I think about it, so did Banjo. Even he didn't make THAT big of an impact it seemed, but still. It was more than Simon and Richter
I feel like this may be the case. I do wonder what would have happened if they revealed Mega Man in Ultimate rather than Sm4sh (I was freaking out when they did Mega Man and seriously considering buying the game after that)
Alexander Rogers
I have no idea how such a talented developer like Eighting who created such mechanically great fighters like Marvel VS Capcom 3 and Tatsunoko VS Capcom, decided that the Castlevania fighting game needs to be the most generic and mechanically shallow "arena fighter" with the stiffest controls out of any other arena fighters that were out at the time.
The game would've been a million times better if Eighting developed it as a normal 3D fighter with 2D controls like in an every Street Fighter game.
I love Takeshi Obata as an artist and character designer, his heavily detailed drawing skills and his sense of gothic aesthetic (as seen in Death Note's original manga) can match the Castlevania series very well, but the idea of making every well known and classic character from the series looking as different as possible compared to their original appearance kind of completely misses the point of making a crossover Castlevania game in the first place. If they want to hire someone as famous and talented as Obata then they need to allow him to make the character designs in a more faithful and more seinen fashion instead of telling him to go full shounen.
Samuel Perry
Played it via Dolphin with a friend on Parsec and realized I was wrong to ignore it for so long. This game is fun as fuck. Given how many games are getting revivals via Dolphin netplay these days, I wouldn't mind seeing a scene for this pop up.
Connor Allen
Also, the only thing that was unfaithful about Simon's original design in smash was the Vampire Killer's design which was directly copied from Lords Of Shadow for some reason. Also, I really don't like how Simon looks like some sort of mix of Dreamworks character and plastic action figure in Smash's art style but that's just me.
Benjamin Peterson
Yea Forums was buzzing for like a week with daily castlevania threads after the reveal.
Ashley fags were in full meltdown.
Parker Gutierrez
IMO Vampire Killer definitely looked the best as just a simple black leather whip in Lament Of Innocence and later Ayami Kojima's artworks.
Brody Jones
damn. nice neck, bro
Colton Perez
I especially like how it looked in Rondo Of Blood's remake illustrations.
Carson Jenkins
I think it is fucking stupid that Belmonts are so muscular when their weapon of choice is a fucking whip.
Levi Powell
It's just the whip's handle that looks like the combat cross, which ngl looks more awesome than a plain shaft of wood.
Daniel Morris
Shut up Dracula.
Brayden Rodriguez
IDK, i played this with people in college when it was new, we had fun.
Aaron Mitchell
This. They already had Ayami Kojima as the definitive Castlevania experience for character design by this point. Obata was only brought on as a marketing gimmick.
Charles Young
Only Simon and Righter were canonically super muscular and even then Righter lost a ton of mass in SOTN, and was retconned to be a lot more slim build in "Dracula X chronicles" that covers rondo events. Belmonts are 99% slim bishounen pretty boys.
Leo Jackson
To be fair the Belmonts are a lineage of eugenic super soldiers that are also trained in various martial arts and usage in a multitude of weapons including axes and swords.
They probably should be pretty built since it's part of the imperative of the Belmonts to make sure every generation is ready to kill Dracula at a moment's notice.
Angel Young
This actually looks like it might be fun. Not expecting a 10/10 but fun. Is it worth a go?
Aiden Murphy
You forgot Trevor and Christopher.
Tyler Reyes
in lament it was retconned to be that one doof's alchemy project so it was okay to look simple since it was POWERFULLY MAJICK
Asher Wilson
>Obata was only brought on as a marketing gimmick
Not really. They just wanted the character designs to be different because it was supposed to be a fighting game spin-off. Obata is great at making more down-to-earth designs, he has a great sense of gothic architecture, and his illustrations are gorgeous to look at and look incredibly detailed.
I'm sure that he could've made a lot more faithfully and down-to-earth designs but Igarashi simply didn't let him as seen in a lot of official concept designs.
Benjamin Peterson
They look a lot more manly than your average Belmont, that's for sure but they are still not super muscular in terms of body type like the original Simon and Righter.
Ethan Brown
I think the whole idea behind the origin for Vampire Killer in LoI was to explain why its appearance was so inconsistent because lol alchemy.
Also I'm disappointed they never did anything with Joachim after LoI, he was cool. Hell, LoI was just underrated as fuck all around
Jordan Edwards
Eighting was fucked up for allowing 30 second cutscene supers every couple of minutes.
Christopher Foster
Trevor existed before Ayami Kojima joined the series as an artist.
John Reyes
>LoI was just underrated as fuck all around
This. When I started playing the game for the first time I expected it to be a total pile of shit from what I heard from most people on the internet but then I ended up having a ton of fun with it. The level design leaves a little bit to be desired but overall the game is really solid in terms of exploration, enemies, and combat. It really felt like the first good step towards evolving the series into full 3D.
Hudson King
Who did that art it was pretty damn good. ecept for dracula looking like some spanish mofo
Charles Thomas
Fuck, forgot pic
Charles Sanchez
Well... It's Ayami Kojima. You know... The main Castlevania artist since Symphony Of The Night, and Dracula on that X chronicles art definitely just looks like Nobunaga Oda because of the black hair. I think that the idea is that Dracula is becoming older in terms of appearance in his every reincarnation in order to symbolize that his definitive end (the year 1999) is getting closer and closer with the passing of every century.
Josiah Butler
Is this the designated vampire killer thread?
Jose Roberts
1. It was marketed as a fighting game rather than an arena fighter
2. The graphics were bad even for the Wii
3. The character designs
That being said, I've grown to like it in a so bad it's good sort of way.
Brayden Gonzalez
>I've grown to like it in a so bad it's good sort of way.
So my kind of game.