Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

Gusington · July 30, 2013, 06:44:24 PM

I just watched the trailer for this on Steam and it looks...really good. But I can't justify another pre-purchase on top of Rome 2 and Space Hulk. Unless, of course, you guys know more about it. :) Have you read anything on it? Will it be a crappy console port? Either way it is released on August 27, right in between Space Hulk and Rome 2. Oh and Patrick Stewart plays one of the main characters 8)

http://www.konami-castlevania.com/

Toonces · July 30, 2013, 06:55:41 PM

The atmosphere and screenshots look amazing.

Watched a gameplay video on Youtube and...well, it's not Skyrim that's for sure. Also not for me.

Gusington · July 30, 2013, 06:59:35 PM

^You are a surfer of bold contradictions. The atmosphere etc look amazing but it's not for you?

Toonces · July 30, 2013, 07:18:09 PM

The gameplay looked totally weak sauce. Here, see for yourself:

I just don't enjoy games like that. I know some people do...just not me.

Gusington · July 30, 2013, 08:51:38 PM

^That's the sequel on the PS3.

But the new Castlevania coming to PC must play pretty similarly. I don't mind game play like that too much...reminds me of some of the later Blood Omen games, which were kind of cheesy but still Blood Omen. It seems scripted with platforming and exploration.

If the world is cool, then the original coming to PC could still be good (to me). Maybe even Skyrim-lite, with more Dawnguard (vampires).

mirth · February 14, 2018, 06:49:45 PM

Has anyone played this or the sequel? Though it is an older game, it only recently came to my attention. I never played any of the previous Castlevania games and this type of fighting game is not my usual thing. Still, I was sorely tempted just now to pick it up for Xbox off Amazon.

Any impressions would be appreciated. I have a pile of other games to play so I'm not really sure why I would even consider getting this.

bbmike · February 14, 2018, 07:04:36 PM

Quote from: mirth on February 14, 2018, 06:49:45 PM
Has anyone played this or the sequel? Though it is an older game, it only recently came to my attention. I never played any of the previous Castlevania games and this type of fighting game is not my usual thing. Still, I was sorely tempted just now to pick it up for Xbox off Amazon.

Any impressions would be appreciated. I have a pile of other games to play so I'm not really sure why I would even consider getting this.

That never stops you during the Steam sales. :P

mirth · February 14, 2018, 07:12:08 PM

Quote from: bbmike on February 14, 2018, 07:04:36 PM
Quote from: mirth on February 14, 2018, 06:49:45 PM
Has anyone played this or the sequel? Though it is an older game, it only recently came to my attention. I never played any of the previous Castlevania games and this type of fighting game is not my usual thing. Still, I was sorely tempted just now to pick it up for Xbox off Amazon.

Any impressions would be appreciated. I have a pile of other games to play so I'm not really sure why I would even consider getting this.

That never stops you during the Steam sales. :P

You have Fields of Despair out of the shrink yet?

JasonPratt · February 14, 2018, 07:37:17 PM

Okay, there are three games in this series: Lords of Shadow; LoS: Mirror of Fate; and LoS2.

Mirror of Fate is a crazy intrapresequel (but mostly a chronology-hopping sequel to LoS), which was designed to play very much like a classic Castlevania game with the LoS aesthetic and general continuity-line. There are some good 1-1/2 hour movie compilations if you just want to get the story between the two main games. If you like 2D platforming Castlevania games of the past, this one should be a good bet. But play it after LoS 1 and before LoS 2. (This game essentially explains how several key continuity characters from the franchise fit into the LoS storyline.)

Lords of Shadow is a super-gorgeous 3D brawler with massive aesthetics and a kick-ass musical score roughly blending Lord of the Rings with Nolan's Batman trilogy (although unfortunately and disappointingly it features exactly none of the many famous or even obscure CV tracks from decades of past games. Edited to correct: I forgot, it does feature a short music-box version of "Vampire Killer", which is nice but restricted to arguably the most infuriating part of the whole game. So I routinely block it from my memory. It's almost trolling the fans that way... It wasn't included on the official soundtrack either, but was included as an easter egg in the .ogg music files for LoS2, weirdly, where it doesn't appear ingame at all.)

It's very much a linear path, which the camera follows at various angles on rails (99% of the time this works fine and helps reduce the gfx load for rigs contemporary with the game's release, mainly for the sake of PS3 and XB360 consoles). There's a small amount of exploration around some areas. The combat system is... not exactly Batman: Arkhamesque, but more along the lines of God of War or the Prince of Persia Sands of Time Quadrilogy. (If you liked the four Sands of Time game and/or the GoW series, then buy with confidence.) The art style is not entirely safe for work, so... ;) Again, like GoW but a bit less so. (I'M SAYING THERE ARE BOOBS IN THIS GAME! :D And some gory kills.)

The story reboots to a new Castlevania continuity so while there are fanservice nods to prior games no real prior knowledge is needed.

One major plus which loops a bit back around into being a minus, is that when loading a level someone wrote introductory speeches for Patrick Stewart's character to read; but while they're well done (he gets into his performance professionally and with gusto) the content can be quite spoilery sometimes, especially at the beginning, and they don't entirely synch up with how he describes situations during his occasional cut-scene narrations. This is a writing gaffe (maybe compounded a bit by his character in-story himself).

I love this game a lot and have beaten it several times over the years. If you get the game, I recommend you follow the non-spoilery guide I compiled some time ago, which I'm attaching to this post, which will help you power-up effectively through the game as you go along. (Of course, "brief notes" for me means 19 three-column pages for ease in printing them front and back, but the game will run you about 10 hours.) One minor design flaw is that it can be easy to miss a few things that you need to max out your abilities; and despite the final areas being based just on skeletons and zombies (a developer design joke since traditionally they're the weakest and thus opening monsters in CV games traditionally) they will kick your ass if you aren't prepared. Follow my guide tho and you'll be fine and can just enjoy the game with a reasonable challenge of skill.

LoS nowadays comes with two expansion story campaigns, which combine to explain (somewhat broadly) how the epilogue situation of the main game has come about. I frankly gave up trying to beat the final extended boss of the 2nd expansion, but the plot had already explained what was going to happen when I did, so no biggie there. Practically no need for any walkthru help on the two expansions either.

JasonPratt · February 14, 2018, 07:57:50 PM

Lord of Shadow 2 will somewhat explain what happened during the plot of Mirror of Fate, in case you don't bother to play that or watch a compilation movie. (This was necessary because MoF was a game for handheld consoles at first, so many people like myself were in no position to play the middle game.)

It's really designed as a love-letter to long-time fans, in a way, because the designers finally decided to fulfill (read: cash in on) a sequel-bait hook promised, gosh, decades ago? -- that the Belmont family's final battle against Dracula and Satan would take place in 1999. So the main plot is set in 1999, and that's what's happening: Satan's three children are working to bring him back to Earth, and the Belmont clan (some of which are vampires now) has to stop him.

Along the way, Gabriel (the main character from the first game) is slowly going crazy for reasons I won't spoil, and so keeps being dragged back in his psyche to Castlevania (the living cursed castle which doesn't feature a whole lot in the first game), upon the ruins of which the modern city of the main plot has been built. He has... issues... of various sorts to resolve there. Again, the promotional material may spoil that all now, but I won't.

Despite this game being more open-world hub-designed, and set up so that the player can revolve the camera around (usually) to see all the scenery better, I don't really like this game as much as the former one. The modern setting grates me more than I thought it would, I guess; and the writers and level-designers have to cheat a lot to keep the overpowered Gabriel from easily being able to wipe the floor with all his opponents. (For goodness' sake, there are some puzzle-based sub-boss armor suits that show up five or six times, which are far, far more difficult to deal with THAN EVEN FIGHTING SATAN HIMSELF AT THE END!

Oh, uh, spoiler, the whole nominal plot of the story fails and Satan has to be fought at the end again. This part could have been designed better, too, e.g. if dramatically we've got to end with the big fight against Satan at the end anyway, why not have the plot be to properly power-up and prepare in various ways for the fight while maybe slowing down his advent meanwhile, instead of bluntly trying to stop it all the time and losing?

)

Also the game was a much buggier mess when originally released. That has been fixed.

There's at least one DLC expansion prequel which explains what one of the other protagonists was doing between the time of the prologue of LoS2 and the time the main plot starts. It's okayish, not too long, but by story design it covers a lot of the Castlevania-in-the-past areas again to explain why various things in the main plot are the way they are.

If I sound more tepid about this entry than the previous one, that's because I am. I still would say LoS1 is worth full price; this one only on sale and only if you reaaallly care about following the story out to its more-or-less solid completion.

mirth · February 14, 2018, 08:06:52 PM

Well, I did ask :P

Thanks for the info, Jason. I think I will pick up the first game and add it to the pile.

JasonPratt · February 14, 2018, 08:07:51 PM

Let me add an overall point in favor of the series as a whole -- at least in the first game, not sure about the others: the "adaptive AI". If you use too many of the same kinds of attacks against your enemies, the AI will have them learn from it and they'll behave differently to compensate. The difference isn't drastic, but it's enough to subtly lean you into trying new tactics sometimes and keeping your personal fighting skill up to speed.

mirth · February 14, 2018, 08:11:47 PM

Quote from: JasonPratt on February 14, 2018, 08:07:51 PM
Let me add an overall point in favor of the series as a whole -- at least in the first game, not sure about the others: the "adaptive AI". If you use too many of the same kinds of attacks against your enemies, the AI will have them learn from it and they'll behave differently to compensate. The difference isn't drastic, but it's enough to subtly lean you into trying new tactics sometimes and keeping your personal fighting skill up to speed.

That is cool. I just ordered the first game. It comes as a collection with Mirror of Fate and some DLC.

bbmike · February 14, 2018, 09:00:57 PM

Quote from: mirth on February 14, 2018, 08:06:52 PM
Well, I did ask :P

Thanks for the info, Jason. I think I will pick up the first game and add it to the pile.

Remember, do not take it out of the shrink yet for a year or two. Let it age.

JasonPratt · February 14, 2018, 09:02:03 PM

Have fun! -- fortunately, the designers realized some of their fun puzzles aren't necessarily all that fun, and so made them optional: they'll prompt you if you want to pretend like you've solved them already and move along. You won't gain some xp, but xp gain isn't really a problem in this game -- you won't earn enough to buy all the upgrades (without going back to grind levels again), but you won't need all the upgrades either. My sheet will talk about the upgrades to focus your xp on.

(Personally I only skip the chess puzzle out of the skippable challenges. The others don't take that long and, hey, xp is xp. ;) The chess puzzle is highly randomized, though.)