Netflix's Castlevania Reactions: 5 Things You Need To Know
There's a floating vampire Jesus in it, what more could you possibly want?
Most video game adaptions tend to end disastrously for all involved. Just last year, the Assassin's Creed movie joined the likes of Uwe Boll's House Of The Dead, and the Super Mario Bros. movie adaptions in the large pile of critical bombs that result from turning a video game into a movie.
Be it not understanding why the gaming franchise was successful, or simply not caring and trying to make a quick buck, there always seems to be an issue whenever an attempt at a video game adaptation occurs.
After almost ten years of development, including the possibility of a movie version that never took off, the new Castlevania series was released on Netflix last week. Shedding the live-action style that most video games inherit when they make the transfer to the silver screen, Netflix have gone down a completely different route.
The series is set in the style of an anime, spiky hair and all. However, it makes its R-rating clear, with frequent gory action scenes, and a smattering of swearing. If nothing else, it's a refreshing take on a video game, and one that has garnered critical success.
5. The Pacing
Castlevania isn't well paced. From the outset, everything feels a bit rushed. The first episode seems to include protagonist Trevor Belmont in the last few minutes purely just to introduce him to the series, and it fits really badly with rest of the episode's plot.
It looks like they had to cut out an episode, and this set everything back ten or fifteen minutes, creating jarring moments whenever it's clear that something has been cut out. For example, the aforementioned scene introducing Trevor Belmont crosses over the end of the first episode and the beginning of the second, but there doesn't seem to be a reason to separate them.
Towards the second half of the season, this becomes less of an issue, as it's clear these episodes remained mostly intact before anything was cut from them. The first few moments of the final episode do, however, seem to appear more as an ending to the prior episode than setting up what is to come.
With the second season getting twice as many episodes, this should be a relatively easy issue to clear up.