Hogan Reviews

The eagerly anticipated follow up to Netflix’s unexpectedly good Castlevania cartoon (or “adult animation” for those who are for some reason embarrassed by that term, though written by Americans and animated in Texas means it’s not an anime!) Castlevania: Nocturne sees lightly adapted bits of game lore sprinkled in amongst an original story set in revolutionary France. Now lacking the sometimes comically bad dialogue found in the original series but still occasionally trying to emulate the “banter” Nocturne does a lot of things right, especially the animation quality, but it’s not perfect. Let’s take a look!

The series opens up with cartoon-exclusive Belmont Julia and her definitely not cartoon-exclusive son Richter Belmont trying to flee colonial America to France but getting caught by vampire Olrox, who has been around since the Aztecs fell, which is a fun idea. He manages to kill Julia but lets Richter escape with Julia’s Vampire Killer whip. Fast-forward to the French Revolution and Richter is now living with cartoon-exclusive Speaker mage Tera and her definitely not cartoon-exclusive daughter Maria Renard, who uses magic to summon familiars just like her game counterpart. They soon meet a couple of recently freed slaves from the French Caribbean in Annette and Edouard, the former having the ability to control the Earth as well as metal objects. They’re here because a vampire who had enslaved them travelled to France due to rumours of a Vampire Messiah soon emerging, and Richter and the Speakers have been watching a certain chateau where Vampires have been gathering en masse so it all seems to connect together.

This scene of Richter doing the dramatic headband tying is the only real game recreation in the show…

As mentioned they try and keep the Trevor / Sypha dynamic of sarcastic retorts and “I’m a fucking Belmont!” dialogue (with a thankfully a little less swearing for the sake of it) but it doesn’t really work here due to a more serious tone and more complex characters. Richter being haunted by his mother’s death and Maria being heavily involved in the Revolution and what it stands for are good layers to add, but they shouldn’t have felt the need to try and keep the same Avengers-like quips going on. Annette and Edouard are interesting new characters as well, though a little more one-note. An episode or two in and the four of them try and scope out the chateau and end up attacked by a large army of vampires resulting the Edouard being captured, killed and turned into a “Night Creature”, but one that manages to hold on to some of its prior identity (and singing skills) which at least gives her something to do but otherwise she’s just singly focused on revenge but learns to work as a team and plan ahead rather than charge forward, which is a fine but also pretty standard character arc.

As for the villains? Plenty. By pure chance Olrox arrives also to see this messiah, while the Vampires at the Chateau are led by Drolta Tzuentes, a powerful Vampire who is under the direct command of the so-called Messiah. They’re helped by the local Abbot Emmanuel who sees the Vampires as a lesser evil than the Revolutionaries who are attacking Christian churches, to the point where he’s using a machine to create Night Creatures for them. Knob. We do eventually get to see the apparent Vampire Messiah and its Erzsebet Bathory, so a sort-of game reference but she’s so completely different from Elizabeth Bartley that they really may as well have gone with a different name. She claims to be the reincarnation of Egyptian God Sekhmet and shows her power by creating an ever-lasting eclipse for a moody finale. When faced with Olrox Richter flees in terror and ends up in a small village where he meets his Grandfather who given the close proximity to the time period and his long silver hair I thought to myself “please be Juste, please be Juste!” and sure enough, it was! Juste Belmont getting some recognition at last. Sadly this timeline has gone a bit crap for him as he lost Maxim and Lydie when he suddenly lost all his magic powers, rather than the happy three-way ending they got in the game…

Annette rips a Night Creature a new …. everything.

Juste and Richter bond (after arguing a lot) and just when it looked like they were about to be killed Richter suddenly unlocks his ability to use magic and gets a major power boost due to it. This all sets up the final confrontation, though not without a few other revelations leading into it. Once again I can’t praise the animation enough and with a story that touches on the very real horrors of historic slavery and bloody revolution as well as the demonic game-related stuff Nocturne has really got an interesting balance going, the only issue really was a few blander characters and giving Richter a younger more troubled backstory only to try and make him cool and sweary didn’t work all the time, his voice actor was good apart from the shouty bits. When I first heard of the series I thought “Oh okay, Dracula’s alive in this continuity but otherwise I’m imagining a light “Rondo of Blood” adaptation with Richter ending up still possessed by the end of series 1 and then a second series doing a loose adaptation of the classic that is “Symphony of the Night” and instead we got the two leads from Rondo and… that’s about it. They didn’t even mention Dracula beyond a name of a powerful Vampire from the past. Maybe the cartoon universe version of Simon Belmont killed him or something…

Overall Thoughts:

Okay, actually Maria summoning familiars is a pretty big Rondo game recreation, but I meant actual scenes from the game, not moves (otherwise I’d have to include the Vampire Killer!)

Castlevania: Nocturne’s first season established a new cast and more serious tone while keeping the original series’ top-class animation and sadly one or two of its scripting flaws (though nowhere near to the same degree) While I would’ve preferred a bit more game continuity I can’t complain at what we’ve got, it was a fun way to spend a few hours.

So the non-Juste-related twist is that Maria is the daughter of Tera and the corrupt Abbot, a revelation that puts Maria on the outs with her mother and puts a target on her back when the Vampires begin to worry about Emmanuel’s loyalty. Maria breaks into the church to warn her father of the up-coming attack (given the hatred she showed him an episode or two before this it was a bit of a hard-to-believe twist there…) but only ends up captured by him and as the Vampires soon arrive treated as a sacrifice to show his loyalty to the cause, tears in his eyes but he’s still willing. Luckily our main cast arrive to stop him and have a big showdown with Drolta, her lesser Vampires and some Night Creatures. Meanwhile Olrox is not convinced about following Erszebet but also knows she’s extremely powerful so he actually helps Richter and co from afar (it helps that one of the Abbot’s soldiers involved in the fight is also his lover…)

“I have made a pact with demons to punish those humans who are sinning. That means I loyal to you, right God? …. Right?”

The battle goes well until Erszebet herself arrives, now in a more powerful form for… some reason to do with the eclipse or something (she hadn’t fought in her normal form yet so it seemed like a redesign for the hell of it) and she outclasses everyone to the point where there seemed to be no choice but to let Maria get sacrificed but Nora offers herself up instead to save her daughter, as she too would hold sway with Emmanuel. Erszebet agrees and bites the neck of the Speaker while Richter, Annette and Maria escape, only to be pursued by Drolta. Just as the Belmont and the Vampire are about to do battle Drolta is stabbed in the back by a floating sword belonging to none other than Alucard, who finishes her off and declares his intention to join them in their battle. That’s the end, so it’s a bloody good thing they got Season 2 confirmed!