Castlevania Judgment Review - Wii

By my count, Castlevania Judgment marks the fifth attempt at a 3D Castlevania game. While it’s not the first one to turn out badly, and in fact could easily be argued to simply be continuing the streak, it is the first to fail on such a grand and spectacular scale.

Castlevania Judgment is a 3D fighting game for the Wii. A lot of fans raised a quizzical eyebrow at the announcement of the game, but a Castlevania fighting game is not inherently a bad idea. The large and colorful cast of characters that populates the series along with the wide range of fan favorites makes it a pretty cool proposition. It’s the execution of Castlevania Judgment that sinks it like a stone, not the underlying concept.

The patchwork story concerns a mysterious clock-obsessed guy named Aeon who greets a parade of Castlevania characters as they enter a time rift. This is a handy excuse to bring fourteen characters that lived centuries apart from one another together. Along the way they all find reasons to beat the crap out the other thirteen. The only true positive element of the story is that it finally makes official the long-held fan belief that Trevor Belmont eventually married Sypha Belnades after the events of Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse.

All Dolled Up In Straps

The character designs were done by Takeshi Obata of Death Note fame, and are by turns ugly and silly. Almost none of the characters are recognizable as themselves, and apparently everyone in the series has suddenly taken up S&M fetish fashion. Dracula is more or less unchanged, but characters like Grant Danasty and Eric Lecarde look absolutely nothing like any previous depiction of them in a Castlevania game. Even Shanoa, heroine of the newly released Order of Ecclesia, doesn’t look like her DS counterpart at all. Fans of leather and buckles will be in heaven, but fans of the series may not like what has been done to their favorites.

The game’s insulting simplistic controls are identical no matter which character you’re using. Everyone has a basic combo done by wagging the Wii remote, everyone has a special move done by holding the B-button and moving the remote, everyone has an unblockable high-risk attack performed by waving the remote while holding the block button. Most of the characters moves even have similar effects or ranges based on the control input, so there’s shockingly little variety between them.

In fact, characters with unorthodox moves have noticeable advantages. Cornell, the werewolf from Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness, and Grant have agile, deceptive moves that are a huge contrast from the predictable attacks of the rest of the cast. Cornell in particular is so hard to counter that it’s hard to consider him balanced. Maria’s huge magic attacks do exceptional damage, and a simple special move cancel can rack up an 11-hit combo that annihilates about 1/3 of an opponent’s life bar. Conversely, supreme badass Dracula is almost defenseless against air attacks, and can easily be brought down by spamming aerial combos.

It all feels like a fighting game designed by someone who never played a regular fighting game and got in half a dozen rounds of Power Stone on the Dreamcast. There’s no depth or texture to the gameplay, despite the items and power-ups that litter the flat and uninteresting stages. Really all you need to do is block until your opponent finishes his or her attack, then counter with the basic normal move combo with a special attack tacked onto the end. If you really want to end it quick, simply use a hyper attack, a super-powerful cinematic move that cannot be skipped and can make Final Fantasy VII’s summon attacks feel brief in comparison.