You could argue that there have been three main “eras” of Konami’s Castlevania series. The first era contains the classic 2D action games that started on the NES. The second era began with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which redefined the series with Metroid-like progression and RPG elements, and ended with Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. The third era includes the middling Castlevania: Lords of Shadow games and whatever other random entries were released while Konami tried to figure out what it wanted to do with the series. Those second era “Metroidvania” games are easily some of the best in the series, only out-done by the level design in a few of the earlier action games, and most of them can be traced to producer Koji “IGA” Igarashi, the cowb0y-hat-wearing, whip-wielding man who was the heart behind Symphony of the Night. But it looks like he’ll never return to Castlevania, as he has announced his departure from Konami. Read more…
Believe it or not, this actually exists — in Japan. Back in 2008 Konami released a first person “on rails” coin-op entitled simply Castlevania: The Arcade. The game lets you play as a whip-wielding Belmont, a Witch, or a gun-toting Eastern wanderer and makes use of a motion-sensing light-wand for attacks. Players then swing it at enemies or pull the trigger depending on their character of choice in order to vanquish the monsters. Sounds pretty awesome right? As if that weren’t enough to sell you on it, Konami threw in a soundtrack of arranged music from previous games in the series. Sadly, the arcade machine was never formally released in the United States, and though Wikipedia mentioned something about a European release back in 2009, I haven’t heard any reports of it showing up. Hopfully with the recent boom in motion-related gaming, Konami might have a change of heart and port it to a console.
