Game:

Castlevania Judgment (2008)

Duration: 4:46

2,256 views

9

And so we start winding down after a major hiatus and eleven other characters before her, it's finally high time to address Maria Renard. If you're of the counting nature, this will leave only two more characters left to tackle, and one of them is obviously Dracula, since he was the very first opponent.

Yes, Eric! It's your turn! Your turn, as Maria so enthusiastically put it: to get the stuffing beaten out of you! I love it when we're all on the same wavelength.

I actually thought about rejecting any match that begins with Eric repeating his same line from the previous video about fighting him like a grown man...but I think it really hammers home that this is one of his two personality traits expressed in this game...and how repetitive it gets. Plus he's telling the young girl to treat him like a man instead of a child, which was ridiculous enough as it is.

His other lines are generic except for one about "the power stronger than that of a Belmont"...you know, I don't really get that part of the whole mythos of Castlevania...Maria's always implied to be really powerful, but when not under player control she seems content to being pretty useless as either a distressed damsel or at least a slightly uninvolved onlooker, and this goes for both her youth and adulthood.

On the other hand, as a player-controlled character, Maria can often make the games in which she appears a tad TOO easy, because she gets to have a ridiculously rapid attack and all sorts of interesting tricks and unconventional "subweapons" in the form of several powerful animal guardians.

And this...uh...very unconventional redesign of Maria (who is most DEFINITELY NOT Misa Amane in disguise) is no different, utilizing a lot of animal friends, although I'm not entirely certain that the precise makeup of her merry band is consistent. I'm not exactly an expert on the particulars of Maria's canonical pals either, though.

I've heard varying interpretations of where Maria stands on the sliding scale of character effectiveness, but I do know that some people are wont to reject her entirely as "useless" because two of her attacks come with a potential to trigger random tripping. These attacks are the fiery spinning attack and the glowing green divebomb move, which would actually make sense, since it's Osca and his perch that seem to be doing all the work, with Maria simply trying to hang on for dear life.

While tripping, even though you'll appear to be sliding around on the ground, you are in fact open for a free attack that wouldn't otherwise be possible if you had been swept off your feet. Eric was not shy about demonstrating this fact, as a large majority of the times this occurred, he would use his Hyper Attack on me with little hesitation.

It doesn't seem that Maria's dodge is quite up to par with the other characters' evasive maneuvers, nor can she perform a double-jump. She can, however, hover over rather long distances...say the entire length of your average battlefield. How on earth can Osca lift his cage, the staff, and Maria without ever getting tired?

The only other major point that strikes me when it comes to Maria's moves is that the tortoise drop and the tidal wave special moves are long range moves which can be rather easily spammed, and I've run across both local and online players who based their entire "strategies" on simply using a combination of both until the enemy's life bar is exhausted. Naturally, as with any opponent that insists on using only one or two attacks, it's only a matter of circumventing the sorely limited tactical scope of such an enemy's offense before so that you can have your way with them.

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