Game:

Castlevania Judgment (2008)

Category:

Tutorial

Duration: 10:59

2,734 views

9

Well, for just a moment how about something just a tad different?

I present to you the fighting game that managed to annoy and earn the rejection of three otherwise unrelated demographics at once: fighting game enthusiasts, Castlevania players, and Death Note fans.

First of all, it's a fighting game based on Castlevania...a game series that has for years been about platforming (and exploration with RPG elements since Symphony of the Night)...but Koji Igarashi decided that the Wii wasn't very conducive to a new Castlevania title and this is what was created instead. Series fans were understandably unsympathetic.

As far as fighting games go, it's not really going to win any awards on that front. That's not to say it's bad, it's just more than a little gimmicky and not as hypercomplicated as most fighting game enthusiasts would demand. Then again, it's not exactly a traditional fighter where the opponents are expected to face each other...it's got more in common with the likes of Power Stone. I don't know, it's just...different, and there's no surer way to fall under scrutiny than to try something outside people's expectations. The game was pretty much guaranteed to be met with more than its fair share of detractors.

Oh, right...and what has Death Note got to do with any of this? Well, Takeshi Obata, the famed artist of Death Note...and it shows. What you make of that is up to you, but it definitely flies directly against longtime Castlevania designs, much beloved by fans and replaces them with characters that very much seem to resemble certain Death Note characters, most notably Simon Belmont and Maria Renard (both shown in this video) for being too similar to Light Yagami and Misa Amane respectively.

Personally, I find the game charming in its own quirky way and much more enjoyable the less seriously you take it, considering the fact that it's just a side game without much (if any) regard to canon in the first place. The controls take a little getting used to, of course, but the game itself is definitely worth a try...or at least a look, as I plan to share with you over the coming weeks, because I know this isn't exactly something that is for everybody.

Anyway, there are three tutorials to this game and they each cover increasingly-complicated techniques that you'll need to succeed in Castlevania Judgment. I'll admit that I'm not very good at using some of these things like the jump-cancel and the fall recovery, because the timing is a little tricky to grasp, but most of the rest of the things talked about in here are pretty easy enough to understand and apply in battle once you've got a grasp of how the characters work.

I apologize in advance if I scroll through the tutorial text too quickly, but as you can see I just barely managed to get through everything in YouTube's time limit.

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