I finally took the time to watch the latest Castlevania animated series. I wasn’t planning on writing a review, but the ending, which I won’t spoil, got me so flustered that I felt compelled to write this post. This will be a spoiler free review, so please bear with me if some of my claims and complaints aren’t as clear as they otherwise should be.
Let me start by discussing the animation. Personally, I’m fine with the art style and animation quality in this series. I have seen some people complain that it’s not as good as the original Netflix Castlevania, but for me personally I didn’t feel like Nocturne is noticeably lower in animation quality. It is slightly different, but that does not automatically translate to worse. That said, I think I tend to be a lot more forgiving in the animation department than a lot of people when it comes to both games and cartoons. There are definitely badly animated shows on Netflix. I was not happy with the animation in that Dragon’s Dogma show, which I reviewed on this blog as well, for instance. All that said, if you enjoyed the animation in the original Netflix Castlevania series and feel that Nocturne is unwatchable by comparison, that’s more of a you being dramatic problem than a legitimate criticism of the show’s animation quality.
I was happy with the voice acting and sound mixing in this show. While I would say that it needs a more memorable theme song, in general I don’t have any complaints about the audio experience. Pretty much all the voice actors chosen sound the way I would expect them to based on how they were drawn. The actors spoke clearly. Arguably they should have more defined accents. Some of them do, but a great many of them just sound like run of the mill Americans, even though the story takes place in France and consists of characters ranging from French aristocrats to escaped Caribbean slaves. Obviously, this was an intentional choice so as not to be off putting to the white, American viewership. God forbid people read subtitles when not watching Japanese anime. But that’s not a criticism of the show’s audio quality. They did a good job.
While I can praise Castlevania: Nocturne for its animation and audio production quality, I cannot praise its writing. Let me start by saying that I consider the original Castlevania series to be damn near a masterpiece as far as game adaptations go. Though I have also said that the show doesn’t really capture the spirit of the actual games, when judging it strictly as a standalone TV series, it’s phenomenal. The pacing is good, the characters are interesting and multifaceted, and the plots hold your attention from start to finish. That’s not the experience I got watching this first season of Castlevania: Nocturne. This series is set several hundred years after the events of the original series. Honestly, I went into the show trying to watch it as a completely separate series not directly tied to the other one. However, the show goes out of its way, on more than one occasion, to make sure you as the viewer connect the two series together. Which isn’t a problem, but it allows the show to fall into lazy storytelling traps. A little more on that later.
This series takes place in the late 1700’s in the midst of the French Revolution. While the opening scene takes place in the USA when the main character, Richter Belmont, is a boy, the show proper takes place when he’s a young adult living in France about 10 years later. The general dynamic of the show is that vampires are a metaphor for predatory capitalists. And by metaphor, I mean they beat you over the head with the messaging by literally making the bulk of French aristocrats and North American slave owners vampires. It’s a show about the rich parasites of society feeding on the poor and downtrodden working classes. In a lot of ways, that’s not even a bad idea. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) uses the exact same approach. The problem is that they muddy the metaphor by ignoring the obvious problem of telling a story about class struggle and racism through the eyes of a white man descended from a rich family and then making the lead representative of the big bad a Black woman. Essentially, the modern quest to have diversity in storytelling has ruined a story about the fight for diversity, because of the limitations of the canon they previously established. But that’s not even the major problem with the show.
The real problem with Castlevania: Nocturne is that it’s a combination of mediocre and lazy. It relies heavily on you being a fan of the original series than it does being a good show on its own. This is an extremely contained season that takes place in a larger town in the French countryside. The characters keep talking about revolution, but they’re not really taking part in it. Really, they’re dealing with a vampire infestation in a town no one else actually cares about. Which is fine for a vampire story, but extremely limiting for a story about the French Revolution. The only reason the story even takes place where it does is that the Catholic priest of that town happens to be a Forgemaster. But really he’s not even a Forgemaster. He has a machine doing the work for him, and badly. That’s actually one of my biggest issues with the plot. They continue the night creature stuff from the original series, which is fine and expected. But now they’ve given the night creatures a lot of agency, which causes them to break into factions. No, I do not want to see an epic battle scene where the current Belmont and friends stand at the front of an army of good night creatures opposed to a bunch of vampires and an army of bad night creatures. Trevor Belmont would roll in his grave if that were to happen.
This show is terribly paced. It drops way too many big reveals in too short a time without taking the time to develop any of them past surface level. For instance, a character is introduced in the middle of the show that absolutely would make the show better. But then you never see that character again after that episode. I assume he’ll return in a later season, but he should have become a staple character moving forward. Similarly, the show ends with an insane reveal that is completely unexpected, in a bad way, and unearned. By the time I got to the finale, I was unsure about whether or not I’d watch a second season. Then literally in the last scene of the last episode of the season, they do a reveal that calls back to the original series that is so massive that I couldn’t help but commit to watching another season. But that’s not good writing. It’s hack writing. If I sat through an entire season of a show and wasn’t interested in moving forward only to be committed to another season because of a single reveal that’s a reference to a completely different series at the very end, the writers didn’t earn my returning viewership. The writers who wrote the other series did. I don’t really care about Richter Belmont or his friends. The show failed to make me care about them. But I absolutely care about [redacted]. However, [redacted] didn’t have anything to do with the first eight episodes of this show, minus the final scene.
As counterintuitive as it sounds, what Castlevania: Nocturne needs is to slow down. In eight episodes, they introduced seven (eight if you count the final scene reveal) characters capable and willing to fight vampires, three big bads, and a Forgemaster towing the line between both sides of the fight between vampires and humans. In those same eight episodes, one of those vampire hunters was killed and resurrected, one was turned into a vampire, one was introduced and then never showed up again, and one fell in “love” with a vampire. One of the big bads died, one changed sides, and one revealed themselves to be powerful enough to create a perpetual eclipse. This is too much for just eight episodes of animated television! Think about the first season of the original Castlevania series. It’s literally just Dracula’s motivation and an introduction to Trevor, Alucard, and Sypha. That’s it. One villain, three good guys team up, and nothing is resolved. But by the end of those four episodes, you care about and sympathize with all those characters. Even Dracula.
By the end of the first season of Nocturne, I had certainly been given reasons to sympathize with several of the characters shown. But I don’t really care about any of them. There’s just too many of them introduced too quickly with almost no quiet moments of relationship building and character development. There’s lots of fighting. Way more vampires dying than I would have expected, given the age and experience levels of the focus characters. But most of the personal moments are just flashbacks of past atrocities or arguments about what to do next about the multiple big bads running around. There is no funny moment where Alucard and Trevor realize that the Speakers consider God their enemy because of the Tower of Babel story. There is no silly using magic to freeze someone’s beer prank. Which is a shame considering how many people can use magic in this show. Mages are a dime a dozen in Nocturne. The show goes out of its way to make me feel bad for the characters, but it doesn’t do nearly enough to make me like them. That goes for the villains too. With the exception of Olrox, who is barely a villain, the bad guys don’t really have character motivations in the way that Dracula and even Carmilla had in the original series. It’s literally just “we’re the top of the food chain so everyone should bow before us in fear.” That’s it. Every major villain in the season, which is several for some reason, is just a walking bag of classism and hubris. No personal motivations. No tragic past. Just the belief that vampires should be in charge. A lot of them don’t even want to kill most humans. They just want to enslave them and be served by them. The metaphors for predatory capitalism are way too heavy handed.
Ultimately, Castlevania: Nocturne is not the follow-up to the original series that we deserve. If I wasn’t already a fan of the original animated series, I don’t think I would have even considered watching a second season. If not for the final reveal, I might not have considered watching a second season anyway. I do think the show can be improved. There’s definitely potential for something good. The problem is that in many ways the first season feels like they’ve already jumped the shark. On both sides of the conflict, too much power has been introduced too quickly with too many important players factoring in. They really need to get the pacing in check and let things develop before moving on to the next big reveal. If you haven’t seen the original Netflix Castlevania series, I highly recommend it. However, if you plan on watching it before Nocturne, which you should for canon purposes, it will only make Nocturne harder to enjoy.
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