#freezingorangez

An absolutely lovely and adorable commission of Fran by the absolutely wonderful and talented @freezingorangez who is still offering commissions!!!

“Oh, You Know Who I Am… Musta Got Pretty Famous, Eh?”

“I will give you the greatest of pleasures.” Delightfully devilish art by Neesh.

As a diehard fan of the franchise, I take no pleasure in having to cover bad Castlevania games on this website. But the way I see it, when life gives me lemons like Castlevania: The Adventure and Haunted Castle? I’ve gotta make long-winded essays about them — the proverbial “lemonade” of internet content, if you will. So, here I am to squeeze another lemon dry… presumably.

You see, I’ve never actually played Castlevania Judgment for myself. I’ve had the means and the want to, but I just never wound up getting around to it. It’s not even that I was dissuaded from doing so by the negative reputation surrounding it — that much should be obvious from the fact that I run a website dedicated to the very subject of maligned video games. But hey, now that I’m running said website, I reckon that’s just about as good an excuse as any to scratch this one off the list!

So, a Castlevania fighting game, huh? You know, it’s really not all that terrible an idea on paper, if you ask me. There’s certainly a large enough roster of established characters to pull from; spanning dozens of entries in the series across multiple centuries of convoluted canon. All you need is to whip up (pun intended) any weak excuse for them to inhabit the same space at the same time, and you’re off to the races! But of course, fighting games cannot subsist on premise alone: You’ve gotta back it up with some hard-hitting gameplay.

But Castlevania Judgment was never given so much as the benefit of the doubt that it would turn out to be anything other than awful. From the very moment it was announced to be a fighting game, an uproar began the echoes of which can still be heard to this day. Hell, I don’t even think folk got nearly as mad about those “erotic” pachinko machines! Which begs the question: Could the sheer volume of this fan backlash have drowned out what is possibly an underrated game? It’s up to us to pass judgement.

I drew @freezingorangez because she’s cute and perfect and I love her