RETRO REBOOT | Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 (Xbox 360/PlayStation 3)
Bookending this watery reimagining
RETRO REBOOT
"ColonelFancy" Mike Lind
5/26/20267 min read
Developer: MercurySteam
Published by: Konami
Release date: 2014
For all of the memories the Castlevania series has given me, there are times when decisions made with the property genuinely frustrated me to no end. Perhaps no period was more indicative than the Lords of Shadow games. They were developed by MercurySteam, the first game saw aid in production from Hideo Kojima. And frankly, I thought it was a very mindless and generic third person action title that did nothing to separate itself from the other action games from the late 2000's. It plays very God of War-esque, except somehow even more meatheaded and brainless. It even flat-out ripped off a boss battle from Shadow of the Colossus with the Ice Titan.
Complete with the walking bottle of Ambien that is Gabriel Belmont, a member of the Brotherhood of Light who embodies all the tropes of the sullen, grizzled anti-hero tropes that permeated video games during this era, he's on a fruitless quest to resurrect his dead wife. SPOILER: he's being led astray by his confidant Zobek, voiced by Patrick Stewart (who is actually great in the role), who is so obviously evil and eventually betrays him. In short, he kinda fails after defeating Satan. His wife Marie departs with the God Mask, and Gabriel, for all the heinous acts he's done as a member of the Brotherhood, must essentially live forever to atone for his actions. Gabriel wakes up in the modern times as the new Dracula. I'll put aside how furious I was that a Belmont BECOMES Dracula, but this leads directly into the events of Lords of Shadow 2, a far more idiotic and depressing game, but made a few technical improvements.
I'll just get the story out of the way. It's painfully bad. As previously mentioned, this game picks up immediately after the first one, with an aging Dracula coming out of hiding and being approached by Zobek (it’s never made clear why these two are pals after the events in the first game, I’ll chalk it up to Gabriel still being an oblivious buffoon), who tells him that Satan is being resurrected and plans on taking over and these two must work together to stop him and his undead army. You grimly murder a family in order for vampire Gabriel to regain his vitality, and that alone put me in a bad mood with the characterization. There's only one or two likeable personalities.
Gabe isn't even a personality I want to root for or see succeed. He's a sullen, miserable asshole who stands around with one facial expression while Zobek orders him around. Gabe never questions anything, doesn’t object or makes any decisions on his own, he’s the same boring block of wood he was in the first game, he just has a 5 O’clock shadow this time around. Intertwined with Dracula’s modern-day misadventures in the most run-of-the-mill drag-and-drop city in video game history are moments where Gabriel interacts with his son and wife from the past.
The game just gives you no reason to care at all about any of these people. The game’s tagline is “Blood is Everything”, since Satan’s blood is controlling everything, but it bites that we barely get a chance to interact with anything before it’s time to fight again. Characters are dispatched the moment they’re introduced, all development and emotional bonds are merely blurted out in clunky, half-baked exposition and we’re just supposed to accept that, and Gabriel just keeps that vaguely disinterested look on his face the whole time. This is as watery a reboot of the Castlevania narrative as it gets. Grand moments don't feel grand when Alucard (Trevor Belmont) show up to aid you. It's such a mean-spirited venture, that moments that are supposed to be heartfelt come off cynical. It's really tough to get emotionally invested when your protagonist balances his inner struggle with brutalizing a hyper-sexualized woman and hurls a metal rod through her face.
So...does Lords of Shadow 2 do anything I'd consider well?MercurySteam actually improved the combat over the first game, which was an inane button masher, by adding the Void Sword and the Chaos Claws. The Void Sword, does less damage than your Vampire Killer but restores health with successive hits. The Chaos Claws do more damage and can break through enemy defenses. This lets you approach combat more carefully instead of hoping to just beat enemies into a pulp and you can actually string together some cool combos. An interesting dynamic, only slightly ruined by the damn sphere grid-like skill book you can fill out.
This is one of my biggest caveats with new game devs thinking I feel like sitting here and racking up EXP or cash to unlock a whole bunch of extracurricular techniques that I will never actually use in some sense of making me feel better about striving for 100% completion! Bells and whistles are bells and whistles and no substitute for creative balance and design. Essential necessities like a double jump or Mist form that helps get through walls are fine, but why in the ever-living hell would I ever need a move that takes nearly three seconds to charge (which is more than enough time for a skeleton to knock me on my ass), drains my magic, and doesn’t knock down slightly larger enemies? You already added a healthy dimension to the combat system, this skill chart for all three weapons is just overkill! You should have put that focus into some kind of structured level design.
Which brings me to my biggest problem with Lords of Shadow 2; because this is now an open world environment, that means lots of running. Back and forth, up and down, past and present, it doesn’t matter, because there will always be plenty of time for running! There is so much backtracking in this game, it makes my head spin. It sucks that now developers can make these visually vast and minutely detailed locations that they forget us poor saps have to run through them. It totally doesn’t help matters that each location, even the ones that look good, are laid out in such a sloppy, overlong, forgettable manner that even when backtracking to a place that you may have just recently visited, you need a good five minutes to get your bearings together before even moving!
All this accomplishes is padding out the game's runtime by daisy chaining you to a tedious collect-a-thon that mostly tried my patience. The benefit of linear design is that when a path is laid out for you with obstacles, you can map in your head what you need to do and where you have to go. This series used to know this, but MercurySteam and that peanut gallery will just try to emulate what was popular in other games around the era. Like the incredibly contrived stealth portions of the game, which feel more like a horrible side quest than an integral part of the play. I can understand trying to incorporate some variety, but these portions never made sense to me.
At this point in the narrative, Gabriel is a borderline indestructible entity who has dispatched giant creatures with ease. He barely bats an eye, and is only getting stronger with each Deus ex Machina he finds. Yet at various intervals, I have to avoid these giant lumbering sentries capable of reducing him to ash? Why didn't Satan just deploy these guys after Gabe?
It feels like they knew they screwed this up and kept it to as bare a minimum as possible. They involve mostly turning into a rat to climb through cracks and grates or possessing these giant, lumbering slow guys that look like some poor Mass Effect design, and slowly walking toward a door. The Batman Arkham games are far more effective at executing this, it just falls flat here.
The Lords of Shadow story wasn’t an interesting reboot in the first place, just revisionist history for the sake of doing it. A really solid combat system and some fun boss fights are mired in bland level design, forgettable characters, a lousy script (what a waste of Patrick Stewart), a more than useless stealth element introduced for no reason, and an overall poor attempt to westernize the lore into something it never supposed to be in the first place. If there was at least a kernel of a clever concept with the plot, I'd be forgiving. But every aspect of this felt dated and dull.
