Have you ever played a game that feels like a maze? It might have been in 2D or 3D. It might have had powerful, popping pixel art or fantastic, fluid hand drawn animations. Perhaps it had an intricate and dynamic traversal system where you unlock new abilities to access old areas through new means. Chances are, if any of this sounds familiar, there’s a very good chance that you’ve played a Metroidvania game.
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| (Image property of Konami) |
(Image property of Nintendo)
I noticed that even the Nintendo E-Shop has acknowledged the genre directly with a recent sale on Metroidvania games. It was during this sale, though, that I noticed something a little odd. When I checked the listed titles I, unsurprisingly, found Nintendo’s own Metroid at the top of the list. However, underneath, rather than finding its brother Castlevania, I found Hollow Knight. In fact, I had to scroll a little to find Castlevania and, even then, it was only the Anniversary Collection of NES titles.
This raised a question for me. How is it that Castlevania ended up as not even second but third-fiddle in its own genre?
The Dark and Empty Night
It’s difficult when examining Castlevania’s decline to ignore its release schedule or rather, its lack of one. From 1986 to 2014, the longest that Castlevania ever had to wait for a new release was about three years. However, since 2014, there hasn’t been a single game released beyond remasters and re-releases.
Therefore, I suppose the simplest explanation for Castlevania’s decline, exemplified by its unseating from Nintendo’s store page, is that there just aren’t any games for the store to sell. However, we can dive a little bit deeper. After all, Castlevania’s stablemate Metroid has survived despite having a more inconsistent release schedule. Metroid experienced gaps from 1994 to 2002, 2010 to 2016 and 2017 to 2021, so not releasing a game year-in year-out cannot adequately explain Castlevania’s decline.
One could argue that, if anything, Castlevania’s 30 years of waterboard-esque releasing was the root of the problem. After all, many of Nintendo’s headline series, like Metroid, leave long gaps between releases. They simply compensate for this by making sure that the games are of a high quality to make them worth waiting for. By contrast, Castlevania has had its fair share of duds. Perhaps then, while not releasing games has not helped Castlevania’s case, it may simply be a knock-on effect from a lack of quality titles.
What is a game?
From the outside, the Castlevania series seems chock full of great titles. Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow are arguably the peak of 2D Metroidvania games period. Even the original Castlevania, which is fairly dated nowadays, was an impressive achievement and helped to push forward adventure games as a genre.
(Image property of Konami)
However, to work out the cause of the series’ long hiatus, we have to look to the last game(s) that it produced before it went to sleep, namely the Lords of Shadow sub-series. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Lords of Shadow 2 were released in 2010 and 2014 respectively to a let’s generously call it muted response. This might be my post-Covid cynicism talking but it doesn’t feel like these games made any impact upon release. They were both fairly generic hack and slash games, derivative of the PS2-era God of War games, which was especially unfortunate for Lords of Shadow seeing as it was released in the same year as God of War 3.
So did Lords of Shadow kill Castlevania? Well, arguably, but I’m reluctant to say that their quality was the root problem. You see, while neither game is remembered much nowadays and they weren’t exactly a phenomenon back in the early 2010s, they weren’t aberrantly awful games. We aren’t talking ET for the Atari 2600 here. They didn’t kill the entire industry and the pet labradors of everyone that played them.
(Image property of Konami)
No, the poison pill that Lords of Shadow held for Castlevania was about what they weren’t rather than what they were. They weren’t Castlevania games. They had similar elements like characters and settings but in pursuing the hack-and-slash trend, they sacrificed the series’ unique gameplay. They had some non-linearity and creative traversal but it felt token and hollow as if they were thrown in out of obligation rather than being at each title’s core. It is possible then that rather than dying, Castlevania simply forgot who it was and lost its identity in the pursuit of short-term ambitions.
"For what profit is it to a man if he gains the world, and loses his own soul?"
Alas though, behind every questionable creative and business decision there is one name that refuses to be ignored, the spectre at the feast, Konami. Circa 2018, the CEO of Konami, Castlevania’s rights-holder, said that there wasn’t a future for Konami in console games and that they would be better served sticking to the mobile scene instead.
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| (Image property of Konami) |
It’s not only this issue that we can attribute to Konami. Even when they did make Castlevania games, they can still be held responsible for some lingering issues in the series. As mentioned, one of the problems with the Lords of Shadow games was their attempt to chase the trend of God of War hack and slash games.
However, this is not the first time that a Konami series has done this. Infamously, Metal Gear Survive was an attempt to create a survival-crafting game along the lines of Minecraft or DayZ out of the stealth-action Metal Gear series one too many years after people stopped caring. So, Konami has form for this kind of legacy-torching behaviour which explains why, even before they stopped making the games, Konami’s Castlevania was already losing its identity.
The irony of all of this is that, even if Konami wanted to, they wouldn’t be able to make more traditional Castlevanias because nobody would want to work on them. In the midst of Konami’s pachinko-induced midlife crisis, they systematically drove almost all of their strongest creatives out of the company. Hideo Kojima’s dramatic exit has been talked to death but even Guillermo del Toro, who was working on Silent Hills, has sworn off ever working on a video game again after Konami unceremoniously cancelled it.
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| (Image property of Konami) |
When it comes to Castlevania, the story is not dissimilar with Koji Igarashi, lead producer of the series since 1999 and assistant director on Symphony of the Night. He left the company in 2014 after realising that, surprisingly, having spent his whole career making console games, creating mobile games to scam parents’ credit cards from twelve year olds wasn’t very fulfilling. As a result, even if Konami came to its senses, there’s a very good chance that we won’t see anything meaningful come out of them without access to creative directors.
Autopsy Report
So, returning to that initial question; How has Castlevania lost its place in its own genre? Well, in short, incredibly poor management. Yes, the series has experienced a dry spell and low-quality titles but there are plenty of surviving series today that have weathered the same. In practice, a series’ survival is down to the decisions of the publisher and, when it comes to Konami, that isn’t a good thing. Until the day when Konami spontaneously combusts and their series’ rights are redistributed or, just as unlikely, they can win over some decent creatives to make games for them, many of their series will either flounder or lie dormant and, unfortunately, Castlevania is no exception.
History often works in unexpected ways. Castlevania, once a king in its genre, was not de-throned by political assassination, scandal or war, it was brought down because its dad locked it in a basement, refused to feed it and demanded to know why it wasn’t more like God of War…
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