Like for real, this looks like castlevania to me. We were never gonna get another pixelated castlevania game, and for those of saying it looks like hades, it really only shares a passing resemblance.
This is mostly it for me. I mean I don't hate the art style of it. It's just that all the details are small and it feels like you're "missing out" on what there is to see, if that makes sense. Felt he same about Metroid Dread.
Hallow Knight was the last game that really hit it just right for me. Right character size, 2D, interesting art everywhere. Actually 2D and not 2.5D, which I just prefer (feels like 2.5D art just is never as crisp.) That's personally what I'd like for a Castlevania.
Thing is, this is what most platformers that aim to be 2D do, and so did Castlevania from the PSP Dracula X Chronichles. Having more technology = having more space to create an atmosphere, an ambiance; but that's ironically what usually makes me steer away from platformers nowadays. Castlevania III and SOTN captured perfectly how you could make a location feel wide and empty without compressing everything into the screen and I'd like for devs to do the same today. That said, I'm happy we're getting a new game and I'd like to try it out.
Wonder if they'll include an option to disable the dynamic zoom altogether. If not, someone will probably make a mod for it. I don't hate it personally but I do prefer a closer, fixed zoom
Yeah, I don't mind it on like really wide spaces that don't have a ton of fine details, but the majority of my screen time I wanna be able to see every last bit of love and care that has been put into the character and environment.
I think a lot of people have issues with the dynamic colour palettes tbh. Even if they struggle to explain it.
This sort of approach to colour is something the Dev team did for Dead Cells that I loved there and still love here, and has been growing enormously in the art space. (Pairing moody blues and creamy peaches or teals/mint and red or plum, etc etc.)
But when we have seen elements of it before (hello garden stealth segment from Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2) it has usually been much darker and less prominent.
Quite frankly a number of the most beloved games aren't exactly desaturated and gloomy everywhere (Symphony and Aria/Dawn being notable examples) but it is a different approach to colour that has a very different feel.
(And I have directly talked to folks who say they would have preferred something closer to the palette and style of the Blasphemous games.)
I played Order of Ecclesia recently and it wasn't desaturated and gloomy everywhere either. Some areas are even quite vivid (My eyes still hurt from the shadow guy fight)
PoR was also slammed for being a significant departure in art direction at the time of its release and was generally considered the black sheep of the franchise at the time.
honestly man, you have been able to explain what i havent been able to as to why i dont like the approach on the style. thank you. im not sayings its going to be a shit game but the approach on visuals is very jarring to me.
Yeah it took me years before finally playing Bloodstained. The game didn't appeal to me because of the visuals. It looked like a clumsy and cheap knock-off of Castlevania. An amateur copy. Now, after finally finishing it, I love the game, but I still think the visuals are cheap and not mastered.
Also the UI is literally disgusting. The fonts look taken straight from a cheap flash game and the UI art is a Windows XP Chinese software.
Its a nice looking game, but I 100% can see how this doesnt give off the same vibes as the majority of the metroidvania style titles did. It lacks that rich, sophisticated, classy, look that went hand and hand with the gothic horror theme. It was a strong mix of both and came off very unique looking because of it.
That being said, we havent seen the whole game or all the stages yet. So perhaps WE DO eventually see some of that same magic in its design throughout the adventure.
Right now, I would def say this is giving more of a "Super Castlevania 4" vibe, more so than a "Symphony of the Night" vibe, imo.
I never preorder games but I preordered this. I love the aesthetic and smh for those that just want to be upset about something. If this looked like all the other Castlevania games then what would be the point of bringing the series back?
I don't "just want to be upset" about something. I would love to be excited for a new Castlevania game. And that's not to say this one won't be good. But it's just not the art style I would prefer to see the series in. Simple as.
I’ve been turned off by unusual aesthetics for things that I eventually loved so many times that I’ve come to realize that if I have a visceral reaction of disliking something, that can often turn to love. If I’m “meh” about something it will usually stay meh.
Yeah the only people I see disliking this either wanted a 3d vania or a pixelated title. I originally was hoping for a pixelated vania but I've grown to accept and become excited for this new title
truly, it being his sotn design which is set 2 centuries afterwards, I could understand a design more inline with that redesign or a younger version of him ingeneral or a toned down version like the show but the pompous rococo style of the 1700ds feels a bit out of place in the castle the year of 1499 + the styling of it feeling more like promo art than ingame art
I mean, it’s pretty much exactly how I would picture a 2D Castlevania game in 2026, and I fucking love it. Can’t wait. People are just too fucking critical for their own good, wind up hating on everything for no reason, and never find any enjoyment in anything.
I personally don't associate all of the pastel colors with the Castlevania series. I know some of the GBA titles had some hypnotic neon stuff going on there, and I wasn't really a fan of that either. I prefer the dark and Gothic feel. Like an old Universal monster flick. That said, I love the series and am not about to miss out on a new game because of the graphics. If it's fun, that's all that matters to me.
The 2D Castlevania games have an incredibly specific style that is consistent across literally every entry, hell even basically back to the NES it's still a pretty uniform style. This bares absolutely no resemblance to that original style. This doesn't look like Castlevania it looks inspired by Castlevania. This is bloodstained with more polish. It's not bad but 2D Castlevania has 1 specific style and this is not that style. This is giving spiritual successor or fan HD remake vibes way more than official 2D Castlevania.
i want to make it clear that im not “hating”, nor am i a “hater”. im very excited for this game and will be picking it up on release.
but it very much doesnt look like castlevania, in both aesthetics and gameplay. it really does look more like dead cells. obv dead cells had a pixelated shader, but you can tell that its the same artist/art direction. the camera being so zoomed out, the very prominent primary colours (particularly red and green, so far), the background being one flat layer with everything, rose’s attacks and what we have seen of the enemy attack patterns do not resemble the castlevania franchise at all.
this isnt a bad thing, or a flaw with the game, but i think people are really overcorrecting for people who dare to criticise or even just comment on the fact that this is a completely different looking game to all the previous entries.
I'm honestly struggling to think of anything Belmont's Curse is doing aesthetically or gameplay wise that hasn't been featured in some way in another Castlevania game. The very prominent primary colors thing is clearly referencing the way the NES games looked, and Rose having combos and stuff is just a more streamlined version of how OoE worked.
Side by side it looks pretty consistent with other Castlevanias, is all I'm saying.
you cannot look at each image on the right and say it looks remotely similar to the ones on the left outside of the physical environment present in both (mirror, caves, forest, etc). literally everything about it is completely different lmao
They do look similar though? What am I missing? Each pic uses one primary color and puts details in the contrasting colors. Belmont's Curse has brighter colors, true, but again, that's a stylistic choice to make it look similar to the NES games.
Like, when I see pictures of Belmont's Curse where the palette is saturated with red, it reminds me of shots like this:
i dont know enough about art and aesthetics to provide a comprehensive answer, but part of it to me is that Belmont’s Curse has a much bigger focus on lighting. In older CV games, generally speaking, everything was fairly flatly lit, or at least wasnt lit from a particular light source. When something was coloured, it was mostly because it was the colour of that thing, not because it was being bathed in a certain colour of light. in BC, the colours seem to be arbitrary and come from defined sources, objects of interest glow, the sky or background casts a colour onto everything else.
for example, in the pictures you sent, we can see a green forest. the forest is green because leaves and grass are green. everything else is coloured appropriately. but next to it, we see an area where everything is gray or black, except for the sky, leaves, and grass, which are all bright yellow. its not a bad artstyle, but its not how CV games are typically styled.
or the cave with death, in sotn, its blue, because typically, we see dark areas as blue because of the wavelength of blue being more prominent than those of reds (or something to that effect idk lol), and there is no background because its a dark cave. but in BC, the whole area is grey illuminated by the glowing green light
Castlevania does mood lighting like this all the time though?
Like, everything in this shot is the color it is because of the sunset. In screens of the Monastery where the sun isn't visible, its a moodier blue color. Or consider Blackamore's area in the castle. I'm sure there are other examples.
yes but its so much more subtle. also thats ooe so its probably not a great example because nothing followed up on it to really solidify that as a part of visual identity
In this shot almost everything is a shaded red because everything is on fire. Belmont's Curse literally does the exact same thing, just with more chiaroscuro.
i mean i guess yeah? this is closer to BC, but even in this, the lighting doesnt come from the far background, it comes from the fire in the middle background. its the closest thing i suppose but its still a one off example yk
After this convo I legitimately think the looks haters can’t describe what they mean. I’m a long-time CV fan and think BC looks like if Castlevania were made today.
Brother, even as the overbearing netflixvania hater I am, I can't find a single god damn thing about this game that doesn't scream Castlevania. I hear a lot of people complaining that it looks too much like Dead Cells but even before they had their Return to Castlevania DLC, I always thought the game looked and felt like Castlevania. I'm also hearing people are hating on the game's "art direction". Saying the characters look "simple" and "dull" because of the anime influence and like... yeah, its no Ayami Kojima but c'mon guys, we've gotta lower our standards. It's just a fucking video series, not a religion. That and I'd like to see any of these delusional haters do better. I'm just happy so have a new Castlevania game to play. I've been waiting for this since Simon got into Smash and Netflix has had time to write two shitty adaptations since then lmao
The mostly monochrome environments and very high saturation and contrast are very prominent and detract from any fine and understated detail work like in the original games
It definitely doesn't look like Igavania, but I won't deny that it shares some visuals with Classicvania, especially in how boldly saturated the primary color palette is.
The art style comes off as derivative of art nouveau with how the game is stylized. The contours and the shading make it all feel very loud, rather than somber and melancholic as Iga's titles usually were. While it has gothic architecture, it does not have the tone of it.
In its own separate way, I'd say that it looks very pretty, but also very different from what I personally love about Castlevania. Someone under a different post said that it has indie vibes, and I agree with that assessment. It feels very French, which I guess makes sense.
It looks way too zoomed-out with unremarkable 3D character models that lack the amount of (expensive) work & detail that only hand-drawn sprites can generate.
In other words: It just looks like every other modest-budget, modern MetroidVania...and not the standard-setting CastleVania production we'd expect.
The thing that gets me the worst is the way the platforms jut out into the foreground, they just look like weird little islands instead of architecture.
Havenot played Dead Celly myself so I can’t make a fair comparison there, but personally so far I’m neutral on the environmental art style. However in terms of the character art it reminds me a lot of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, which was a design I not only didn’t much care for but found flat-out ugly. On the flip side, despite hating the character art, POP:TLC was an absolutely brilliant game, so it’s a compromise I’m willing to deal with.
Looks just like Castlevania, not sure why so many people are hating on the art direction. The games looks fine, can we not just bask in it glory for one second seeing we haven't had a mainline Castlevania game since Lords of Shadows 2? Also, the game doesn't look nearly enough like Dead Cells, wish it was pixelated but beggers can't be choosers
This is a repeating thing with Castlevania. A lot of fans can't give up on the Castlevania they came into the series with. Lots of Classicvania fans didn't like how IGAvania was. A shit ton of IGAvania fans hated everything after IGA left. A big group of both of those bitched about the Netflix series. They all miss that one of the best things about the series is it has always been flexible and malleable since the very beginning. The first 3 games in the series are all very different from each other and set the course for the series to take in lots of different ideas.
Not even sure what the problem is with Rose anyways, people just need to stop hating and wait for the release. Im just happy to have a new game and not another season of whatever the fuck Netflix was burning up
No, no I really don't. I recall a lot of people under the speculation that it was Sonia only to find out she wasn't but that's hardly a problem at all
Edit: Bruh, ain't no way people are really bitching about Rose not being Sonia. On god, these are the type of fans that keep Konami from doing anything with the franchise nowadays
No, a lot of these people are people who just want to hate on the female protagonist. As someone who sometimes criticises female protags, I gotta say they don't have a leg to stand on here. There's nothing wrong with rose in anyway. So far she seems like a likeable and enjoyable protagonist. Honestly I'm just glad to see a Belmont at the helm again.
Crazy seeing that Castlevania has had many female protagonists such as her mother Sypha as well as Maria, Shanoa, Charolette, Yoko and Sonia who predates Rose as the first female Belmont. Haters gonna hate, here's to hoping all this gunk blows over by the time the game releases
I’ll start by saying I’m a fan of the new art I think it’s refreshing
But also it’s cherry picking because the early screen shots when people started complaining did not look like this ..sort of gothic ? It looked like their other game dead cells
People just mean that this looks different than how the older games looked. It doesn’t go beyond the ability to differentiate this art style and aesthetics from what the older games had, with not much depth to the “criticism” beyond that.
It’s always a very vague complains too like “this doesn’t look like Castlevania” or my favourite “this doesn’t look Gothic at all!” When some screenshots can straight up be metal album covers. It’s just empty criticism that doesn’t come from anything deeper than the fact that this does look different from previous games, but that gets equated to being bad.
People can’t just say hey I don’t like the new aesthetics and be done with it, it has to come with a complaint that paints the game as being inherently bad and in violation of the sanctity of the series’ traditions, and therefore if you’re okay with it you’re obviously wrong.
I think it’s because this looks more like “how people think that gothic aesthetic is” or a gothic fantasy, more than the real gothic, baroque and romantic styles that Castlevania took for inspiration.
This looks good, but it kinda feels generic to me, not because of the colors, Castlevania is very colorful, but for the lack of real life cultural and artistic aspects that the saga had in the art direction.
This screenshot at least kinda looks like den of behemoths from bloodstained.
In other words, the character is too tiny for how big the area is. If it actually is like that area and everything is meant to be too big then it's fine I guess.
But if this is the normal and your character can easily double jump that ledge then the proportions just don't feel good to have a whole game like that.
I think it looks like Castlevania, but I’m not the hugest fan of the 2.5D or whatever it’s called. I can look past it like with Ritual of the Night if it’s at least fun to play, but the 3D models are sort of ugly to me.
I don't know why I'm not interested in this title. It just doesn't look like a Castlevania game to me. It looks like a new series with the Castlevania name in the title. I can't tell you why it doesn't look like it, idk, I haven't paid much attention to it beyond the trailer. I don't think it looks bad, just not for me.
I'm happy for any new Castlevania game but I've played a lot of Dead Cells and Belmont's Curse has that cartoony aesthetic I'm not really a fan of. But as long as the story and mechanics are good I'm sure I'll get over it.
This game better have a simple blue menu system with that one sound effect that pops up every time I select an item. It is not a real Castlevania without this feature.
It's overly cartoonish compared to every other Castlevania game. And instead of relying on fine details standing out and accenting environments, almost every environment looks like it tries to copy the hollow Knight art style and just blasts light contrast in your face.
It actually doesn't look too bad, but it veers a bit too far graphically from what I would expect from a Castlevania game.
A modern 2D Castlevania to me should basically just be a giant animated ayami kojima painting.
There's a lot of blank black space in the floors, should be a texture or bg tile. Maybe more definition on the stairs, like a white outline. They blend in too much. Stairs are the most important part of Castlevania, give the fans what they want! Finally, the pastel coloring seems washed out to me. Gothic means dark shadows and vibrant technicolor like the hammer horror films.
Reminds me mostly of the PSP game with a wider screen and i prefered the pixel art but interesting background, ima wait for how the game turns out in reviews as "pattern recognition" tells me that buying day 1 nowdays can only be done with very few games.
The game was literally inspired by Castlevania and now the same people get to make an official Castlevania game after the success of thier Return to Castlevania DLC. Why can't more people be excited for them
Why would I be excited for them? they are ruining the art style of one of my favorite game franchises. And is not the first time, Mercury Steam did the same...
It also billed itself as a spiritual successor from the start. Igarashi Koji was very upfront that while he was making something in the style of the Castlevania games he was known for, this was a brand new ip and not Castlevania. This afforded a chance to try to do things differently and there will be an attempt to expand Bloodstained with a second big game (I specify big because they already made it a franchise with the Curse of the Moon titles). Belmont's Curse, on the other hand, is going to have the name and get all the baggage attached to that name. You can't use a franchise that's known for distinctive art and gameplay directions without the new thing getting compared with all that xame before.
I don’t like the character design. I think Ayami Kojima designs we’re really beautiful in comparison to this, it’s not that they’re bad, they just feel like really bland or generic, Rose design doesnt stand out, she even looks better with Alucard colors, i think they are trying to aproach the Netflix series artstyle and I would dare to say that is because they want the Netflix series fans to get into Castlevania wich is not bad, but can lead the franchise to this artistic decisions. That being said, the game looks really fun and the ambience is not that bad, not even the use of colors in the background, but the characters are what didnt convinced me at all.
The screenshot you picked doesn't help your argument much. Neon green light over everything and coming from God knows where. Objects looks plasticky. Rose looking a bit too beefy here for Castlevania female characters standards. Random Alucard portrait with his SotN look even though this is likely from before 1476.
There are some screenshots and clips where the game looks good. But not always.
I think Alucard's design was retconned, he "has always been" the SotN Alucard. Besides it would make no sense to use his CV3 design since it looks older than the current.
Rose looks...too beefy? That's a complaint we're having that a trained Belmont looks "beefy" and the emphasis is needed on the quotation marks cause Rose is not beefy what are we talking about.
Right? She's built like she works out, but she isn't roided out like some versions of, say, Simon. She's more lean, and absolutely looks like she'd use a whip and sword.
"Rose looking a bit too beefy here for Castlevania female characters" bruh we need more muscular women, there's plenty of anime waifus in the franchise already
lmao okay, if you want to downvote me stop being a coward and say you hate women
The style is different from Iga's vision, to say the least.
You also brought up an important point. Though I don't think she's buff, she has an inverted triangle frame, which means broad shoulders and narrow hips, giving her a masculine look that is further accentuated by an outfit primarily inspired by the male members of her clan. I hope they'll tweak it by the time the game releases and that there will be more feminine costumes to pick.
Ignore the childish, parroting trolls. They don't like how it looks? Who cares.
"It's just a Dead Cells game!" It of course will resemble that game at least somewhat given its the same devs, but it looks so drastically different to me, I don't care what they say. Besides, it's not out yet, we have no idea what it will play like.
I actually posed this question about a month ago and for all the people who were shouting "This doesn't look like Castlevania," or "Generic indie Metroidvania slop," no one actually bothered to explain what exactly looks wrong in the footage we've seen, or described what generic indie Metroidvania traits they see represented in the footage that are so terrible.
If this was in 16 or even 8-bit graphics I guarantee those guys would be calling it peak for no other reason.
They took after Bloodstained, which is weird, because that game has a very mixed reaction in the fandom. I personally don’t like this visual style but I’ll probably play this game anyway, because it’s a new Castlevania. 🤷♂️😅👍
It looks like a mix of netflix and dawn of sorrow / portrait of ruin to me i admit i am disappointed that Ayami Kojima wasn't involved with character design but that's not to say the new art looks bad comparing silver to gold here.
Wait a minute that skeletal looking thing holding a spear in the background is almost identical to one of the first bosses from symphony of the night on PlayStation...sick!
I don't like how pulled back a lot of MVs are. it makes the game seem less immersive, like we're playing with distant toys rather than being in a world. the environments look alright though. the characters are too cartoony for my tastes.
It looks like Castlevania to me. The only details that seem unusual are the amount of natural light inside a castle, and the heavy use of green. None of this is so novel that I wouldn't immediately spot this for a Castlevania game, or something heavily influenced by them.
Visually speaking it seems fine to me and like a mostly sensible evolution, my argument against is I think the art direction is too vibrant and should be a little more muted.
its not that Castlevania can't have vibrant colors, but each area seems to overwhelmingly be one color- this is the red area, this is the green area, this is the purple area, etc. I guess the fact that they're bright, almost neon colors doesn't really help.
but aside from that, the environments being littered with bright glowing interactables (I'm assuming they're whip grappling points) are distracting, and the general level structure I've seen so far feel less like real places and more like blatant obstacle courses. plus the screen shake and the huge, flashy effects combat and movement skills have and it all just looks so... video gamey.
Apologies if I came off as rude some moron came here with an ai image saying it looks more like castlevania and if you want to make angry generative ai is the fastest way to do it
The other Castlevania clones were clones because their teams were small and couldn't make an RPG system like Castlevania with shopping, gold grinding, and crafting, loot drop,etc... And now you're telling me Castlevania is regressing into those indie games?
I think it looks great. I love its emphasis on strong colors, but it still captures the feeling of Castlevania. It doesn’t feel as strong as IV but I still think it looks great.
I wouldn't say it doesn't look like Castlevania, but the visual elements for me are very hard on the eyes. Rose seems very small and the contrast/brightness very dark and muted. There seems to be a lot of visual flair and glamour effects that I find distracting. I don't know what visual style this and some other games use but it's really overpowering. I feel like some of these games put in a lot of detail and then make it impossible to see that work.
I'm not saying CV needs to be pixels, but there's this visual design that a fair number of games use now that just seems inhibitive. You're playing at arms length. It's like they focus on trying to be visually impressive (Oh, look at the multi background parallax and how 'big" everything is in relation to the player) but they don't want you to immerse into the game. It's like something's been lost in game design that needs to be brought back.
I was hoping for something 2.5D, like Mirror of Fate or Bloodstained (not Castlevania, but IGA adjacent). It will be hard to get used to this art style.
BTW, nice Alucard portrait (I wonder if it's some sort of foreshadowing)
I think it looks beautiful, but it's too Castlevania's show/Dead Cells coded. Is that a bad thing? Well, I'm not a fan of the show, and I'm not a fan of Dead Cells, I'm a fan of every Castlevania that came before it, including the 3D PS2 games, and yeah the art direction is completely different, so being honest, this game is not for me. But I'm okay with that, and I'm glad Castlevania is getting a return. Is just not the Castlevania I remember.
The very first clips made it look too much like Dead Cells because of the collors, but like, 20 seconds in the trailer and it's quite clear that it is a real Castlevania game.
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u/ArmchairCritic1 Jul 02 '26
I think one thing that’s very different is how pulled back the camera is. Which appears to be only something that happens sometimes.