cloudstrife-03407

Maybe I'm so sick of Hollywood sequels or Disney live action remakes but it was so refreshing to watch an original story here featuring a ridiculous premise: KPop Demon Hunters.

It's hilarious, heartfelt, great voice acting, and has a banger soundtrack.

If I had to criticize it the antagonist is too one dimensional and I wish they built him out to be more complex.

I feel like I enjoyed the flagship Castlevania series, especially the earlier seasons, and I'm not certain what happened here. The voice acting is decent - especially Zahn McClarnon as Olrox - and the animation is okay. The storyline is a big whiff at the plate.

My biggest pet peeve is the stakes (no pun intended) are so low: characters seem to be both invincible and never removed permanently from the storyline. After this happens over and over you start to feel like what's the point of these battles if there's never any real consequences. I'm also a stickler for consistency so if you're a mortal and are hit by a goddess.......you should probably die (granted so many shows are guilty of this).

The Edouard storyline is grimacingly bad and at the end of the second season I just started skipping all his scenes, which seemed artificially emo. The storyline jumps all over the place, especially in the second season, and I feel like they really did Erzsebet a disservice. She is such a bland and one-dimensional antagonist, there was a real chance to make her complex and interesting.

Finally, the show should have leaned more into Belmont/Alucard, who deserved so much more screen time than they received, this is Castlevania after all.

I'm not exactly sure what happened here. I'm a big Tim Miller fan and Blur studios can put out some solid animation but the stories on so many of these went sideways.

I feel like there was little effort at world building or background on a lot of the shorts and if you hadn't played the game you're out of luck. I am sympathetic that 8-15 minutes is super short, but man, at least tell us what the rules are in the fantasy universe we are in.

So many of these seemed like I was watching a video game trailer or a video game cut scene - and you might say "but wait, these are video game episodes!" but if I wanted to watch video game trailers or video game cut scenes I'd go play video games. These really need to be standalone stories: like I have no idea what was going on in Warhammer even though it looked cool, and that probably goes for Armored Core as well. Mega Man and D&D seemed like trailers. A couple were so boring I had to skip out midway through (The Outer Worlds).

Fantastic voice acting and animation, unfortunately story writing has pole position.

Anyways, it sound strange but I'm glad it was renewed for a second season since I do like this genre. I hope Tim Miller gets it right with the second bite at the apple.