Castlevania Season 2 Review

Castlevania Season 2 Review

So, the second season of Castlevania dropped on Netflix on Oct 26. The series is based on the video game series of the same name and these two seasons in particular are based on Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse that was released for the NES in 1989. While the Castlevania series has many protagonists in III the playable characters are Trevor Belmont, Alucard, Sypha, and Grant Danasty. Grant was excluded from these two seasons and there's currently no word if he would show up in a future season. I myself am mostly unfamiliar with the Castlevania series. I know there are a bunch of games and Symphony of the Night appears to be the favorite, but I have only played Order of Ecclesia for the DS which I found to be overall a pretty good game although with some frustrating RNG.

As for the Netflix series I watched the first season last year and didn't like it. I felt it was incredibly boring outside of the last episode and I couldn't quite explain why until I started this season. I think it was partially the writing and mostly the acting from the first season. The first was heavily emphasized on the townspeople and the priest all who I felt failed at convincing me I was witnessing this world. It was when we briefly saw the priest again in the first scene of season 2 where I felt his dry voice dragged things down. If I'm not mistaken I think this is the same actor that did a couple of the white guy voices in The Boondocks and I think the juxtaposition of his serious voice with the comedic style of The Boondocks fits better there than in here.

But that aside let's get into this spoiler free review of season 2. So to recap with season 1 Dracula's wife is murdered by a group of villagers led by the village priest and in response Dracula rages war on humankind, edging for their extinction. Trevor Belmont is a drunk and meets up with the nomad magician Sypha, some boring stuff in between, and at the end they meet up with Alucard, Dracula's son and they all go on a mission together to slay the vampire.

Season 2 picks up right after this with the trio traveling along to find the whereabouts of Dracula. This season is heavily focused on Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard, and Dracula and his army. I would say that the story leans more about Dracula and his followers than the three heroes and I'm actually cool with that. The relationship between Dracula and his followers is probably the most interesting part of this show. It involves politics, humanity, and loss. It also has my favorite character on the show Carmilla. She's a bad b and the only female vampire that gets some spotlight. Dracula's followers all have distinct personality and you get a sense of their characters and backstory. Out of the vampires I would have to say that Dracula was the least interesting, but he served his purpose to the plot and a climatic battle at the end. I know serious Castlevania fans would be wondering how the fight would play out and despite only playing one Castlevania game I can assure you that you would not be disappointed. Now, Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard are all fine in the show, but it seems like the vampires steal the spotlight. You get fun banter between the characters, mainly jabs between Trevor and Alucard, but the three characters grow into their own on the journey which was a lot shorter than I expected. You get a couple of neat fights with them and all and I'm still intrigued on where the characters will go from here. Something else I wanted talk about quickly is how gorgeous the animation is. The artwork is not only pretty, but it animates well, the frames move with a water-like flow that's beautiful to watch and some of the fight choreography is gory and spectacular.

Overall, I really enjoyed this season. It's not perfect. There are a few parts that do drag but as soon as you start to bore it grabs your attention again. I'm eager to see what a third season will have in store for us. I'm already speculating about who the new villain could be. I never thought a TV series based on a video game could be good. It's been years since I watched one, but my experiences were with Super Mario Bros, Mega Man, and Sonic which were all very brief and I hardly remember them, but I don't think they were any good. I know there's been a few others in past years like Sonic Boom, and I think Nickelodeon had a Tak series, but I've never heard anything good about any of these shows. I watched a little bit of the old Donkey Kong one online, but that was super bad. I caught brief views of the Street Fighter and Kirby ones too and they were also bad, but not as bad as that Donkey Kong one. Well, that's all I have to say. Season 2 of Castlevania was great and I highly recommend it to everyone. If you haven't seen the first season I suggest just watching the season 1 recap and just skipping to 2 honestly, the recap was way better at keeping my attention than all of season 1. Well, that's it. I'll see y'all next time.

What Would a Black AAA Game Look Like?

Video games are my favorite form of entertainment and it's disappointing that I have to wait every once in a blue moon for a game with a character that looks like me. The industry has gotten better at this in the past couple years, but it's still pretty small in the grand scope of things.

We have video games starring black characters and telling a black narrative, but not so oddly, none of these characters were created by black people. Games like Mafia III, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, Dandara, and the upcoming Beyond Good and Evil 2, all feature black characters but the titles were developed by white or Japanese developers. As mentioned in my Black Panther review it would be fantastic if we could get a AAA title on par with Black Panther. A high-budget game that embraces black culture and gets a colossal amount of black people supporting it. I love video games, but it's crazy how there are really no black people in the medium and no significant games developed by black people. The closest we ever got was Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan that was developed by a Cameroon team, but even the some of the most hardcore of gamers would be like "Oreo of who?" if you ask them about it. In every other medium we can name people such as Zhane or Octavia Butler in literature, Motown or Def Jam records for music and not forgetting a ton of musicians. And we have people like Spike Lee, John Singleton, Tyler Perry, Oprah, and Issa Rae for TV, but when it comes to video games, no one really and I say it's long overdue.

Mafia III's Lincoln Clay. One of the recent black characters created by a white Western studio.

It would be astounding if we could get a big budget game with black people in charge and seething of black culture. I thought it would be fun to theorize what a game like this would be like. Firstly, I have to ask what kind of game would this be?

While Black Panther was a celebration of where all black people can trace their roots, Africa, I want this game to be a celebration of black culture across the diaspora. I'm going with an action-adventure title. Something that provides a mix of genres and have more of a mainstream reach without it being too mainstream if that makes sense. You'll have the choice to play as a boy or a girl who gets swept in a magical journey that takes them from the UK to the US, Caribbean, South America. You can customize your character throughout the journey and there would tons of hair options far from the afros and cornrows with no hang time. There will be dozens of skin tone options and the brown ones will not make your character look like he or she was bathing in fish grease.

As far as the gameplay is concerned the cycle of gameplay would be something like this:

• Story cutscene
• Dungeon or city exploration with light platforming
• Combat
• Puzzle
• Boss Fight
• And a new gameplay section to switch things up like a racing or minigame segment, that can be placed before or after any of the above segments

It would also be one of the only games ever if not the first to include debates about the pronunciation of plantain and have Spades as a minigame.

Now a game of this magnitude needs a strong team and since this is my game I'm putting myself to lead the development, but I will need help so I'm also recruiting Momo Pixels to help me out. Momo Pixels released the "Don't Touch My Hair" game last year called Hair Nah. Hair Nah went viral leading to many black women to participate in some catharsis by swatting away the hands of white people and other non-white people (because Hair Nah did feature an Osaka location) treating them like a petting zoo. Momo Pixels designed the game, created the pixel art for it, and organized the team. She also works at an advertising agency as an art director so she has experience in that as well.

Speaking of art I want a very distinct art style for this game. Nothing particularly cartoony. I want realistic proportions in here. I know games of this magnitude will have multiple artists and animators, but for my choice of a distinct art style these are the people I would go to.

Free Mech

My first choice is freemechanism. I started following this Chicago artist on Deviantart years ago and now following him on instagram. He has a very distinct almost comic book like art style to me that I see a little bit of Saga in. I'm in love with both his sci-fi and grounded designs.

Mattahan

Another artist I would go with is Mattahan, real name Paul Davey. Now Mattahan already has experience in video games as he's been working on a runner called Earth Night which will release sometime this year. Mattahan was my favorite artist to watch at one point and I definitely wouldn't mind having him on my team.

Adrian Wilkins

He has experience working on games like Mattahan, but he also has has experience working on a AAA game as he was a concept artist for Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Now we need an art director to manage this team and while Momo Pixels is an art director she's not an art director of a video game studio but someone who is is Lisette Titre. She is the current Art Manager at Double Fine and was the art manager at Ubisoft before then. She has been on the cover of Black Enterprise 2011.

So someone's going to have to write the story for this game. This took me quite a while to think about. I don't read a lot of black authors who write science fiction and fantasy, but have been meaning to correct that and most of the ones I have read I didn't like their work. The ones I do like are Octavia Butler who's deceased, Nnedi Orkarafor, author of the Binti books, but I don't think she's a right fit for this, and Roxanne Gray who wrote the World of Wakanda comic and like Nnedi I don't see her with this. Looking into TV and film didn't give me better results, but then I came up with something. It might be weird, but I think Donald Glover could write a weird, but funny fantasy adventure given his writing skills in Atlanta.

We're going to need some voice acting on this project and this was even harder for me than the writer. There aren't many black voice actors in gaming and looking outside of gaming I'm just particularly unfamiliar with voice actors, but I do know that I want Cree Summer on my team. I'm just nostalgic for her because of A Different World and all the cartoon characters she did in the 90s, plus she's already done some game work as she was Tatjana in Arc the Lad Twilight of the Spirits and Dr. Young in Batman Arkham Asylum. Beyond her I really don't know who I would want.

Now this team will need a lot of programmers. I really don't know who to put for this. I recall seeing a black guy that programmed at Naughty Dog in the Uncharted 2 Behind the scenes video in the game and since he worked on something as big as Uncharted 2 he'd be a good fit. There's no one else I have in mind, but I don't think this one is as important to me.

I want this game to have a dope ass soundtrack too filled with a mix of Caribbean, afrobeat, and hip-hop sounds, but still sounding video gamey at the same time. I looked around and I didn't find much that I liked, but my two candidates are 2Mello who is currently making music for the upcoming fighter called Cerebrawl which has some of the best music I've ever heard in a video game and Rekcahdam, a user who does a lot of chiptune.

The ones I mentioned above are the ones in charge in specific parts of the game, but this is my team. For other parts of the game I didn't talk about like UI, marketing, sound design I'm not too picky on. There could be plenty of white people or non-black people working on these, after all Black Panther was not made 100% by black people. This is just something that I really want to see happen one day. Let me know what you think on the topic and I also made a video about this on YouTube which you can view below:

EVO 2018 Day 2 Discussion

I'm back to talk to you about the second day of EVO. I watched more matches yesterday and found quite a bit of intense moments. Lil Majin vs Jeondding was a really hype match. We don't often get to see King utilize his throws this often and we got a chain throw to boot. We also got some good play with Dragon Ball FighterZ with Go1, HookGangGod, and SonicFox. I watched a little bit of Street Fighter V as well and caught a Cody player called EX Squall fighting an Ibuki. One thing I would like to point out is that it seems like we got a lot more women participating this year. The fighting game community is very male dominated to it's good to see more women getting into this because when I started all the way back in 09 there were hardly any and I know there had to be even less before then.

In Tekken we got Cuddle Core still rocking shit. I didn't watch every match so I'm not sure if she got eliminated or if we'll see her today in the Top 8. I hope so since I main Alisa like her and thought of adding Ling to my team for 7 whenever I pick up 7. That's all I have to say. If you want more check out the video below:

EVO 2018 Day 1 Discussion

Hey all. It's EVO time once again and I would like to talk to about this year's tournament. I know this vid is kind of late for a day one discussion, but as long as I put it out is what matters. So to give you some context about me and my relationship with EVO it was back in 2009 when I first started getting into fighting games competitively and the first game I hopped on was Street Fighter IV. I actually think that IV brought a lot of new people into the fighting game community. III seemed to go under the radar for me and others I knew and the hype that IV created got people who didn't know about the FGC, like me, exposed to it.

I started off playing C. Viper and Chun-Li, but I realized I couldn't do charge characters so I ended up maining Viper, Sakura, and Dhalsim instead. I got introduced to the shoryuken forums at this time and learned how to improve my game. I even played with Wolfkrone online for a while and he taught me how to play Viper. I remember seeing that first EVO with Justin Wong against Daigo I think, I could be wrong about who he fought, but he had used Rufus up til this point and then switched to Balrog and I recall people chanting "USA, USA!" and that was the hypest shit I ever experienced and from that point on I decided I wanted to get into the competitive scene. My first tourney was a GameStop Tekken 6 tournament, but no one showed up so I won by default and after that went to some tournaments in my local city. At my first Tekken one, I was doing really well in my friendly matches until the tournament organizer saw I had mapped my double punches and kicks to L1 and R1. In Tekken, mapping two buttons to a shoulder button isn't allowed for some reason so once the tournament started I had to just use the face buttons and up until this point I had always used the triggers so it threw me off and I ended up losing early on.

After that I trained without the L1 and R1 buttons and was pretty beast after that. I made 3rd place at the state tournament and did decent in other games, but never as good as I did in Tekken. I played competitively from 09-2012 and stopped because I was going to school and  people stopped wanting to give me rides to tourneys and sessions. I didn't have a car and still don't and when you want to play competitively you have to do more than just play online. I hope one day I can get back into the scene, but I have to figure out how to get some money and a car first since I still can't find a ride all these years later.

But let's get to EVO. Yesterday i watched just a bit of the madness. Cuddle Core did her thing in two sets against Rhyan who i think was playing Feng and also against a Jack player. Rhyan wasn't all that good in my opinion, but the Jack player she fought later was better. I saw a little bit of Dragon ball FighterZ, not enough to remember anything specific, and I watched some Street Fighter as well. I saw how Punk got sent to losers against an Alex player. This is the man who made 2nd place last year. That goes to show how fierce the competition is this year. You can be the runner-up one year and then lose early on the next. Harada also showed up and is competing. I thought before that devs weren't allowed to play in their games as I recall this being a rule for Mike Z when Skullgirls dropped, but here was Harada who played against Scarlet's Jin. I thought Harada looked like a Feng player and he's damn good, but is he good enough to beat the fans and make it to Top 8? We shall see. That's about all I have to say about the first day. I'll be back tomorrow to talk about day 2. You can check out my video version below: