And now, 17 days later, the long awaited debut of What I'm Watching! Ok, so no one was awaiting this, but I teased it an embarrassingly long time ago, and here goes nothing. My chops probably aren't as well developed reviewing TV shows, music, and movies as they are with games, but I'll improve with more practice, theoretically.
I finally, after nearly a millenia, finished the show Mad Men, which freed me from the crushing burden of having that show hovering over me. I seriously started that show two homes ago, and I lived in my penultimate house for 3 years, so it's been probably four years from start to finish, with a long layover in the middle. Mad Men, not coincidentally, will be the next reviewed show on What I'm Watching, with more appropriate teasers for subsequent shows.
After Mad Men, I decided to binge a bit on my own personal guilty pleasure, anime! I've reviewed Cowboy Bebop, which is still not only my favorite anime of all time, but also my favorite TV show, here, but haven't really discussed any other anime on reTROview. My first plunge back into the world, as I've fallen waaaay out of the anime world since college, was Netflix's Castlevania. The show loosely draws upon the plot of Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, featuring the characters Trevor Belmont, Sypha Belnades, and Alucard as the main foci of the show. The series, thus, far, is only 4 episodes long, as it was originally intended to be a film, rather than a TV show. A second season has been greenlit, so we'll be able to follow the adventures of these three mostly lovable misfits for at least one more season.
The first notable thing about the show was how little it resembled anime in terms of it's animation. I expected it to be cut from the same cloth as a movie like Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, and I would have been thrilled if it had. And while it kind of has the same comic undertones (more pronounced in Castlevania) and sheer audacity of violence as the most recent Vampire Hunter D movie, its animation style is actually much closer to the style seen in 90s American cartoons like Batman: The Animated Series. I personally find the anime style more pleasing, but be aware that this isn't a true anime, which may make you more interested or less. It felt a bit more choppy than your typical anime, but I found the visuals to be fine. The fight scenes were clearly done with a bit more love and attention than the more narrative advancing scenes (which is also true of anime), but I found it to balance out to a fine presentation, nothing special, but nothing atrocious. The fights are really excellent, however, and hyper violent, so if that's your thing, check it out! I do wish there were more fights, however.
The high point of the series was the comedic element of it, driven by a mostly strong script. Written by Warren Ellis, one of the finest comic book writers of the present era, the script has a strong black comedy bent that plays very well with the setting and plot. Trevor's introductory scene is particularly hilarious, so keep an eye out for it at the start of the second episode.
The other part of the show that I really enjoyed was Dracula's character, for whom Ellis does a really nice job of causing you to feel empathy. The best villains, in my mind, have never been the pure evil people who you are just rooting against, but the ones with a certain human element that causes you to be a bit conflicted about who they are and the choices they make. Ironically, Ellis' dark vampire lord has the most identifiably human drama in the whole show, and it really works.
There were some weaknesses in the writing and plot arcs of the show. It's pretty heavy handed in a now tired trope of "the Catholic Church is a bunch of evil megalomaniacs" that seems extraordinarily common, particularly in vampire stories. While this can be played to great effect, it feels like this is a halfhearted attempt to use this commonly accepted stereotype to get you to "buy" the villains in a way that is really pretty lazy. All it needed was a little child molestation to really get you to cheaply detest the priests in the show, but at least they didn't take that ultra-lazy route.
Trevor's character was also a lazy stereotype common in a lot of shows. He's basically a jaded guy that's given up but gets sucked back into helping people because it's the right thing to do. While this can be a nice character archetype, it lacks the big "twist" that pushes the character down the straight and narrow path, and away from the cynical and disinterested one. It seems to just happen randomly, which kind of misses the point of the whole archetype.
The show ends delightfully, with a nice tying up of the events of the first season, but leaving enough to be desired to see what happens next. While I wasn't completely thrilled with season 1, it was definitely enough for me to check back in on our new vampire hunting friends in season 2.
Anyway, I enjoyed Castlevania, but didn't think it was anything special as far as vampire hunting animation goes. If that's your thing, I'd recommend Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust first, and there's plenty more where that came from once you go down the vampire anime rabbit hole. But this is a decent adaptation of the Castlevania story, a rarity among video game adaptations, which tend to be dreadful. So there's definitely hope for my dream of a really good game adaptation down the road, as long as talented people like Ellis are involved. I'll give it an 8.2/10.
-TRO
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