Today I'm going to be reviewing the Netflix original Castlevania season one which is an American animated series based on 90-89 video game Castlevania 3 Dracula's Curse and those who are not familiar with the Castlevania game series that started back in 86 and it was fairly popular game series throughout the 80s and the 90s there was also the pioneer of the Metroidvania genre that has been resurfacing quite a lot as of late in the indie scene and throughout the early 2000s obviously, when we went to more 3d gaming the game series wasn't very relevant throughout 2000 to 2010 until they rebooted the game series with the Castlevania Lords of the shadow and that game is 3d it's fairly different from other Castlevania games, also the story is bit different but still, you can see a lot of similar characters but maybe their background story or the actions and the chain of events are bit different from the originals.
So what I mean that is I can't compare how the Castlevania TV series is being faithful to the source material of Castlevania 3 ( Dracula's Curse ) but knowing that timeline I do think that Castlevania 3( Dracula's Curse ) wasn't probably very dialogue-heavy as a whole but let's talk about Castlevania season 1.
The thing is that I was very surprised when I started watching it, it was the fact that it has only four episodes and if you're not like a guy who watches Netflix a lot, most of the shows are 10 or 13 episodes, that are their go-to go episode count and sometimes they have eight and six episodes before is unheard of obviously being an animated TV series, It makes things different in terms of budget and there's a lot of costs when you make animated series, at least in Japan there is.
It was produced by multiple companies like Frederator studios, powerhouse animation studios, Shankar animation and project 51 productions and I'm not familiar with a lot of these studios outside of Frederator but the animation quality of Castlevania is pretty good and this is not a kids cartoon. There are a lot of violent scenes like people will have their eyes being ripped out, a lot of blood in every episode. It has its fair share of plot and it's very mature and it's more aimed at young adults or adults in general rather than kids.
The beginning episode will show us Dracula and kinda won't go into a lot of details about his background story. Maybe they will colour that more in season two. I do know a lot of them since I've known something about the Castlevania series but those who haven't played the games may not know much about Dracula but they kind of give an explanation why Dracula gets mad at the beginning of the series as he meets a woman which will spur a chain of events and very interesting. As I said before the animation quality is top-notch. While the fight scenes, lettuce scenery is pretty good. The soundtrack, it's kind of ambient. I have to say it doesn't have an opening theme which is kind of interesting because Netflix is very keen on that, they are keen on having actual opening themes. The music, as I said it's a bit ambient. It's not like the super band, bringing a lot of super deep atmosphere into it but, that's okay. It didn't play down but I think it would have been nice to have more theatrical tracks. I haven't listened to a lot of the other older Castlevania soundtracks but I do know that a reboot game has an actual and pretty decent soundtrack.
The story itself follows the Belmont family of Trevor Bellman to a family of vampire Hunters. I guess they're very comparable to the Van Helsing's.
It is more like a prologue story to me. The four-episode visit is only 30 minutes long.
As I keep saying there are a lot of brutalities in the scene, it's beautiful in its way, the blood scenes don't look fake. There's not much CGI used. But it's a very impressive series in terms of animation. That's all house has its fair share of comedy, Trevor is a bit like a lot of mouths and has maybe a bit about his sense of humour that he brings along.
The voice actors are pretty good, they have had to view exciting voices which bring in more accents because it takes place technically in Europe so it's probably a more European setting and there's a bit more elegance to the Eastern European accents Italian accent and Spanish accent.
Overall I would say Castlevania is a really good show and if you are not a person who watches anime or cartoons in general because it's right on mature, I think even adults will be enjoying it a lot.
You guys can start watching season 1 cause it only has four episodes.
I enjoyed this season of Castlevania but I think they could have done better. So I'm going to give it an 8 out of 10.