Castlevania Nocturne is kind of an unfocused mess. Too much going on being crammed into 8 episodes. I get that the show has a window of time around Dracula X/Rondo of Blood and potentially SotN (especially given how it ends), even stepping away from a faithful recreation it still manages to mess things up.
The first episode starts out good, establishing some long driven fears and motivations for the young belmont, though I'm not so sure that was really needed. It would have been nice to see the belmont line thriving, not failing and riddled with guilt. Seems like they leaned on Trevor a little too much for inspiration while doing other heavy handed changes to separate the character. That being said.... solid. Great way to begin a new series. Sadly this is where my praise is going to end. As everything feels better going in, we are introduced to a complete re-imagining of Annette. Why was this done? Couldn't they have fleshed the original out more instead of turning her into a walking cliche virtue signal? Nothing wrong with the actress, but in the span of 3 episodes we're in Revolutionary War America, Revolutionary War France, and Revolutionary War Haiti..... why? French revolutionary war works well enough, but the reset button on time frames is a frantic upheavel of viewer focus. Shifting Annette's background to fill a quota is partly responsible for this. What's worse Annette and Annette B could have been totaly different characters in this show. This combined with "slave history" and "Independence" commentary is just a mess, obnoxious, and completely divorced from the fictional world of Castlevania. It's like the saw the dates on the calendar and figured there had to be french and haitians in the world of Castlevania. Neither exists in this world.... atleast as we know them, very good chance there wasn't a revolution happening either. So it seems forced and wastes 3 episodes of time fulling around with flash backs which aren't even about the Belmont family. Annet's friend.... probably the more exhausting components of the show is just another time waster trying to be more profound. Hard fail. Mostly in execution. Again time is too condensed to make good use of this story telling instrument to care about it.
Eventually the show gets some highs, but other problems introduced, like a suitable replacement for Dracula as the main villain quickly becomes problematic as the new villains just aren't that interesting. Trying to force Egyptian history into a Castlevania is like shoehorning stealth and the 20th century into Lords of Shadow 2. Just doesn't work. I think they wrote themselves into a corner with the happy ending for dracula at the end of castlevania, but it loses the spirt of the games by not trying to rectify that with a creative story explaining Dracula's shift in attitude and present us with a dracula recalled by humans tearing him away from his love entirely.
Warren Ellis work in the previous seasons was better, with better dialog and better characters. Which is a shame as the cast is awesome. Sadly it feel like check box mandates and "oooo wouldn't this be neat" attitudes of fanfiction style writing have corrupted this show.
Even the introduction of a specific character at the end runs against Castlevania canon, like many other things in this show. Unlike the first series that did something interesting with it for 4 seasons, this just has a cosmic meltdown trying to find reasons to make you care about it.
" Comprehensively remastered as Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Final Fantasy VII is perhaps the crowning glory of the long-running franchise and one of the best video games of all time. "
FF7R trilogy is a sequel. Not a Remaster or a Remake.
"The original Suikoden was the first RPG released in the West on the 32-bit PlayStation, and therefore holds a special place in the hearts of many fans. "
Not even a little bit true. Several JRPGs and RPGs were out prior to this game.
Was any checking done on this article at all? Who wrote this list?
@Hikingguy Ya the Akura is/was 55 dollars when I got it. Pretty much no more effort than plugging in any other console. Everything else is switches for things like scan lines.
I can't speak for your TV's upscaler which might be part of the problem. That Akura will output 480p. Not sure it'll do it any better than your current solution. At which point some other upscaler might be more apt. Then again there might be something about that old video standard I don't understand, a bad cable, or a bad port. I've upgraded all my displays to 4k and they have pretty decent built in upscalers. OSSC and the RetroTink 5x have pretty much taken care of everything else.
Ya any linux distro will work, but SteamOS 3 takes a lot of that work out of it imo. Like setting up proton in case there is a Windows Emulator you're after that doesn't have a linux port. I've run emulators on everything from RPi w/Raspbian too Custom built Gentoo configs. It does take me back to original hardware a lot of the time. Still trying to get my light gun working with one of my Pi's I think its not getting enough power as the behavior is flaky on the Pi. I really want to play Elemental Gearbolt on my nice big TV's lol. When you get down to it the Polymega really isn't original hardware or even an FPGA, it's an intel CPU running emulators with some nifty software under the hood. Aside from their GD-ROM attachment, they aren't doing anything the opensource community won't try now that steamos 3.0 is becoming a thing with emulator solutions.
@Hikingguy Their are a lot of solutions for getting the Dreamcast looking amazing on a 4k/HD TV.
I'm currently using an Akura, which is purchasable with relative ease online. I believe the OSSC has a vga input. Among many other options. None of my legacy consoles are using component or composite anymore if I can avoid it. That means things like the DCDigital mods. There are RGB kits too.
Don't get me wrong in concept the Polymega is cool, but in execution its still a mess. With complaints about controller ports not being to spec, faulty drives and cartridge connectors, to issues with game stability. Even then I have to say, maybe Launch Box and other launchers in combination with various emulator solutions are a better path to take. Even running Steam OS 3 on a PC with EmuDeck or Emulation station seems like is becoming a very viable option going forward.
It's great if you only have one or two consoles. Once you start going beyond that you're better off with a Retro Tink and some form of channel split video for RGB or some variant of that.
Comments 9
Re: Random: Music Fans Are Modding Early PS1 Consoles To Use As CD Players
Someone should probably warn them about the warping turntable in the CD drive lol.
Re: Review: Castlevania: Nocturne - Richter And Company Take Netflix's Gory Series To New Heights
Castlevania Nocturne is kind of an unfocused mess. Too much going on being crammed into 8 episodes. I get that the show has a window of time around Dracula X/Rondo of Blood and potentially SotN (especially given how it ends), even stepping away from a faithful recreation it still manages to mess things up.
The first episode starts out good, establishing some long driven fears and motivations for the young belmont, though I'm not so sure that was really needed. It would have been nice to see the belmont line thriving, not failing and riddled with guilt. Seems like they leaned on Trevor a little too much for inspiration while doing other heavy handed changes to separate the character. That being said.... solid. Great way to begin a new series. Sadly this is where my praise is going to end. As everything feels better going in, we are introduced to a complete re-imagining of Annette. Why was this done? Couldn't they have fleshed the original out more instead of turning her into a walking cliche virtue signal? Nothing wrong with the actress, but in the span of 3 episodes we're in Revolutionary War America, Revolutionary War France, and Revolutionary War Haiti..... why? French revolutionary war works well enough, but the reset button on time frames is a frantic upheavel of viewer focus. Shifting Annette's background to fill a quota is partly responsible for this. What's worse Annette and Annette B could have been totaly different characters in this show. This combined with "slave history" and "Independence" commentary is just a mess, obnoxious, and completely divorced from the fictional world of Castlevania. It's like the saw the dates on the calendar and figured there had to be french and haitians in the world of Castlevania. Neither exists in this world.... atleast as we know them, very good chance there wasn't a revolution happening either. So it seems forced and wastes 3 episodes of time fulling around with flash backs which aren't even about the Belmont family. Annet's friend.... probably the more exhausting components of the show is just another time waster trying to be more profound. Hard fail. Mostly in execution. Again time is too condensed to make good use of this story telling instrument to care about it.
Eventually the show gets some highs, but other problems introduced, like a suitable replacement for Dracula as the main villain quickly becomes problematic as the new villains just aren't that interesting. Trying to force Egyptian history into a Castlevania is like shoehorning stealth and the 20th century into Lords of Shadow 2. Just doesn't work. I think they wrote themselves into a corner with the happy ending for dracula at the end of castlevania, but it loses the spirt of the games by not trying to rectify that with a creative story explaining Dracula's shift in attitude and present us with a dracula recalled by humans tearing him away from his love entirely.
Warren Ellis work in the previous seasons was better, with better dialog and better characters. Which is a shame as the cast is awesome. Sadly it feel like check box mandates and "oooo wouldn't this be neat" attitudes of fanfiction style writing have corrupted this show.
Even the introduction of a specific character at the end runs against Castlevania canon, like many other things in this show. Unlike the first series that did something interesting with it for 4 seasons, this just has a cosmic meltdown trying to find reasons to make you care about it.
Re: Best PS1 RPGs Of All Time
" Comprehensively remastered as Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Final Fantasy VII is perhaps the crowning glory of the long-running franchise and one of the best video games of all time. "
FF7R trilogy is a sequel. Not a Remaster or a Remake.
"The original Suikoden was the first RPG released in the West on the 32-bit PlayStation, and therefore holds a special place in the hearts of many fans. "
Not even a little bit true. Several JRPGs and RPGs were out prior to this game.
Was any checking done on this article at all? Who wrote this list?
Re: Dreamcast Support Could Come To Polymega In The Future
@Hikingguy
Ya the Akura is/was 55 dollars when I got it. Pretty much no more effort than plugging in any other console. Everything else is switches for things like scan lines.
I can't speak for your TV's upscaler which might be part of the problem. That Akura will output 480p. Not sure it'll do it any better than your current solution. At which point some other upscaler might be more apt. Then again there might be something about that old video standard I don't understand, a bad cable, or a bad port. I've upgraded all my displays to 4k and they have pretty decent built in upscalers. OSSC and the RetroTink 5x have pretty much taken care of everything else.
Ya any linux distro will work, but SteamOS 3 takes a lot of that work out of it imo. Like setting up proton in case there is a Windows Emulator you're after that doesn't have a linux port. I've run emulators on everything from RPi w/Raspbian too Custom built Gentoo configs. It does take me back to original hardware a lot of the time. Still trying to get my light gun working with one of my Pi's I think its not getting enough power as the behavior is flaky on the Pi. I really want to play Elemental Gearbolt on my nice big TV's lol. When you get down to it the Polymega really isn't original hardware or even an FPGA, it's an intel CPU running emulators with some nifty software under the hood. Aside from their GD-ROM attachment, they aren't doing anything the opensource community won't try now that steamos 3.0 is becoming a thing with emulator solutions.
Re: Dreamcast Support Could Come To Polymega In The Future
@Hikingguy Their are a lot of solutions for getting the Dreamcast looking amazing on a 4k/HD TV.
I'm currently using an Akura, which is purchasable with relative ease online. I believe the OSSC has a vga input. Among many other options. None of my legacy consoles are using component or composite anymore if I can avoid it. That means things like the DCDigital mods. There are RGB kits too.
Don't get me wrong in concept the Polymega is cool, but in execution its still a mess. With complaints about controller ports not being to spec, faulty drives and cartridge connectors, to issues with game stability. Even then I have to say, maybe Launch Box and other launchers in combination with various emulator solutions are a better path to take. Even running Steam OS 3 on a PC with EmuDeck or Emulation station seems like is becoming a very viable option going forward.
So plenty of solutions out there.
Re: Review: Anbernic RG503 - Now Packing OLED Goodness, But Is That Enough?
@Damo Putting this in the same category as a Game com is a little absurd. I can't agree with your point.
Re: Review: RAD2X Is The Only HDMI Cable You Need For Your Retro Consoles
It's great if you only have one or two consoles. Once you start going beyond that you're better off with a Retro Tink and some form of channel split video for RGB or some variant of that.
Re: Review: Anbernic RG503 - Now Packing OLED Goodness, But Is That Enough?
"Design might be too 'retro' for some" lol what? Where is my princess bride meme when I need it.
Re: Yuji Naka Killed "Dreamcast's Star Fox", Says Former Sega Producer
"we actually had a very diverse cast; looking back, we were actually ahead of our time."
Probably the dumbest comment made in this quote. Honestly makes me feel like he's over selling this game as well and it probably wasn't that great.
Anyway good lesson here, not the first I've heard of it happening either.