I wanted to like this game so badly, but I can only ever see it as just "okay". I don't envy the dev team's position when being tasked to reboot Castlevania, with circumstances regarding the franchise's financial standings at the time, and with Konami being Konami, I'm sure it wasn't easy.

For what it's worth, I do think the team earnestly do care about Castlevania, there's a good amount of references and tidbits that fans of the original series would pick up on, I sincerely think these guys did their homework. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop the game from being a 20+ hour long padded slog where its core combat can be even more frustrating than it can be enjoyable, with janky hitboxes, incredibly fast enemy attack tells, unblockable hits you can barely see coming because the warnings are too fast and can even be obscured depending on the camera angle, etc.

Luckily, I can rest easy knowing MercurySteam improve as developers after this one. Lords of Shadow 2, for all of its own oddities and issues, actually improves the combat from LoS1 by a ton, which is pretty important for an action game (yeah wow, shocker!). That, and I've heard tons of glowing praise for their Metroid games. If there's one positive gained from having played LoS1 in full finally, it's made me appreciate the studio's later works on a mechanical level much, much more

(oh and the post-credits scene is pretty sick I'm not even gonna lie lol)