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• CastleVania: Heir of Darkness

  (#) Kasan_Soulblade 2012-11-03

  Opening question, why does Cornel have his werewolf senses (AKA smell)? He lost his lycanthropy, didn’t he?
  
  
  I feel almost bad for Draco, between the serpent and the tumble he’s been through a lot. Still, you think he would have stood more of a chance fighting wise…
  Does he even have a close range weapon?
  
  
  And so they are all together.. unmerrily bound, this band of Dracula hunters. Draco is so going to ditch them for all the shenanigans he’s been put through just by being in the same room with them.
  
  
  Considering Cornel is “papa wolf: in this fic (in all possible meanings, TV Trope and otherwise) I imagine the Castlevania regulars are quite used to being dog piled.
  
  
  Now that we’ve hit the halfway mark I am due you one rating… also a more coherent review than these witticisms. Since your bio states you want constructive criticism I am going to be frank.
  
  
  THe good, you can tell what’s happening. Setting is (mostly) described well enough that the sense of “where” is addressed. The characters are described enough that we know who is who. There’s minimal confusion of place and people. Also the monsters are nicely described without being torn from the pages from the monster manual/beasteary. The sense of “been there done that” as well as the out and out arrogance from Reinhardt is a nice characteristic/personal touch that fits very well…
  
  
  On the opposite side, when your descriptors lack, they lack. As I pointed out, the whole from forest to castle lacked transition, we went from battle with undead centaur/scorpion thing to “oh there’s a drawbridge, lets cross” and go into the Dark Castle that we happened to miss… I could understand and forgive if it’d been a running battle, or if the mist had been thick and there was a blocky black shape that wasn’t as distant as it first seemed…
  But that transition or any other wasn’t there so it’s glaring. So while you establish who is who… you only focus on the hair color as a descriptor.
  Cornel breaks the trend by being “feral featured” but we aren’t given an example of what feral featured means, rugged beard, squinty eyes, it loses impact with lack of example. Past that exception, and a brief spiel when Draco sees everyone lumped together ... the cast is hair color coded for our convenience…
  
  
  In the last chapter you seem to be remedying the color coded issue, and it’s the earliest chapters that hurt from this more than the latter, but it’s big and seems stylistic, so I thought I should address it.
  
  
  Also, about setting, while the forest was touched up upon, and the castle was rendered a gothic horror and you avoid the cardinal sins of using area titles to bypass having to actually describe things… until we got to the castle interior. The Walls, past the drawbridge, were scantily touched up upon and to any but a true castlevania-ite… well they would be lost… after all the intricate plat forming areas the game teaches us to expect hardly mesh up to the reality of a true castle’s walls, so here some descriptors might help with clarity and scope.
  
  
  But beyond and before that, all was well setting wise.
  
  
  Another thing I like, and hope you have a chance to expand upon, is the whole “castle summons madness/insanity/monsterous acts when it appears. I personally thought that it was a nice touch, and I have to wonder, how is Belmont and co. immune? Also, you seem to be branching out with the character’s pasts, something I am enjoying, though the info is small tidbits but that goes with the small chapter size I suppose.
  
  
  Well that’s all for the lengthy review, now to hammer out some sort of coherence out of the sites ranking system.
  
  Also... are you getting these reviews... they are showing up in the chapte breakdown screan, but not on the main chapter's page. So I odn't know if you are getting them or not...

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