The animated Castlevania series on Netflix debuted Friday and my wife and I watched through it. Let me start by saying my expectations were pretty low. I mean, when was the last time you saw something based on a video game that turned out well? And it was by the studio that brought us Adventure Time...so this seemed kind of out of their wheelhouse. But the one thing that gave me some hope was that it was written by Warren Ellis. He would know what he's doing, right? Well I'm glad to say that I was impressed with the show all around.
The story is loosely based on Castlevania III, as in, it stars Trevor, Sypha, and Alucard. The animation is really well done. The backgrounds look really good and the characters are nicely detailed and expressive. (The first episode, in particular, is pretty graphically gorey and they're rather free with throwing out cuss words. So be warned, in case either of those is an issue for you.) By and large the voice work is quite good. What surprised me most, though, was how funny it was at times. Trevor, in particular, has a wonderfully dry wit. The "problem" is that the season is only four episodes long, and you can watch the whole thing in about an hour and a hour. It feels like a prologue to a larger series and, in a way, it is. Netflix has already renewed it for an eight-episode second season. So while I don't know when that will be coming, I'm excited to see where the series goes from here.
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