Cliche anime looks with a hint of Castlevania. I judge this game truly dissapointing.
The game has a few game modes like tutorial, versus, training, survival, castle and story mode. I only played TUTORIAL, STORY, and CASTLE mode which I will cover later. I was too disappointed to play any further. The controls aren't too difficult (at least not for me) but there's not really many things you can do with each character, and their move lists are surprisingly short. In combat you can jump, guard, evade, attack, use classic sub-weapons, special attacks and finishers. Certain characters interact differently with the destructable boxes, crates, or candles. Some set traps, others throw them, and others power up upon destroying them. One good point is that you at least get the option of using nearly any control scheme, and choosing from a few presets. You can use Nunchuck, Classic or Gamecube controllers for this game, and choose button presets accordingly. The general downfall is the redundancy of this game. The fighting gets stale after a few hours of playing, which hurts this game because fighting is all you do. The voice acting wasn't too great, but I wasn't so concerned with that. You can choose english or japanese voices but I left it in english.
-Tutorial mode is alright, it gives you a run down of the controls and it's pretty easy to play the game after playing through it. It should take no more than 15 minutes.
-The story mode is vague, and all you do is fight nearly every character in the game with your chosen character. After beating it (about 10 stages) you unlock another character so it's pretty standard but redundant. I played with Simon and Alucard and was getting bored so I moved on to Castle mode.
-Castle mode was kinda neat at first, but is kind of like the dungeons you encounter in Soul Calibur II's Weapon Master Mode except you can get "ambushed" by enemies while scrolling through different paths.
If there's anything from the Castlevania series aside from the music that I've loved, it's the art style. This game detached itself from me with the character design. All of the characters in this game seemed like they were completely different. Sure the Belmont's had their trademark whip, but they looked horrendous.
The characters all look like they were outfitted AND rendered by the designers from Square Enix and feel nothing like the original gothic warriors of the classic Castlevania series. The names are there, but the characters look and feel completely different. Trevor Belmont doesn't look like Trevor, not even the Trevor from Curse of Darkness. He looks like a barbarian from an overdone and overrated RPG/Anime. And Alucard looks like Sephiroth. If I wanted to see Sephiroth I'd play Final Fantasy, not Castlevania. Eric LaCarde's character is a child and looks nothing like what he was in Bloodlines. Maria arrives as a child from her Rondo of Blood appearance, but she looks like a standard little cutesy anime loli girl. Death is a stylized skeleton without a robe of any kind. Oh, and remember how awesome Dracula looked in Symphony of the Night and Curse of Darkness? Well he looks nothing like that anymore. He's just your standard dark wizard variant. I'm not saying that taking a new direction is bad, but this was just horrible. It was too bright for the Castlevania series. And the worst part of all this is that there are no alternate costumes, just alternate colors. The game offers customizable items to add onto your characters, but that's about it and I never unlocked anything of note.
All in all I think this could've been a lot better if they had focused more on combat and characters instead of inventing a new version of 14 characters. It seems that with this installment of the Castlevania series they were trying to draw in more fans by using a cliche anime scheme. As a fan of Castlevania, the characters in their new outfits seemed foreign to me, and it just felt like I was playing some cliche anime game that all the teenagers were raving about. In fact the only thing that made it feel like Castlevania was the music, some of the stages, and the sub-weapon usage. If you're a die-hard fan of Castlevania, rent this game before buying it.
RE-CAP
Plus side:
Decent gameplay
Great music (as always)
Visually stunning for the Wii
Nice controls
Negative side:
Redundancy
Limited move sets
Cliche anime cartoon style
Doesn't feel like Castlevania