Sometimes you just gotta face the music. I put this one off for an entire decade before finally getting around to it. And I should go on record upfront that I loved the first Lords of Shadow and think Mirror of Fate is a decent, underrated game. I understand for plenty of people these aren't Castlevania or whatever buzzwords get tossed around, but I maintain there was value in an Ultimate Universe style timeline to the original's 616 (the success of the cartoon pretty much shows this as well.) And as much as I adore the DS games, I vividly remember Castlevania fansites back around their release going "something has to change." The cheap IGAvanias with reused sprites were not doing it for people anymore (again, I adore them but that's pretty much factual) so taking a wild swing like this was a worthwhile endeavor.

There's lots of ink spilled on what went wrong here. For my money, it feels like the team bit off more than they could chew and ended up diluting the whole experience. LoS might have been a bit overlong and its story might have been your basic sad husband stuff that the 7th gen loved so much, but it was paced well and the levels had variety to them with a nice straightforward thrust. This wants to be an open world game, but it also wants to be a 3D metroidvania and ALSO still a linear action experience, which makes everything feel so jumbled. The areas don't have any real flavor to them which makes backtracking or exploring feel much, much more of a slog than it needed to be. And the plot, full of promise, ends up suffering the most. Characters are barely shown and nothing has any real gravitas.

The combat, despite it all, is still good. There's a lot less enemy types this time around, but the bosses are mostly all very good. When I was focused in on fighting a giant gorgon or weird demon lady or something, all the issues seemed to melt away. Its far from the most deep hack and slash, but the combat throughout all three games has a nice weight to it and the balance of healing, extra damage and such was always fun for me even if I really wanted to fight something other than a basic doom imp knock off.

I'm glad I got this monkey off my back. And even after all that, I'd still play this over something like Legend or Haunted Castle. I think there's a good game there (hell, one only has to look at what Mercury Steam did with Metroid after this game), but alas. If there's ever another Castlevania (which who the hell knows at this point) I'm sure it will resemble the cartoon more than this. But even though it ended on a failed landing, I can't help but appreciate the swing the LoS games as a whole took.