YMMV / Castlevania: Lament of Innocence

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Mathias Cronqvist. Pitiable man who is slightly justified in his rage against God due to mourning his beloved wife, or essentially throwing a tantrum like a spoiled child and resorting to backstabbing everyone to spite God? You decide.
  • Rinaldo is established from the start to be your ally, but as you progress through the game, it becomes clear that he's keeping an ENORMOUS amount of info from Leon. While he claims a large amount of it is to prevent Leon from becoming "distracted," the bit that really stands out is when Leon reveals to him that his attempt to strike Walter was brushed off, leaving Rinaldo to give an exasperated "So it didn't even work for YOU." This implies that Rinaldo had a pretty decent idea that the whip wasn't going to touch Walter and he simply didn't warn Leon of the possibility, likely hoping that Leon wielding the whip would somehow change that. Granted, Walter simply remained amused by the attempt and let Leon and Sara go, but this still feels a bit like a Jerkass move to keep such critical information hidden.
• Awesome Music:
  • It's a Castlevania game; what did you expect? However, Lament's music is considered excellent even by Castlevania's high standards.
  • Special note goes to the background music for the Anti-Soul Mysteries Lab. (Listen to it back-to-back with "Dance of Gold," which plays in an analogous area of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and Michiru Yamane's stylistic range will be apparent!)
• Broken Base: The game's status as an Origins Episode has some divisive reception due to some of its elements. Some love the origin story for showing the origin of the Vampire Killer and giving a more tragic bent to Dracula's generational conflict with the Belmonts. Others dislike it for introducing plot points that would never be revisited down the line (such as Sara's soul powering the Vampire Killer), unnecessarily retreading plot points that were introduced in earlier games (such as Mathias declaring war on God due to his wife's death when Dracula was already established to declare war on humanity and God due to another wife's death), and contradicting certain plot points established in later games (such as the game having no ties to the "avatar of Chaos" explanation for Dracula's power introduced in Aria of Sorrow). This is to say nothing of the arguments over Lament being the canonical origin story of the series instead of the previously removed-from-canon Castlevania Legends, which is controversial for its own assertations about the lore (the Belmont clan's lineage in particular).
• Camera Screw: The game has very few platforming sections, but all of them feature frustrating mid-jump camera moves. Fortunately with two rooms, falling instantly sends you to their entrance, keeping the frustration factor from getting too high.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Despite his tragic backstory, Joachim seems to be a bit more endearing to the fandom than he should be.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Joachim, whose vampire-ness, prettiness, and unique fighting style have made him relatively popular. (Though not enough to make a re-appearance... yet.)
• Good Bad Bugs: The Item Duplication Glitch in the North American version.
• Ho Yay: Lots.
  • Just try listening to Leon and Walter's conversations and not pick up subtext.
  • Mathias also thinks enough of Leon to offer sharing eternal unlife with him (and you can interpret the entire business with Sarah as Murder the Hypotenuse).
• Memetic Badass: Being the progenitor of a clan full of badasses probably counts, but only Leon can kill a TIME OF DAY!
• Memetic Mutation: If there's but a single thing most people remember from Lament of Innocence, it's Leon's angered Badass Boast towards Walter.
  Walter: That power is quite something. But I am beloved by the night — you will taste my powers!
  Leon: I'll kill you and the night!!
• Misaimed Fandom: The Lament of Innocence fandom seems a bit too fond of Joachim Armster.
• Narm Charm: Leon's unforgettably ridiculous outburst to Walter (after he says that he's beloved and protected by the night) that "I'll kill you and the night!", while absurd, is also considered by many to be awesome too, mostly because it's Kamina's particular flavor of Badass Boast. (Must run in the family.)
• Nausea Fuel:
  • The Forgotten One is easily one of the most disgusting bosses in the series, what with all the exposed bleeding organs and loads of giant maggots that fall off them.
  • The Undead Parasite rivals the aforementioned, since it's more or less a giant intestinal parasite living in the one kind of place that it can reasonably inhabit. Said place resembling an unholy meat chamber made of an amalgamation of brain, eye and stomach tissue.
• That One Attack: Crazy Mode really brings out the worst moves from the final bosses.
  • Walter's "Behold my strength" attack will now not only blast your health, but he will continue using it until you hit him. The catch? He can use it again before you can reach him, putting you in the blast radius. Unless you have the Wolf's Foot or Invincibility Jar.
  • Death gains a homing double-attack that he'll start spamming if you are too far away from him (when you hear him yell "Die!", things are gonna suck), Deadly Tempest unleashes two more waves of fire, and there's a new attack, in which Death says "It's over," and throws an energy ball to the center of the stage, resulting in what is basically Demonic Megiddo, nuking the entire screen with an unblockable wave. Good thing you can Perfect Guard!
  • The final phase against The Forgotten One removes the rocks that protected you from his Breath Weapon in Normal difficulty, and you can only dodge it with precise movements.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: We never meet Mathias' now-dead wife in-game, so his conversion to evil doesn't have the weight it should. Not to mention it somewhat diminishes his marriage to Lisa later in the series, who fans have met and gotten attached to. Not to mention Lisa is the mother of Alucard, meaning she plays a way bigger part in the story. (Unless you accept the headcanon that Lisa is Elisabetha's reincarnation, which is implied but not confirmed.)
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The act that gave birth to the Vampire Killer was Sara Trantoul relinquishing her vampirism-tainted soul to the Whip of Alchemy to unlock its true potential. This critical plot point is never addressed again in any context. Ever. Not even when Portrait of Ruin reveals that the Vampire Killer also leaves imprints of the last Belmont to wield it in the form of the Whip's Memory. Some of this can be excused in that Lament is a prequel taking place at the very beginning of the timeline and there are several possible in-universe justifications, but the event lacking any sort of follow-up or revisitation in titles released after Lament is nevertheless odd.
  • Aside from a great villain monologue by Crispin Freeman, you never actually fight Mathias after he becomes Dracula. He disappears and leaves you to fight Death for the final battle. This game sets up the Dracula/Belmont rivalry and you don't even fight Dracula?
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Yeah, try your best, writers, you are never going to make someone who goes genocidal after his love dies sound sympathetic. Especially if he is so consumed by revenge that he readily inflicts that same emotional damage on his supposed best friend.
  • The fact that this game was sandwiched between the Sorrow duology adds another wrinkle to the above, to the point of generating debate over how "deserved" Dracula's ultimate fate (i.e. being reincarnated as Soma, rejecting the mantle of the Dark Lord, and basically earning a happy ending — including the possibility of being reunited with his lover(s) in the next life) is in light of how Lament portrayed his Start of Darkness. Even with the series suggesting that the big guy upstairs really is that forgiving, some found that Mathias's actions tainted the prospect of Soma serving as a (literal) second chance in life... even though Soma appears to share very little continuity with his past self and actively renounces it.
• The Woobie: Leon proves to be one of the biggest in Castlevania history. His girlfriend gets kidnapped and he goes on a journey to rescue her, though at the cost of his rank. It seems at the end that he'll be able to put everything behind him and live his life with Sara, but she ends up having been turned into a vampire and Leon has to fuse her with the whip to end her suffering. And as it turns out, this was all instigated by his friend Mathias, who Leon subsequently vows to hunt down, be it by his own hands or those of his progeny. By the end of the game, he's a broken mess, leaving the castle with a silent and empty gaze.

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