YMMV / Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The Original Founders. Were they really paragons of holiness or were they every bit as arrogant and egotistical as Gabriel comes to believe they were? did they know what would happen when they ascended? Their ascension caused what was left behind to coalesce in the titular Lord of Shadow, a plague upon the world. one theory is that while both sides of the Founders were pure good/evil in aspect, the split didn't separate their personalities other than warping to fit their new, evil mindset, the Founders were just arrogant enough in their own purity that they believed their dark sides would be small and weak.
  • How much did the vampires blood affect Gabriel? It takes shockingly little time for him to start indulging in every violent fantasy he has on the Forbidden One who, while evil, has no real connection to Gabriel that would justify such animosity and then turn his attention to the rest of the world. Did the blood then turn Gabriel into a monster or was it simply the excuse he needed for Jumping Off The Slippery Rope and begin a crusade against a God he had felts slighted him?
• Annoying Video Game Helper: Claudia in the Chapter 2, especially in the Entrance to the Sanctuary, where every few seconds, she tells you information you already know. Her voice becomes annoying rather quick.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Satan. You have infinite magic which you can use to heal whenever you need it, and he does piddling amounts of damage himself. It's basically impossible to actually lose the fight unless you're just not trying. Very unexpected for the final boss. Except in Paladin Mode where his attacks do a lot of damage (and only one is blockable). While you have infinite magic, he can drain your health faster than you can heal if you're not careful. Not to mention that he can heal too.
• Awesome Music: The entire soundtrack is excellent, though very different from the upbeat music found in the series' 2D outings.
• Breather Boss:
  • Pan's is not a really difficult boss, considering that he's a Physical God. However, it should be noted that he was out of his "area", which weakens him, and his objective was not to kill Gabriel, but to teach him how to fight against Satan.
  • The three Scarecrows are rather weak and have an impossibly low amount of health for bosses, being brought down very quickly.
  • The two Necromancers, their most annoying skill is being able to summon hordes of Reapers and Zombies, both of which are brought down with a single bottle of holy water, they have low HP and their attacks are very easy to dodge.
  • The Gravedigger also counts, despite being a hulking character, his attacks are easy to dodge and there are not many of them. Although he has a gimmick to be defeated, it's both extremely easy to figure out and easy to do.
• Base-Breaking Character: Gabriel. He's either praised for being the first Belmont in the franchise who isn't a downplayed Vanilla Protagonist, or scorned for becoming the villain of the games.
• Broken Base: The split sprang up around the increased emphasis on plot and presentation as well as the more action-based gameplay, of which many made comparisons to God of War. Incidentally, these Base-Breaking issues have some uncanny similarities to a few that have sprung up with Metroid: Other M, an installment in the fellow Trope Naming franchise for Metroidvania which came out a few months before this game. Both games have had detractors who have lamented each game taking a page from Metal Gear (and in Lords of Shadow's case, it had assistance from Hideo Kojima), in regards to each having longer cutscenes and such.
• Complete Monster:
  • Satan is the architect of almost every atrocity in the games, all so he could return to Heaven and take revenge on God. Deceiving Zobek, Satan uses him to separate Heaven from Earth, leaving the souls of the dead trapped in Limbo, afterwards forcing Gabriel Belmont to murder his wife Marie. Aiming to exploit the prophecy of the Chosen One to claim the God Mask for himself, Satan arranges for Gabriel to kill many others, both evil and innocent, before attempting to dispose of both Gabriel and Zobek. Defeated by Gabriel, Satan has his children pave the way for his return and when he does come back, he murders the son who summoned him for not disposing of the one man he fears: Gabriel—now known as Dracula. Opting to simply destroy the world with an enslaved and tortured Leviathan, Satan's final gambit has him possess Alucard, Dracula's beloved son, to try to stop Dracula from killing him, all the while taunting Dracula. Making paltry attempts at justifying himself, Gabriel saw Satan for the wretched egomaniac he is.
  • Zobek, the Lord of the Dead and the strongest, most ambitious of the Lords of Shadow, is also The Corrupter to Gabriel Belmont/Dracula himself. As part of a grand scheme to attain godlike power, Zobek cut off the Earth from Heaven and trapped the souls of the dead on Earth, infesting the world with the undead. Zobek directly facilitates Gabriel's fall into evil by using the Devil's Mask to make Gabriel murder his own wife, and meticulously disposes of any and all loose ends along the way while playing the role of Gabriel's friend, having Gabriel dispose of his fellow Lords of Shadow and other innocents like Claudia. Zobek tortures Gabriel to death after revealing his true colors and mocking him over everything Zobek has had him do. Even after he's revealed to be a Big Bad Wannabe to Satan, Zobek returns in the modern day with ambitions of destroying Dracula and Satan both, and the first thing he does upon awakening Dracula is feed him an innocent family.
  • Reverie & Resurrection DLC: The Forgotten One is a tremendously powerful demon summoned by the Bernhard family that brought about untold destruction upon the world before it was sealed in its home dimension by the founders of the Brotherhood of Light. Many centuries later, the Forgotten One would attempt to return to Earth once again to enact vengeance by purging it of all life, and only deciding to spare Gabriel so that he can look upon his failure..
• Critical Dissonance: The game got pretty good reviews by professional critics and is in fact the best-selling Castlevania game ever, according to Konami. However, the game and the series it spawned were and to some extent still are divisive within the fandom due to its totally different feel compared to the rest of the series.
• Demonic Spiders: Swordmasters, who can dodge, block, and counter-attack on par with many of the game's bosses (some of whom, it should be noted, you will have less trouble with than a group of three Swordmasters.) Creeping Coffins can be demonic spiders as well (bonus points for actually resembling spiders), at least in groups. Ironically, the game's actual Giant Spiders aren't that difficult.
  • The Swordmasters being demonic spiders makes it incredibly cathartic when you finish one off by knocking it to the floor, stealing its weapon and stabbing it right in its irritating, ghostly face.
  • Skeleton Warriors are also a pain, being surprisingly fast enemies who are very difficult to stagger. When defeated they explode into a pile of bones, which recombine if you don't destroy them with a strong, floor striking attack (all of which need some wind up and thus leave you open being interrupted). Unfortunately they nearly always come in groups of three and charging the attack takes just long enough for one of the others to run over and hit you out of it, resulting in an endless battle of attrition.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • The Castle is the second, not the final act of the game. The final act of the game is in the Land of the Dead. A massive, barren, and very very brown wasteland. It's even worse when you consider that the area where you start in the Land of the Dead HAD quite a feel, being mostly dark with purple lines.
  • The DLC chapters are also considered to be subpar by many who enjoyed the game to buy it.
• Fanon: It is pretty much universally agreed that Gabriel's eye color during the events of Resurrection is red. ^note  Yet, in the game itself, his character model doesn't change.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Virtually everyone – including those who normally adore the games, – immediately disowned everything that has to do with the soon-to-be-released Japan-only slot machine game.
• First Installment Wins: The first game is widely considered to be best and most well-rounded of the trilogy, lacking any of the divisive gameplay elements introduced in 2 and having the best story of the three games.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In-game variation. Abbot Dorin: "I know who you are! You're sent by the devil! He told me! He always does! He mocks me with it!" Turns out he was right...
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Allegedly, one of the various reasons why Castlevania Legends was declared Canon Discontinuity was that it was implied that Sonia and Alucard became a couple, and it didn't feel right for the Belmonts to be related to their sworn foe Dracula by blood. Funnily enough, that very plot twist happens in this series, by Gabriel himself becoming Dracula, and Trevor Belmont being Alucard.
• It Was His Sled: Due to the followup games heavily advertising or casually revealing it, Gabriel becoming this series' incarnation of Dracula is fairly well-known.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Dracula was once the heroic Gabriel Belmont, a champion of the light who saved the world from the fallen angel Satan himself before succumbing to the darkness. Deciding to remake the world, Dracula declares war on the Brotherhood of Light and destroys their champion, which leads to his confronting and killing his own son Trevor unknowingly, which later causes Trevor to rise as the vampire Alucard. Playing the villain to strengthen his grandson Simon, Dracula later enacts a plan with Alucard to destroy their enemies, the evil Lord of Shadow Zobek and the original Prince of Darkness Satan: allowing himself to be impaled and placed in hibernation for centuries, Dracula knows Zobek will awaken him to destroy Satan, and when Dracula regains his memory, he and Alucard can destroy both. Even at the end, Dracula shows why he is the supreme lord of darkness and chosen one of God simultaneously by destroying Zobek and even taking advantage of Satan's cowardly nature by fooling him into believing that he's willing to kill his son again to trick the angel into fleeing from Alucard's body, before finishing him for good.
  • Alucard, formerly known as Trevor Belmont, is Dracula's son who matches his father in craftiness. Turned into a vampire, Alucard watches over his son Simon Belmont's quest to Dracula's castle, and helps him in his battle against the Dark Lord. Aiding the Brotherhood of Light against the Prince of Darkness, Alucard hatches a plan to end the conflict between good and evil: by putting Dracula into a deep slumber, the two great evils Zobek and Satan would return to conquer the world. When the time is right, Alucard would awaken Dracula and he would guide him into regaining his powers and memories, disguising himself as Zobek's lieutenant in the process, so that he could be able to battle them again and defeat them once and for all.
  • Laura was a young vampire child who was abducted and turned by Carmilla to be her adopted daughter. After playing a game of chess with Gabriel, she shows him the way to Carmilla when she loses. Angry at her loss, Laura attempts to kill Gabriel, but relents when she sees the love between him and his wife Marie, and lets go of her petty grudge. She later convinces Gabriel to help her stop the Forgotten One from breaking free and destroying the world, and gives up her life so that Gabriel can turn into a vampire and challenge the Forgotten One.
• Older Than They Think: This isn't the first Castlevania game to have you play as Dracula; that detail was the plot twist of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.
• Polished Port: The 2013 Ultimate Edition for the PC bundles the original game up with both of its Reverie and Resurrection DLCs, sharpens the textures, improves the frame rate, as well as rectifies other miniscule problems that were present in the 2010 console release.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Chupacabras. If players weren't annoyed that they stole your items and then made you play Hide and Seek, they were even more annoyed with the fact that it's a completely different creature with the name of the South American myth slapped on it.
  • Also, on a side note - Chupacabras had been in Castlevania since Symphony Of The Night, although they suffered from a Dub Name Change and are called Cave Trolls in the western versions. Now this game introduces another sort of Cave Troll: A sort of cute mixture of a gorilla and a tapir, whose first appearance doubles as a Funny Moment, as well as a Bait-and-Switch Boss.
  • Even worse, you don't even get to kill the annoying thing when you do catch it. Gabriel simply grabs the Chupacabras and forces it to give back his gear, then it vanishes.
    • This is also an interesting case in that the Chupacabras gets a Take That, Scrappy! in the same game that it first appears in: at one point you find a scroll on one of the dead Brotherhood knights talking about how he's been setting up an extermination squad to drive the Chupacabras extinct. Clearly the developers knew just how much their players were going to hate those things.
    • For many players the Chupacabras gain an additional Scrappy aspect as it often feels like they only exist to artificially lengthen the game and could be excised without affecting the story or gameplay.
• That One Boss:
  • The Silver Warrior aka Pan, at least in the first phase when you have no magic to heal with. He has lots of fast attacks that are difficult to predict (However, the vast majority of them is blockable), and to kill him you have to complete a quick time event that manages to be quite difficult despite consisting of only one button press, because the ring you have to watch to get the correct timing is moving very fast across the screen, and the rings themselves move way faster than the other ones in the game.
  • Cornell, also. The hardest boss in the game, moreso than the Silver Warrior or even Satan! Also arguably the most fun.
  • Olrox is just like Cornell: a brutal Lightning Bruiser. Unlike Cornell, he gives no warning before using his charge attack. Also, he likes to Teleport Spam sometimes, and there's no warning of when he's going to stop, where he'll appear or which attack he'll use after teleporting. On top of that, he has a separate attack that will change direction mid-blow to hit you. Even worse, his battle comes right after That One Level, the Clock Tower. And finally, when he gets low on life, he uses corpses stored in coffins around the room to restore a large portion of his health, and he's practically guaranteed to do it at least 3 times before you manage to destroy the corpses.
  • As you'd most likely guess from his name and the fact that he's described in story to be extremely powerful, Forgotten One is a hard boss, but most of it unfortunately relies on Fake Difficulty: the segments between the 2 fights are supremely annoying timed platforming gauntlets not suited for the game's physics or controls, any weak points beyond the first one require you to jump to hit him, where you're unable to dodge anything, none of his attacks can be blocked, most of them have very similar tells, most of them produce shock-waves or debris making their range larger than they look and getting your Focus Gauge high enough to get any Neutral Orbs off him beyond the first weak point is an exercise in futility, very few of his attacks leave him open long enough to hit him at all and only a select few leave him open long enough for you to actually hit him and back off before the next attack, every time you take off enough of his health to trigger a QTE and the next checkpoint involves a different minigame where you need to figure out what you're supposed to do on the fly or risk losing all of your hard-earned progress, neither of the stages you fight him in have any Neutral Orb fountains or Health Fonts, and to rub the constant dying in even further, the game uses yet another ill-timed Shout-Out ("Avoid fighting like a dairy farmer.") as one of the "tips" you see when you die.
  • And when you get him to low life? He stops roaring, which is the only safe time to hit him for an extended amount of time and he becomes even faster.
• That One Level:
  • The Abandoned Wing in the Reverie DLC, where you spend the majority of the level sprinting across the surface of the water while trying to avoid being eaten by aquatic horrors. Not only does it require precise timing, not only do the ice platforms break if you stand on them for more than a couple of seconds, but Gabriel has a habit of falling into the water mid-sprint for absolutely no reason. This level has caused more than a few players to Rage Quit.
  • The Clockwork Tower also qualifies, arguably being the level that has a lot of difficult plataforming to do, and the only enemy that you face in the level is the Electrical Monstrosity, which you already defeated a couple levels ago. Luckily, the Monstrosity cannot heal this time.
  • The third-to-last level also qualifies, being the longest level in the main game, with A MASSIVE LOT of plataforming and puzzle-solving to do (not difficult, but extremely tiring), and two boss fights in-between plataforming. The two bosses are Necromancers, which are not really difficult, but are tiring to beat, as they summon two types enemies during the battles: Reapers, which you were already fighting in large groups during the level, and that are capable of killing you in two strikes (while also being killed in two strikes), and zombies, which while very easy to deal, can easily break your focus by hitting you with attacks that barely deal damage anyway.
• That One Sidequest: Most of the trials are fun to do. Timed trials, with special mention to the titans's ones and Olrox's one, however, are not.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Both plotwise and visually, the final Lord Necromancer!Zobek, a massive twist in the game lasts all of a grand speech and that's it, and visually the design is just dull, compared to Cornell or Carmilla, he just looks like a gangly dude in a brown robe, and he is apparently killed off after his speech, thankfully the sequel rectifies this and gives him a more befitting design as this universes version of Death.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: After a certain point, it becomes hard to care about Gabriel's journey due to some morally reprehensible actions on his part with his quest to resurrect his beloved Marie failing to become a good excuse after a certain point, the Crapsack World the characters live in that might actually become worse if Gabriel continues to defeat the Lords of Shadow, and the fact in the end, Gabriel's goals are doomed, due to the Brotherhood's manipulations being to make Gabriel into something that could destroy Satan, which causes Gabriel to become Dracula.
• The Un-Twist: The trailer makes it clear that "there is no resurrection! Only the living death you see before you!"
• Vindicated by History: A Downplayed example. The first game had good reviews and had much better sales than almost every other game in the Castlevania series. However, it was much more divisive with core fans, gathering scorn due to no longer being a Metroidvania style game that even the earlier 3d versions at least tried to do, a combat system closer to God of War in nature. However, as time passed, people began to appreciate many things about the games, the stunning visuals, great character designs and an engaging plot, also helped along by the fact that the VA cast is full of big name stars such as Jason Isaacs, Patrick Stewart, Robert Carlyle and the later games gave us Game of Thrones star Richard Madden which, at the time of Mirror of Fates release, was a main cast member of GoT.