Castlevania/Nightmare Fuel: Difference between revisions

[[File:136_full_6002.png|frame|All the Kings of Evil are decking their castles out with giant rotting corpses nowadays.]]

 

 

* Dracula's castle itself can be seen as one. Due to its always different inner structure in every game, it has been referred by Alucard as a "Creature of Chaos".

** This monster may look both fucking scary and funny at the same time...

** Legion returns in Portrait of Ruin, only this time, to add to the nightmare, the bodies ''fall off'' as you damage the boss, disappearing into nothing. Try to not think about how those might have been innocent souls you just murdered.

** In [[Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow|Dawn of Sorrow]], there's a really creepy underwater Homunculus enemy. It just sits there until you approach it. Then, it starts thrashing wildly and trying to chase and kill you, while attached to this tube thing that gives it oxygen. That's not the worst part, though. If you don't kill the guy, he'll still follow you. Eventually, if you wander far enough from its spawn point, the tube will stretch too far and pop off the creature's back. The creature will be reduced to spending the last parts of its life thrashing and chasing you and turning purple as it slowly drowns to death.

** Some of SotN's songs themselves are terrifying to listen to. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlDp9gElLnI Door of Holy Spirits], the background music to the Reverse Colosseum, sounds like something you'd hear in a horror movie. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOq9bODf_UY Abandoned Pit] has the potential to drive you insane if you're listening to it in real catacombs, and to worsen matters, it's played not only in the normal Abandoned Pit, but also the Cave (the reverse Pit). And should you go through that area, beyond the boss battle with Death, into the Floating Catacombs, you're greeted with [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8TR_ZsDdBc Curse Zone], which starts to get more chaotic and freakish at the 0:41 mark. The ''Symphony'' soundtrack does a much better job of setting eerie atmospheres than the more cheerful tracks of the later titles in the series. It's like Michiru Yamane became a completely different composer sometime between SotN and ''Aria of Sorrow''.

* ''[[Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow]]'' features a horrific boss named Gergoth that was apparently chained in captivity for thousands of years in a tower. It looks like a half-rotten dinosaur, with exposed ribs and skin on its face that peels off when it's making an attack. You fight it, seeing its rotten flesh and dripping blood further emphasizing its cursed existence. Made even more disturbing when you read the text in the bestiary and find out it was [[Break the Cutie|once gentle, but was driven insane by years of imprisonment.]]

** The Japanese manual is even worse -- Simon's not just got unhealing nasty injuries, his body is starting to decay. And the guardian spirit cautions you that the exorcism ritual might not work.

* ''[[Castlevania III]]'' seems innocuous enough. Then you meet freaky monster thing Grant, and find out that Dracula turned him into a megafreak for the lulz. And there's hints that Sypha-the-statue was ''conscious'' in spite of being, you know, a rock. There's also the music in the catacombs where you find Alucard.

* Medusa's death sequence from ''Castlevania: Portrait Of Ruin''. She thrashes around violently while tiny [[Goddamn Bats|Medusa heads]] come flying out of her body, then turns to stone, shatters, and falls ''[[Gravity Screw|upwards]]''.

** Also, the ceiling of her room features a helpless, petrified commando of modern-day soldiers. Which she ''shatters'' when the battle begins.

** The buildup to the boss can be scary as well. It doesn't seem to help that the area in which the boss is located is called "The Prison of Eternal Torture", and that you hear a horrifyingly loud, monstrous breathing while you descend the staircase, that only keeps getting louder and louder the further you go. And then you reach a room where the breathing has gotten extremely loud, and there just happens to be blood smeared on the walls and floor. Granted, the main level itself is creepy enough with the high-pitched sound of wailing women as background music.

** There's also the Undead Parasite boss and his room (which looks like the belly of some giant monster) and the Executioner enemy, expecially when you see this gargantuan, faceless, cleaver-wielding monster coming out of total darkness in front of you.

* Also in 64, there's the rose garden. Reinhardt walks into the room and the vampire Rosa is watering roses. She comments how she just waters the white roses. Reinhardt, with a confused look on his face realizes just as the player does that the roses are obviously red. Then the camera zooms into the water pail and you see that Rosa is watering the flowers with ''blood'', and that it has stained them red.

* Of the many versions of ''Symphony'''s Legion that appear in later games, the one from ''Aria of Sorrow'' stands out thanks to its presentation. Several rooms before the boss, you find yourself in an area full of strange humanoids who come out of doors in the background and walk mindlessly forward. They don't damage you; they don't notice you at all. They just keep making a low groaning noise (unsettlingly reminiscent of Zelda's ReDeads). Only when you reach the boss room do you see what's going on: these are corpses being ''summoned from their graves'' by Legion to create its shell. At least the original Legion didn't make you think about where the bodies came from...

** There's also chainsaw-wielding maniacs they have running around. The HAWHAWHAW laugh they have does not help.

** The Wallman. He looks like some sort of [[Monster Clown]] from a kid's storybook at worst, and is more annoying than anything. But... the way he dies is some seriously scary [[Body Horror]]. His gimmick is he uses glyphs to hide in the wall while you get blown to pieces by bombs. How do you beat him? Simple! Absorb his glyph ''while he's in the wall'' and watch him scream as his liquified body sinks to the bottom. And then walk through the wall right afterwards.

** [[Grim Reaper|Death's]] [[Hell Is That Noise|voice]] in this game is astonishingly creepy.

* Those pallid, constantly-grasping hands in the pits, from ''Dracula X Chronicles'' (and perhaps Rondo of Blood as well). Should Richter be unlucky enough to fall/get knocked into them, they grab him and drag him down, their perpetual moaning becoming... something else -- and a few seconds later, Richter dies horribly. Since those damn demon hands dragged him offscreen, ''how'' is left to the imagination.

** Don't forget Dracula's final form in that game, which looks like an amalgamation of body parts.

* The game over screen in ''Portrait of Ruin'''s {{spoiler|Sisters}} Mode. Imagine a woman with an eerily calm facial expression as she bleeds out her right eye. ''That'' is your motivation for ''not dying.''

** The regular game over screen is also scary, showing a bloody skull with a snake in its eyes and a sword in its wide-open mouth.

* ''Dracula X Chronicles'': Fail to rescue {{spoiler|Annette}} properly, and she is turned into a vampire, whom you must fight. Let me rephrase this: {{spoiler|[[Tear Jerker|''Richter is forced to fight his loved-one-turned-enemy-vampire to the death.'']]}}

** The music is also scary, reaching its peak as the massive abomination is slowly revealed. Thankfully, the following boss, [[Light Is Not Good|Nuculais]], may be eerie, but is far less scary. Actually, when you see him opening his mouth, he'll fall into the [[Nightmare Retardant]] category!

* One of the sidequests in Portrait of Ruin involves retrieving "The Statue's Tear". You get the item from a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Nation of Fools. All you have to do is press "up" and {{spoiler|a massive amount of blood spills out of the statue}}.

* Lords Of Shadow, the single darkest and most depressing of the series: The idea of losing your childhood love, who was so dear to you for your entire life, to a brutal, tragic death {{spoiler|at your own hands, and subsequently suffering a 1000-year life cursed with immortality without her around to heal your emotional wound, just like Gabriel?}}

** Speaking of Lords Of Shadow, the mask of the Necromancer Lord is really creepy. Even worse, {{spoiler|it is the brainwashing tool the Necromancer Lord Zobek used to force Gabriel to kill Marie and Claudia.}} And because the game hates you, the ending credits features a closeup of the damn thing the entire time.

** Vampires in this game are quite terrifying. The [[Mook]] vampires are bestial savage monsters. The vampire lieutenants are ''vampirized demons from Hell'' and look the part. The "child" vampire Laura and her "toys". Of course, they're all pale in comparison to Carmilla's true form. One of the scariest moments in the game occurs in the Vampires' castle. Vampires are pouring out of holes in the ground with no end in sight. Fortunately, there are a couple of big windows nearby and if the drapes are uncovered, sunlight will pour into the holes and keep the Vampires from escaping. All is right with the world. Then, after solving a puzzle later in the level, [[Oh Crap|the sun sets]]. As night falls, Vampires start coming out in waves...

** And then there's the [[True Final Boss]], Chaos, a being of almost Giger-esque incomprehensibility.

* Puppet Master in the sequel. Not only is its face horrible, but its attack pattern is scary. It puts a magical puppet into an iron maiden, then swaps Soma directly into it.

** In the first part of the Menace battle, {{spoiler|he's trying to stab you with his ribs.}}

 

[[Category:Video Games/Nightmare Fuel]]