Lords of shadow is the series that basically ended castlevania, and I don't say this in the usual "it's all the reboot's fault hurr" kind of way, I mean it's literally the last official branch of the castlevania series before konami went bat-shit crazy and decided that giving boobjobs to crosses on a pachinko machine was somehow a good idea.
But just what is lords of shadow really? was it a "reboot" reboot, where it was trying to replace the oldschool castlevania titles? or was it just a foray into a bold new take on the series quietly sequestered into its own canon?
the answer is the latter, insofar as I know, but it's more complicated than that, so let me explain.
Lords of shadow is a branch of the castlevania universe that changes some things around.
in this universe, the belmonts, the titular protagonist family of the original games, are actually a fusion of the cronqvists and belmonts,
The cronqvists, if you didn't know, are the family of the villain of the original castlevania series, mathias, who eventually betrays his dear friend leon belmont, the first belmont to hunt the night (though not the first belmont of his line) it's his betrayal which ultimately creates the now iconic feud between dracula and the belmonts.
However in lords, the cronqvists are only mentioned once in a discreet journal entry, and are implied to be related to gabriel, as gabriel himself is rumored to be an "abandoned bastard child" of the cronqvists.
In lords of shadow you're placed in the dead center of the end of days, literally the end of the world, the apocalypse, but lo and behold the end of days is not some great triumphant battle, rather it's a perfectly natural, even quiet death by throttling from three different factions that have united together to slowly stifle mankind out of existence in the most efficient way possible.
the dark lord of the lycans sends his minions to hunt humanity down,
the vampires prey on any stupid or stubborn enough to remain within the collective expanding territories of the dark lords
and the final lord, death, collects their souls to ensure that none escape to heaven to inform god of earth's plight or gain access to eternity.
in this world, carmilla, death, and cornell are the leading villains, three powerful immortals called the "lords of shadow" who have managed to separate their spirits from their bodies to become pure-hearted godlike beings while their bodies remain behind to govern the world as they see fit as dark lords.
the premise here is that the lords of shadow have been at this for a while, literally a thousand or so years, and it's just now gotten so dire that mankind is ready to die fighting, as death recently enacted a spell that could separate the earth from the heavens, leaving mankind totally alone in a dying world.
Gabriel belmont gave himself the belmont surname, he is the first belmont and it's up to him to find out what precisely caused the spell, as nobody really knows it's the lords of shadow for certain, it's just implied, a lot.
Gabriel is ruthless in combat, and he carries with him a powerful anti-monster weapon called the combat cross, which is one of a kind and made for him, and him alone.
he belongs to a brotherhood dedicated to protecting the people by killing the horrors the lords of shadow and satan have spread across the world, and it's gabriel's duty to uncover the truth.
and nothing else.
I repeat, it was never gabriel's duty to save the world by defeating the lords of shadow, his specific task at the beginning of the game is, and I quote "find the guardian of the lake and uncover the truth behind the heavens being closed off"
it is here right when he finds out, to some degree, that the lords of shadow hold the key to this nightmare that a certain zobek appears and tells gabriel "sure! sure! this can only mean that you must find the lords of shadow and slayificate them to death!!!"
with zobek outright saying their power will give him the ability to bring his wife, who died really recently, back to life, the forlorn gabriel has his motivation to not only ignore his prior orders, but strike out, alone, with nobody even knowing he's doing this, and kill the lords of shadow.
zobek explains there's a prophecy about a pure-hearted warrior defeating the lords of shadow and taking their power to become the second god of the universe, god's steward as it were.
naturally, this is a tempting notion.
However, along the way gabriel encounters a woman named claudia, the last of the aghartians, and her black knight protector, and after defeating the last obstacle to the first lord, he sorta...kills her in his sleep.
this leads us to question our manly, broodsome hero, and more importantly, it leads him to question himself, even zobek appears to be shocked during his narration, if one could fake shock that is.
during the journey we see just how much damage the lords of shadow have done to the world, they literally ended a modern era, as in, dialed civilization back to medieval times.
that's no small thing, and when gabriel confronts cornell, cornell gleefully informs gabriel of the problematic nature of his situation.
the lords are themselves victims of a higher treachery, they're merely the remnants of the founding members of the brotherhood, they themselves are like their own beings who just happen to have been left behind in the founder's bodies, confused, frightened, and very, very hungry for answers.
naturally, the three lords gang up and conquer the world as quickly as possible, as zobek himself says "victory is the natural objective of every creature on this earth, they will kill and die for their kind to dominate" and that's really all the lords of shadow are doing, trying to own the world they were "reborn" in.
they are divinely separated darknesses left behind, dark halves of the saintly founders left to rule the world. however the larger problem presents itself.
if gabriel kills a lord of shadow, the founding member, who is currently a supreme and pure-hearted spirit in heaven, will also die.
sure it doesn't seem like a big deal, but gabriel himself shows outrage at the idea that having to kill a villainous fiend like cornell will result in the death of a saint somewhere else, it's a very real dilemma to the morals of a hero already being made to question himself.
gabriel then proceeds to violently impale cornell through the skull with his own hammer and gets a piece of the "god mask" which is basically our macguffin of the story, and don't expect too much by way of explanation, it's not gonna happen, it just exists.
traversing through the lands of the vampires reveals a feud going on between a monstrous feral witch and another witch off somewhere else that came to a head and ended in tragedy for the not-as-evil-as-you're-lead-to-believe-malphas, but it's just a subplot added for detail.
gabriel finally finds his way to castlevania after making his way through wygol and after acquiring holy water, which is a very special weapon, the crazy abbot vincent dorin (who looks identical to his classic counterpart by the way) outright tells you what's going on.
but since he's an old priest we just assume he's crazy and ignore him, much to the amusement of the true antagonist later on.
after meeting laura, carmilla's adoptive daughter and getting on her good side after almost being one-shotted by her lighting, we find our way to boobs- er I mean, carmilla, dark lord of the vampires.
she attempts to seduce gabriel after explaining the motivations of the lords of shadow a bit more thoroughly, which is that mankind is ruined, the lords are just trying to survive, and they decided the best way was to just take over and let vampires, werewolves and (coughs) undead have the world.
gabriel is surprisingly iron-willed here, he doesn't even let carmilla lay a single tempting finger on him, and she's so offended that he'd choose a dead woman over a...uh....another dead-ish woman, that she decides to kill him.
things don't go as planned.
Later, pan, the guy who basically gave gabriel access to the place that told him the lords of shadow needed to die, appears and gabriel and pan have a confusing exchange in english that says basically nothing before pan opens a gate through a very, very, very important mirror and gabriel is in the land of the dead.
after dealing with a certain witch (who zobek then murders offscreen because he doesn't like witches who kill servants of god) he then goes to the front gates to the land of the dead.
before gabriel leaves though, baba yaga gives us our next tip about the true antagonist, he's the "king of the angels" and much like vincent before her, she's alluding not to god, but someone else who fits that criteria.
it's here we find out by way of many scrolls that the land of the dead has a lock on it, you can't just walk in, you HAVE to be evil, meaning that death is well aware of the prophecy about a pure-hearted warrior, and he had since devised a clever remedy to it, make the way impassable for anyone pure of heart, you either commit a mortal sin or you go home, there is no other way.
in this way there's no conceivable means to correctly fulfill the prophecy, so it seems like the third lord has won the fight before it's even begun.
there are several hidden scrolls explaining why this is a problem in more detail hidden throughout the level, and one that outright wonders what sort of monster would be able to fulfill the prophecy on death's terms.
Pan of course decides that if gabriel is truly determined, he needs to be tested. the knight's test is a fight to the death, if gabriel wins, he will be worthy of fulfilling the prophecy, if not, well, he wasn't going to be of much use anyway.
gabriel kills pan, but only because pan forces his hand, and after pan explains that blood has to be spilled and a mortal sin committed for the way to be opened, gabriel walks into the land of the dead with the blood of the old god who governed LIFE ITSELF now dead at his hands.
Pan, once loyal servant of god and heavily, heavily implied to be the old god responsible for the balanced cycle of nature itself, is dead.
that's a big deal.
gabriel merrily slaughters his way through armies of the undead and finally gets the final piece of the god mask after defeating "death"
and is confronted by zobek
and then suddenly you come to a startling realization.
Gabriel has, for all intents and purposes, turned his back on the brotherhood, having disowned them after fighting carmilla, zobek himself even observes that gabriel gives zero fucks about the brotherhood of light, who are the ones responsible for the hell the world has become.
but wait! there's more! it turns out that zobek has-
Pulled a zobek.
Yep, zobek was the real dark lord of the necromancers and lord of the dead,
meaning that death himself had been helping and guiding gabriel throughout his quest to vanquish those pesky lords of shadow rivals of his so that he could obtain godlike power and- you guessed it-
serve god as the judge of the dead.
wait, what?
it's not outright stated, but zobek is very, very pious, like, god-tier piety pious, the man is so holy that he is the one who guided the original founders to collect the power of the heavens in the interest of destroying evil, and that still hasn't change with zobek the dark lord.
there is nothing zobek wants more than to punish the wicked, he's been posing as a high ranking member of the brotherhood for ages because he's still quite loyal to god, he's just not loyal to mankind, and certainly not afraid to get his hands dirty.
this was implied to have been his greatest weakness when he was human, he was too righteous and the reason the lords even went on their crusade to the three places of power to begin with was due in part to god's displeasure with zobek's overzealousness in punishing evildoers.
it was meant as punishment, but the plan backfired and zobek became the personification of a holier than thou-god's-right-and-the-wrong-must-die mindset that people tend to associate with violent religion.
so gabriel dies pretty horribly at zobek's hands, leaving zobek with the god mask.
or...does it?
nope, turns out there's yet another twist in this list of twists, behold, the true antagonist of the lords canon!
the fucking devil.
literally satan himself is the guy responsible for the lords of shadow, though admittedly he's only responsible for giving zobek the ability to seal off heaven.
he is, by extension, also probably responsible for their original formation, but given how the god mask is probably part of "god's" plan, then it could be that god did indeed create the lords of shadow as implied from zobek's journal entry, though it's uncertain as to how, but he knew the power their corruption would create, leading to the god-mask, a mask so powerful it hides even the face of evil!
and just look at those crow's feet! they need a mask!
anyway, gabriel comes back to life and after a few moments of preaching, gabriel and satan come to blows.
but here's the funny part, the god mask only empowers those you happen to be looking upon with your greatest immediate desire of the time.
it just lets you see through god's eyes.
now what did satan want most?
godlike power.
what does gabriel suddenly have?
unlimited angel wing uses, unlimited magic reserves, incredible stamina.
I.E.I. Godlike power, satan even cries out in shock "is this the power of god?!" referring to gabriel suddenly gaining angelic qualities that we can be sure satan was wishing on himself.
but the mask doesn't work like that, it only works on people you're looking at through the mask.
it's a genius masterstroke, but one that merited pointing out because the devs never mentions it explicitly.
anyway, moving on, gabriel finds out this fact for himself, his dead wife takes the mask into heaven, everybody's happy.
except gabriel....lol
fast forward and laura calls on gabriel, begging for help, it turns out the lords of shadow had been keeping a seal on a super-powered demigod in check and it's up to the guy who killed them and satan to find his way to its prison and kill it before it can escape.
after traversing castlevania AGAIN laura an gabriel find themselves before the prison, and it's here that laura explains the bigger dilemma.
gabriel is a human, but the forgotten one's prison (yes, the same forgotten one from the original castlevania timeline) is uninhabitable, it's not explained very well, but basically the air is unbreathable, toxic, and the place is full of evil energy that will destroy a normal human with barely any darkness in his heart on the spot.
the counter?
become a vampire.
vampires enjoy a plethora of wonderful benefits, immortality, being dark by nature, immortality, never having to eat solid foods again....immortality.
reluctantly gabriel drinks her blood, then finds out he must drink all of it, killing her in the process.
so he does.
then he enters the forgotten one's prison, and it's here we find out that the forgotten one is an unstoppable god-like horror that cannot be stopped.
unless he's devoting most of his godlike power to breaking the seals on his prison.
this also means that it's only here, inside this prison, that the forgotten one can ever be defeated, once he's free he'll never need to use this much power and weaken himself like this again.
meaning this was only ever gabriel's one chance to kill this thing, killing the lords of shadow essentially locked and doomed him into becoming a vampire, to do anything else would have resulted in the world going boom.
and this thing is powerful enough to destroy the world in an instant.
confronting the forgotten one, it remarks on how weird gabby's soul is, he says the iconic second half of dracula's line from symphony of the night, and we're off.
from there it's gabriel relentlessly stalking the forgotten one to the final seal after wounding it, it's actually really imposing as to just how ruthlessly good he is at stealthing, literally being no less than four feet from the damned demon at any time.
the final confrontation ends with gabriel stealing the forgotten one's power and inheriting its station, turns out that the forgotten one was the literal sovereign over the elemental plane of darkness, with the forgotten one dead by gabriel's hands, he literally becomes the "prince of darkness" by taking its power.
enter the next act, gabriel has renounced his name as the first and "last" belmont and taken a new name, dracul, the dragon.
he has inherited castlevania by right of combat, but unlike his classic counterpart, he's not connected to it like the OG dracula was, instead he possesses lesser dwarves, the fleamen of the lords canon, and has them make whatever renovations he wants for the castle while he learns how to use his godlike power.
however, it's here that a bigger twist is revealed, it turns out the brotherhood knew what gabriel was going to become all along, hell they even prepared for it, going so far as to feed the lord of the dead himself a fake version of the actual prophecy, the REAL prophecy simply says "he who kills the lords of shadow will inherit....their...throne...and become the....prince of darkness...."
well.
that explains a lot.
it turns out that a year before gabriel fought the lords, he was tasked with dealing with the current lord of the elemental plane of darkness (the forgotten one was...forgotten by his own subjects)
the daemon lord, as he's called, has the ability to control large structures and raise castles, pay attention because that detail is pretty important moving forward.
he captures the daemon lord and that's the end of it, but it's revealed that before he left on this task, he and his wife had a wonderful, wonderful-
yeah he got laid.
she was also pregnant while he was away,and the brotherhood, knowing what was at stake, moved in fast and informed her of what would happen, as PAN HIMSELF GIVES HER THE PROPHECY THROUGH A FRAGMENT OF THE MIRROR IN CARMILLA'S CASTLE!
turns out it was the titular mirror of fate all along.
who knew?
marie regrettably gives up her child, because she doesn't have a say in the matter, and gabriel later goes on to become dracula after zobek possesses him and has him kill her and he kills the lords of shadow with zobek manipulating and empowering him with relics when each lord dies..
forgot that detail, but it doesn't matter anyway.
trevor is raised to be the best brotherhood member he can be, stationed at a city at the foot of dracula's castle, he has a son, simon, with sypha, who is sypha belmont in this timeline.
it's later that the brotherhood informs him of the truth, dracula is his dad, and dracula, after having collected the forces of darkness sufficiently, has finally decided to embark on a murderous war-campaign to destroy the brotherhood of light when he finds out that zobek is still alive, since zobek was originally pulling the brotherhood's strings in the first place, dracula sees the threat a large army of anti-darkness can be to him and the slowly restoring world and decides it's high time to decomission them for the betterment of the world.
the brotherhood strikes back, and after repeated failed attempts, they ask trevor to do the deed, telling him the truth of his origins.
trevor is understandably pissed, not only is he now aware that his father is the newest and most powerful lord of shadow, essentially ruling the forces of the night that all three had been in command of, being the respected alpha of the werewolves thanks to killing lycanthropes, being the lord of vampires thanks to his own personal advancements in perfecting vampire blood to ensure that newborn vampires no longer appear bestial, and powerful necromantic spells provided to him by a "traitor" necromancer (the same one from the first game) dracula is the sole force of darkness and the most powerful one, being a demigod in terms of sheer power alone.
and he knows it.
he fancies himself the current sovereign of the world, god's earthly steward, and because he understands death from a afterlife-point-of-view having died and put satan himself into a chokehold just so he could preach him to death, it's safe to say that dracula no longer views death as a punishment, but a reward.
he has, for all intents and purposes, found his calling as the lord of castlevania.
trevor pretty much crashes into the castle and meets a being called the lost soul, who intends to guide trevor to his destiny.
trevor politely declines half its face off and renders it mute when it tells him the consequences of rejecting its aid.
after making his way through the castle, and with the lost soul seemingly "helping him" he finally comes to his battle with dracula.
then loses because dracula can use mist form, arguably the cheapest and most broken ability in any castlevania game.
trevor never tells him his name, but he does inform him of his lineage, dracula, confused, goes to the mirror of fate, which is the same mirror he once walked through to get to the land of the dead, and learns the truth there.
horrified, he rejects everything he believes about death and in his haste tries to return his son to life with his blood.
the effort appears to fail, dracula, having never learned his name, calls his newfound son "alucard" due to discovering his identity through the mirror, alucard is "dracula" which means "son of the dragon" in romanian, remember, technically dracula calls himself "dracul" so it's an appropriate parallel.
he then goes bat-shit crazy and sends the forces of darkness on a massive genocide campaign with but one goal in mind.
Make god pay for this treachery, this ridiculous, elaborate treachery which went so deep that it revealed to him that his very reason for becoming this creature of the night, his wife, was a lie to begin with, by killing all of his children and tormenting them forever.
dracula is now suffering from one of the most serious cases of existential confusion he's ever had to deal with, his own wife was shown to have hidden her pregnancy from him and knew what he would become, her spirit even went out of its way to guide him to becoming this monster he's become.
he became what he was for the greater good, but with his own son turned against him, dracula no longer knows what to believe in, he builds a tower and isolates himself in it while his castle begins falling into disrepair, his vampires and creatures of the night roam free and dracula hires a succubus to keep him fed with a healthy supply of warriors and spare women while he slowly waits for the last human to die, isolating himself in the throne room, locking the door with an advanced blood mechanism and all but throwing away the key.
years later, simon, whose mother died in the attacks, reaches adulthood, trains fiercely and surpasses his own father and gabriel in terms of skill and sets off for castlevania.
meanwhile, alucard wakes up, sees the name on his coffin and decides to keep it after realizing that he's become a creature of the night.
now with the aid of the mirror of fate, and fully cooperative after being trolled by it the last time for breaking its face, he proceeds to go to the tower to meet his father.
dracula is well aware of simon's arrival, and wants no part of the newly discovered lineage he unwittingly created, but he doesn't have the heart to kill them himself, and so he activates a trap once simon steps into it, but unfortunately alucard breaks to traps and meets his son for the first time in years.
realizing that his son is not only alive and well, but actively trying to discourage simon from fighting him, dracula gleefully retreats to his throne room hoping for a reunion with the son he'd thought dead all these years.
simon enters the throne room first, and dracula, who knows simon will be the one to defeat him, tries to use the succubus to kill simon for him, however simon proves to be more than a match for her wiles, and when alucard arrives, dracula realizes one cold truth.
fate is a bitch.
dracula isn't dead however, and the combat cross used is just a replica, only powerful enough to de-constitute dracula, not enough to kill him outright.
so dracula, now a pile of ash, unintentionally fuses with castlevania while simon and alucard part ways.
this leads to the castle crumbling and falling for the first time in lords of shadow
this is because part of the forgotten one's power has something to do with keeping castles animated, but dracula never had this power until being de-constituted by the copy of the true vampire killer.
or rather, he wasn't aware of it.
many years later however, dracula returns and sets about collecting the forces of darkness to resume his campaign against the brotherhood, regaining a newfound tolerance for mankind thanks to the revelation that his son is very much alive and well.
he even goes so far as to incorporate them into his ranks, provided they cooperate.
by this time dracula has an incredibly dark reputation, and this has influenced his already broken mind, now he's struggling with two sides of himself, the "dracula" persona, which is basically just an act he puts on to keep the forces under his command in line out of fear of their master, and his true self, the broken, sad man who just wants to hide away in a well sealed throne room and let the forces of darkness do the killing for him.
many years have passed and dracula is tired, but he's determined to finish what he started with the brotherhood of light.
it's at this point that dracula has all but given up hope, he's no chosen of god, and if he is that can only speak volumes for the state the world must be in if its chosen savior is the lord of evil.
dracula is depressed, forced to put on a big act he wants no part in for revenge against a brotherhood that turned his own blood against him, dracula barely cares about maintaining the world, he's no longer a genocidal maniac, nor god's "harvester and world manager" that he was during trevor's chapter, he's just a sad, broken old vampire who sees no end in sight and is simply determined to build his own world, as it's really all he has left.
zobek is beyond his reach, satan is in another dimension, and to make matters worse, the power of the forgotten one has fused his very being into castlevania, turning it into an extension of his own inner turmoil, meaning the castle now transforms freely more than it had in the past. in fact it does so based on his mood to represent his mind through its architecture, it has, for all intents and purposes, become THE castlevania.
but there's a larger problem,
dracula can't leave.
because he's at odds with the false face he's put on for so many years, the castle has begun to take on a form all its own, it's very dependent on dracula, should he ever leave the castle, the castle and all his servants will die.
this is due in part to dracula's second "forgotten one" ability, he can bring back the dead.
specifically those he's ever killed, their souls go to him, this includes anyone he's killed when he was human, but he doesn't know this, so he just assumes it extends to his servants.
this also makes his closest servants much more reliable, as they're beholden only to him, and should they fall in battle, he need only create new bodies for them from the blood of the castle.
this is shown more than anything else during certain cutscenes and in-game, whenever a monster belonging to the "castle" faction comes into the real world, they rise from a pool of blood.
500 years into his rule, the brotherhood of light finally decide to end the confrontation in an epic battle to the death spearheaded by a paladin, roland de ronceval.
the resulting clash was due to maps of the castle being drawn by survivors who escaped the castle dungeons, this also implies that the whole reason these maps exist is because dracula's state of mind began calming, thus leading to less transformations within the castle's structure.
sadly, dracula finally gets the revenge he was hoping for, as roughly 80 percent of the brotherhood forces are at the castle, the clash being their last stand.
in the middle of the night.
fighting the lord of darkness.
at night.
the literal prince of darkness, an apex vampire overlord.
at night.
plans were not drawn when this assault was thought out.
dracula destroys the fuck out of them, only to realize he has nothing left to do.
he can't reach zobek if the castle won't let him leave, and while he may be outdoors when he fights the brotherhood, he's still on the castle grounds.
with no way to leave, he can only stare helplessly at the smoldering cross as he's faced with the realization that his revenge will forever remain half-complete.
alucard appears and offers his father a way to acquire his revenge, and maybe even regain his son's loyalty.
pretend you're dead with his vampire killer forged sword sealing away his powers and disabling him, and he'll draw his enemies to the castle.
dracula, reluctantly agreeing, gets stabbed and enters the deep sleep, waking up 500-ish years later with no memory of what took place after the siege, during the time the castle's "inner dracula" persona has been in charge of the castle, which is in a half-formed state due to the crissaegrim and the long sleep fragmenting his memory, creating a separation of the two consciousnesses, dracula's subconscious has now become a new life form and the truest representation of "dracula" the series has seen so far, despite being a horrific blood golem.
zobek confronts dracula with an offer, he's no rival to satan, but dracula is and has always been, zobek offers him true death thanks to his restoration of the vampire killer, but only if he prevents satan from being summoned.
dracula reluctantly agrees after trying to hunt only to find a demon in his way and being bested by it in his weakened state.
zobek gives him an innocent family, and dracula, pushed to the edge when the father wounds him to the point where he risks de-constituting again, has no choice but to eat.
zobek explains that satan's children are trying to bring him back, while he does this, drac looks in on the dead family and whispers a few words of regret to himself before steeling himself and moving on with the bargain.
after investigating bioquimek, dracula is lead into the still-recovering dream castle to retrieve his void sword.
despite everything, tevor hasn't forgiven his father for what happened to him and his mother, this is in fact, alucard after he used the timeless vision ability on himself, he's guiding his father to where he's placed the powers, but he's doing so disguised in such a way as to fool his father into thinking that he's just the representation of his own guilt for what he did to trevor years ago.
handing dracula a white wolf medallion, he agrees to act as a guide to help dracula freely enter the castle, dracula, having lost his memories, isn't entirely sure what the dream castle is, worse still, the memory loss also affects the information in the book of dracul, which only gives us flawed information from dracula's own assumptive point of view.
only in revelations is the information reliable (the dlc, not the chapter)
dracula regains his chaos power and is forced to kill the heads of his dungeon, the gorgon sisters, when the blood of the castle fuses them together.
later dracula is faced with carmilla, returned from the dead by the blood of the castle, and it's here her affiliation with the mirror of fate is heavily implied.
as it turns out, carmilla knew what gabriel would become (implied) and wanted dracula for herself, not as a servant, but as a lover.
during los1 her attempts at seducing gabriel were very much actual attempts, and likewise it's shown that gabriel himself, while certainly iron-willed in his reactions, hadn't been wholly unaffected by her advances either, otherwise she wouldn't have even been in the castle.
now back from the dead thanks to inner dracula, she intends to serve inner dracula by using her own blood to take control of gabriel belmont, thus keeping him pacified for the castle.
win win!
but unfortunately another force is at work, one that helped alucard enter the dream castle to begin with, marie belmont.
Owning up to everything she did, she and dracula make up, and he sets off to defeat carmilla once and for all.
then he does.
later drac kills the acolytes, is faced with the toy-maker, who betrayed him after trevor's death and became one of dracula's greatest enemies during the simon and alucard arc of mirror of fate.
however dracula has been busy reforming thanks to his reconciliation with his wife, and he forgives the toy maker, sparing his life after the blood of the castle turns him against dracula.
he fights the second acolyte later on by luring him into the castle, where it becomes painfully apparent that the castle is its own dimension created by dracula's forgotten one power, just like the classic castlevania is half in a spiritual world and half in reality.
the two acolytes defeated and the mirror of fate restored, dracula patches things up with young trevor, who he still thinks is a dream-metaphor for his actual son due to his memory loss.
zobek, still not realizing how bad an idea it is to be in the same castle as dracula right now is, sends him to kill the third acolyte, and after dracula regains his memories, alucard reveals himself and the two happily prepare to defeat satan.
the acolyte vanishes and zobek, now able to read dracula's mind clearly, realizes the irony of his situation and that he unwittingly trusted dracula with crucial magic tracking information, meaning he can never hide or flee from his old friend ever again.
cornered and in the heart of dracula's domain, zobek gets the vampire killer and readies his last stand.
and is turned into a block of ice.
with that out of the way, the two go after satan, find him just as he summons leviathan, the old god responsible for destroying the world should god be dissatisfied with it, now a slave to satan, and after blowing it up, satan possesses alucard and fights dracula.
defeating satancard, dracula manages to scare satan into believing that he'd kill his own son to destroy him and chases him out of alucard's body, killing him.
with that said and done he revives his son and heads into his church.
and that's it.
the whole trilogy said and done.
lords of shadow was basically a castlevania for dracula, where you play as a different take on the villain, drac was always heroic in some capacity, but ill-fortune pushes him into being the bad guy.
lords is a combat focused evolution of the classics, los1 is basically the combat focused evolution of the stage by stage sidescrollers, mirror is a combination of the best of the sidescrollers, and los2 is an homage to symphony of the night, even sharing the same "father son" theme as its classic counterpart.
but in the end it was an experiment, would I want another one? sure, it'd be great, but will we get one?
no, not with konami out of the gaming business.
and that saddens me deeply.
well, that's it, that's all I got.
have a good one.
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