Castlevania Judgment is another attempt at a fighting game that mashes different characters from gaming history together. This one's flavor is of the whip-cracking variety, featuring a stable of folks from Konami's dark franchise. The range of Castlevanias is generally well-represented, aside from the recent DS/GBA games -- Shanoa is the only character from those games present, but at least they picked a good one. Whether you're a fan of Castlevania 1, 3, Bloodlines, Symphony of the Night, or anything inbetween those, you're bound to find some characters you're familiar with...Well...sort of...
You got some FF7 in my Castlevania.
This gets us into one of Judgment's main problems -- it features all of these characters you know...except you don't know them anymore because they look entirely different. Even IF you happen to enjoy the art style here (I personally don't care for it all that much) the fact is that half of the characters are pretty much indistinguishable, and then the rest are only somewhat recognizable. Some of the characters aren't even the right ages. This is just a bad move for a game whose whole point is recapturing the essence of its history and paying homage.
The environments you fight in generally look good and retain some elements of design from their original forms (incorporating amusing hazards that can be turned off if you wish it), and the soundtrack is pleasingly retro-inspired, comprised of remixed tracks from the Castlevania series -- though most of these are from the original NES title. The story, on the other hand, is a mutilated wad of tripe. "Welcome to the time rift," indeed. Apparently there's some ultimate time-traveling death omen that needs to be destroyed and thus all of these Castlevania heroes and villains must come together to duel one another pointlessly, lost in some whirlwind where time and space have been mashed together into a messy mutant. Smash Bros. Brawl uses the same concept, but that game goes off in an amusing direction, with a plot conveyed through cutscenes without cheesy dialogue, and had a lot of original content to explore. This just feels like arcade mode with irritating nonsense tacked in-between matches. What really makes the story mode frustrating is that you're restricted to play through it one character at a time, unlocking a new one to play through with each time -- after you've beaten it with everyone, you can finally face the final boss. In order to unlock new characters, however, you need to play through it all AGAIN with unlocked characters. It makes absolutely no sense why one would need to complete story mode with every character TWICE to unlock things.
The Castle mode is interesting in concept -- trying to mimic the mission modes in Soul Calibur games -- but is ultimately uninspired, as well. For starters, there are "save rooms" and whenever you fail a mission, you go back to the last save room. This just encourages you to go back to the save room every time you complete a mission, but sometimes you'll face "random encounters" while scrolling through a menu screen. It's all too drawn out, as the missions tend to feel too pointless or samey, and there's very few rewards to achieve -- at least in Soul Calibur you earned money to buy alternate weapons. Here you can maybe once in a while unlock a bonnet or a monocle to equip on your character for aesthetic entertainment. Some of the missions are pointless and end quicker than it takes to get to them, while a few are incredibly tedious and difficult. It's very unbalanced.
All of these bells and whistles are an attempt to add some replay value but it generally feels artificial. It would've been better to have worked on a strong base first, then used any resources to add these extra ideas in. Judgment's gameplay has some ideas that are intriguing on paper but ultimately end up being mediocre in practice.
Combat can be enjoyable for a time, and for a bit longer a time with friends, but it's extremely basic. Players have weak attack, strong attack, and then some other options like guard-breaking. The problem is that by and large, attacking doesn't feel terribly varied -- you just sort of try to mish mash the different kinds of attacks together into strings that happen to work. It doesn't feel like branches on a tree, it's just a set of basic attacks you try to weave together. Sub-weapons (which require hearts, as is tradition) must be scavenged in the level, which just adds more tedium to the whole process. In Smash Bros., item usage is more fluid and smooth (likely due to the 2D structure of it all) and the items are a lot more varied and useful. Here, they're by and large unhelpful, especially since you need to collect hearts to use them at all -- though a few can be weaved into combos to add some strikes.
I admit, it is pretty nice how loyal some of the moves are to their source material. Having just played Order of Ecclesia not long ago, I recognized every single one of Shanoa's moves. I also concede that the combat, for those who are OK with shallow smashing, can be some fun with friends. After hours of playing, however, I felt like I was still using the same handful of moves as I had been at the start, like there really wasn't room to grow and expand my arsenal because of how shallow it all is.
