Critic Reviews

All of this heady material slows the pace down a bit, but the excellently animated action sequence (of which there are plenty to enjoy) give each episode a nice punch-up. All in all, these eight new episodes of Season 2 will give you everything you wanted from Castlevania and more.

The team behind Castlevania Season 3 absolutely knocked it out of the park with this batch of episodes. They deliver the action, the intrigue, and the food for thought that elevates the source material into what’s easily one of the best video game adaptations ever made.

This definitely isn’t kid friendly. And yet the violence and gore serves the story, one that’s not about a simple action-packed adventure of a trio of heroes wandering the Wallachian countryside, but the very real battle of complex heroes fighting for what’s right and protecting the innocent from darkness, death, and ignorance.

While the animation and writing in this first “season” occasionally stumble along the way, the series’ creators have gone above and beyond to wring a resonant story from a game that never really had or needed one. It’s a promising start, and while this isn’t saying much, that alone makes it one of the most successful video game adaptations to date.

Gruesome, bloody, and (for most of its runtime) mostly devoid of hope, Castlevania doesn’t skimp on darkness. It never quite reaches the demented highs of its pillar-of-hellfire pilot, but by season’s end, there’s a clear mission statement for arriving at a slightly more optimistic future.

Bleak, bold, blackhearted, brutal and very, very bloody, Netflix’s Castlevania is an uneven, weirdly paced but vividly realized and often captivating anime adaptation, one that propels the video game genre to newfound heights and a promising, if very short, glimpse at the show’s potential.

While not perfect, the final season serves as a love letter to Konami’s games and the series Warren Ellis has worked on since 2017.