Mário Santos
@mariosantos
Pixel Artist/Animator Before: Neon Inferno, Shredder's Revenge, SOPHSTAR, Wallachia: Reign of Dracula, and more... Job inquiries: emppixel@gmail.com
I should probably have started with the cathedral's front. The intro was supposed to be the people running away. Then, a child trips and falls. JUST as a Skeleton is about to kill the child, Julius jumps out of the cathedral and destroys it. Here though is just a presentation of the four heroes.
In here I wanted to display that you could climb places in the town. Before this part there would be a truck (the one saying "Bay Houses") to climb on top off. Mermen would be already infesting the sewers and jumping out of manholes to attack people. (4/4)
Motorcyle Skeleton was planned, and he'd be VERY annoying to deal with. Also, I had the idea for a Blue Oni who would carry a stone block with a White Dragon attached. Would be a difficult enemy to fight normally. (3/4)
Here you can see soldiers joining the battle. It's funny, if you try to render cars and tanks on the appropriate proportions to a human, at this scale, they'll look like they're TOO small. So I made them bigger to look more interesting. The Skeleton Muskets are made by my friend Dracula9 (2/4)
Mockups I made for the fan-game I tried to direct. It'll unfortunately not move forward. Here, Julius Belmont is walking towards the monster-infested city while the people run away. I hid a little reference among them. The cathedral is partly reference from one close to where I live (1/4)
Estou certo que entrou, Jana. Estou certo também que você é só uma mulher dona de casa preocupada, e não o Jorginho Games metendo o louco na internet
Você tem um parente caminhoneiro? Introduza ele ao Discord. Quando caminhoneiros usarem Discord, tiverem lá seus servidores "TODOS POR BOLSONARO (O RETORNO)" com essa foto aqui, com canais tipo "Rebite-do-Dia" ou "Scania-memes", ai o governo para de encher o saco com ideia estúpida.
Destructoid wrote this incredible masterpiece of a review. Symphony of the Night. World famous for being "brutally hard". And THAT difficulty is not here. Am I supposed to think this game is piss easy? What am I supposed to take from this (and many other things said in other reviews)?
Esse é um dos piores vídeos que eu já vi Como pode o cara errar T O D O S os argumentos
PS: Just to clarify, I'm not looking for the interview on this printed EGM magazine. I'm looking for the web-exclusive one, which came out in the same month on Gamers.com
So that's what I think: Malus is "Mars". He was supposed to be an element from a doomsday prophecy, turned into an actual character in Castlevania 64, which was banking on the Nostradamus craze originated by a Japanese author. The "King of Terror" that reigns "before and after Mars"🧵
This has happened in Castlevania before. Here's "L"ihiter. Another known example: Eric "L"ecarde, who is supposed to be "Eric Ricardo". What do you think the big R on his emblem stands for? 🧵
This is a photo of the official guide for Castlevania 64 taken by my friend Patrick Finzi to check this analysis. I imagine a western fan would be confused by the romanization of his name... Why "Mals"? Think: What is the letter that Japanese devs of old often mistakenly romanized as an "L"?🧵
And check what it says again: in a loose interpretation, that the King of Terror will come from the sky, and will reign "before and after Mars". Who is the Demon King that descends from the sky and reigns "before and after Malus"? Dracula. Malus, as his reincarnation, is just a transition state 🧵
Malus' japanese name is マルス. You can absolutely translate it as "Malus", this is in fact how the latin word is rendered in katakana. But, remember the entire "Japan Nostradamus prophecy fever" context I just gave you, and how it influenced Castlevania? Look how "Mars" is rendered in the prophecy🧵
But, sometimes, the mistranslation is not due to "mistake" per se. There are things like homonyms. This is how "シャノア", meaning "Chat Noir", became "Shanoa". She was supposed to be called the french word for "Black Cat", but since "Shanoa" sounded right due to katakana phonetics, the name stuck🧵
If you know me for 30 seconds, you already heard that the west's idea of Castlevania is significantly informed by the inumerable translation mishaps that this franchise underwent. A lot of stuff got lost in translation. A mistranslation can even influence an official western product🧵
The Castlevania community collectively agreed that "Malus" is a hint at the boy's true nature. It means "Evil" in latin, because he's Dracula's reincarnation. It's the developers being on-the-nose on purpose. Even the wiki has this listed down. Or is it?🧵
And, following suit, CV64 has its own version of the "King of Terror coming from the sky", with Malus riding a pegasus down from the clouds to fight the player 🧵
CV64 coming out in 1999 and being called "Apocalypse" are not the only details. The game's re-release/expansion, also, features a "church priest" making a doomsday prophecy regarding the return of Dracula, which is this franchise's King of Terror.🧵
So, the game comes out in 1999, at the peak of Nostradamus craze, and what is it called in Japan? "Akumajou Dracula: Mokushiroku" or, "Castlevania: Apocalypse" 🧵
Back on SotN (1997), you can already find the devs talking about a "Battle of 1999 inspired on Nostradamus". I have confirmed that this was indeed drawn from Goto's writing. They'd put this to paper in 2003's Aria of Sorrow. But this thread is about Castlevania 64, which released in..... 1999🧵
Anyway, JP pop culture gets influenced by Ben Goto's interpretations of Nostradamus' doomsday prophecy, and as they approach the year of 1999, people get more antsy and the boom reaches it's peak. Castlevania is neck-deep in this context and, of course, gets influenced as well🧵
(In fact the influence goes further than just pop culture. People were really panicking as a result of Ben Goto's writings, and REAL DOOMSDAY CULTS were born as consequence. Not the Castlevania cult types, the "Sarin attack in subway stations" types. But this is a story for another day🧵)
Thing even had a movie adaptation made, produced by TOHO, which eventually got pulled because of its depiction of mutants resulting from the 1999 cataclysm, and survivors of atomic war 🧵
Because of his book, and the occult fever he started, a METRIC TONNE of Japanese pop culture takes inspiration from it or outright bases it wholecloth on Goto's Nostradamus writings. These include a billion things like Fist of the North Star, Godzilla and Digimon 🧵