All three seasons of Castlevania are currently available to stream on Netflix.
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Ignoring for a moment the usual pedigree of video game adaptations we’ve come to expect, Netflix’s Castlevania is the genuine article. Though set in the universe of the game series, there’s no real barrier to entry for the show, which fleshes out Vlad Dracula Tepes’ insuppressible dominion over medieval Eastern Europe and the motley crew of would-be heroes trying to stop him.
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Castlevania’s three seasons – which can be quickly binged in a little over nine hours – steeps its alternate historical drama of the Dark Ages and the Old Testament religious dogma of The Church in a grimy, mature fantasy soup where vampire nations, demons, a tangible hell, and magic coexist. It finds success in being far enough from traditional high fantasy to feel unique and foreign while staying grounded in its loose historical trappings where science is just as wondrous to the villagers working the fields as the creatures that haunt the darker places of the world.
Writer and creator Warren Ellis (Astonishing X-Men, Hellblazer, Deadspace) uses this backdrop to explore a number of weighty topics across the dozen-or-so chief characters to an extreme that reflects the brutality and barbarism of the setting: loss, grief, love, apathy, loyalty, authority, ambition, duty, destiny, self-loathing, isolation, friendship, and vulnerability.
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Did you watch Castlevania Seasons 1 and 2 and need a refresher before jumping back into Season 3? Get caught up with our story recap above.
All these philosophies simmer as each season slowly burns toward excellent confrontations and reveals. And while the gorgeously stylish animation delivers bloody, bombastic fights against a hellish bestiary of horrific creature design, Castlevania treats its softer moments – two characters learning to trust one another – with the same deference and care as the grand, world-spanning plots like the extermination of the human race. And despite the grave overtones of a world circling the drain, Castlevania manages to subvert the doom and gloom by injecting genuine humor and dry wit in the most welcome and unexpected moments.
Castlevania’s complete disregard for the traditional good versus evil binary is one of its strongest themes – it’s an excellently muddy mess of conflicting ideologies, nature-versus-action, and the ramifications of deep personal trauma. The depth of tragedy and the potential for redemption in nearly every character plays out to such a degree that not only is it possible to be empathetic to every side, it’s hard not to actively root for every character involved even as they directly confront one another. No small feat for a premise revolving around a genocidal undead tyrant, a drunken fatalistic folk hero, and a number of lost souls.
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With the current third season of Castlevania just hitting Netflix on March 5, the wait for the unconfirmed fourth season is likely to be a lengthy one. That’s the bad news. The good news is the universe is now wide open for a number of new storylines, and there are some incredibly pressing threads left dangling, so I’m confident we’ll be hearing about more Castlevania on Netflix in the near future.
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Binge It! is IGN’s recommendation series. Movies, TV shows, books, comics, music… if you can binge it, we’re here to talk about it. In each installment of Binge It!, we’ll discuss a piece of content we’re passionate about — and why you should check it out.
Source: IGN.com Castlevania Is an Exploration of the Human Condition…With Vampires