The other half of the equation in inspirational texture is clearly 2006's Portrait of Ruin, the Castlevania that was ostensibly built on its partner mechanics but which ultimately treated them as occasional punctuation at most. The reason that this model being present here excites is not because Portrait was a great game--I'd stretch to call it even good--but because its frequent fouls and flubs read as the most damning and wasteful missteps out of all its peers as the conceptual basis that rooted them held so much promise that never went realized. Inti's take on Castlevania up to this point has always relied on multiple character scenarios, wherein the natural point of comparison is Dracula's Curse, but the course they took in adapting that work spun off into a wildly distinctive large-scale adventuring party mold as expressed by platformer mechanics, and completely transformed the retraux tissue of what they were making, arguably outdoing the venerated source material through expanding the concept's possibilities. That's why it's heartening to see a flawed, uneven work like Portrait used as the primary model in the tributary improvisation that will hopefully derive in Grim Guardians, where they're latching onto that unrefined potential instead of playing a round of catch-up with a more represented perennial classic of the canon. For what Portrait was aesthetically and tonally also, it's also the work that best fits the cartoony derivations in whatever of Gal Gun that may carry over into this spinoff, making the fusion less intrusive than it otherwise might be.
The trailer above doesn't ultimately show much beyond getting a primer on the game's base elements, so much of my feelings about it are based on hopeful conjecture, which may just as well turn unfounded. I'd rather wager on foolish optimism instead of skeptical cynicism in this case, for this project that carries so many suspect but promising potentialities within it.
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