Konami offers the tiniest sop to Castlevania: 'Fans always want more, and we do too'
After thousands of years, the coffin lid suddenly shifts. Dust cascades and pachinko balls scatter, the lord of vampires Dracula emerges, and a bunch of startled Konami employees look over at filing cabinet C. Wasn't that dude in a game once?!?
Last weeks saw the release of Dead Cells' Return to Castlevania DLC(opens in new tab), a whip-cracking dash through decades of Castlevania history that both showcases developer Motion Twin's feel for the series and, frankly, makes you a bit sad Konami hasn't done anything notable with the series in nearly a decade (outside of the excellent Netflix anime).
Konami's Tsutomu Taniguchi was the supervisor of the Return to Castlevania project, and refers to it as isekai: A fantasy sub-genre where a character suddenly finds themselves transported into a new world or setting.
«Is 'isekai' a buzzword? Because this is how I would define this storyline,» Taniguchi said in a new interview with IGN. «Let's just say that Dracula's Castle teleported on the Beheaded's Island and what happened on the island stays on the island.»
The collaboration got its start at 2019's BitSummit conference in Kyoto, which Motion Twin and publisher Evil Empire attended hoping to find a partner to sell the game in Japan, before taking the chance to pitch Konami the more full-on collaboration. «Since Dead Cells had 'respectfully stolen' so many elements from the series already, such as: the whip, the key art with the castle, the food hidden in walls… [...] the pitch quickly turned into a full DLC proposition,» said Evil Empire's Benjamin Laulan.
«When Evil Empire and Motion Twin came back with their full-DLC proposition instead of just this short featuring [initially plans were less ambitious] we weren’t really
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