The series starts off with a woman stabbing one bat out of a thousand in a swarm of bats that are flying harmlessly past her off into the sunset. It makes no sense, but it's supposed to look cool I guess. And that's pretty much the tone for the series.
Trevor's stance against the church is an unusual take from the series where the Belmonts generally were closely tied to the church in terms of their religious tools, being shown praying (to restore health in CV2, at the start of the game in CVIII and praying over a dead person in CV 64).
It was okay. I watched the four episodes - gory, clearly aimed at an adult audience (probably to capture a lot of the audience who grew up with the series as well as teens who knew the series later on). My main issue is that there hasn't really been much plot so far. It's all been establishing of character backgrounds and basically 'setting up' the main characters per se.
The most interesting episode arguably was the first, because we actually see Dracula interacting in a way that isn't just RAWR I'M THE FINAL BOSS. Sadly, any potential chances we could have had to see how his relationship with a human woman developed, how Alucard came to be born, the complex family issues behind a vampire falling in love with a human (who never gets bitten/turned into a vampire)... there's a potential character drama here, but it's pushed aside as the show quickly needs to fill its arbitrary action/violence/gore quota. The woman is quickly killed off as the excuse for why Dracula destroys the countryside so we can get to KILLING THE MONSTERS, and we're only going to see more of her and Dracula if flashbacks appear.
There's lots of gratuitous swearing as Trevor tries to be the edgy anti-hero. Characters repeatedly survive long, bone-shattering falls with barely a scratch (often multiple times in a row in one scene). The design of Dracula's castle, along with Dracula's high-tech machinery is all classic Castlevania. The gore is frequent, and explicit. It's all very flashy, but four episodes in and it's been fairly shallow stuff in terms of plot, character development, etc. There's a few very good moments here and there (
demon 'kissing' the priest)
but mostly it's forgettable, and none of the characters are particularly likeable.
I get it, it's Castlevania, so there's an expectation for it to be action based. But Dracula's never even given the chance to be genuinely interesting or have much more than the bare minimum of interaction with other characters before he's thrust into the Final Boss hotseat. We've not seen anything of what actually happened to the Belmont family before they were labelled outcasts. It feels like a waste - they could have had a few episodes of genuinely interesting character development before Dracula descends into madness and goes on a rampage.
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