The second and pretty rad season of Castlevania: Nocturnedropped at the start of the year. As fans await word on the show’s future, Netflix and Powerhouse are putting out an art book chock filled with material from the first two seasons.
Due out in March, the 208-page book features “hundreds of pieces of never-before-seen concept artwork, production design, and stunning storyboards” covering the characters, locations, and monsters from the series and commentary from Powerhouse staff. Peep some pages below to see Richter Belmont, Eduoard (in his monster form), and storyboards from season one episodes.
Art books are popular, and fortunately, Netflix really likes to putting them out for its animated hits: the original Castlevania series has its own book for its entire four-season run, and Arcane and several movies have gotten the same treatment. It helps that its most high-profile stuff looks really damn good and get attention because of it. Like its predecessor, Castlevania: Nocturne has been praised for its visuals and animation, so at least Netflix knows to capitalize on that.
For fans of the show—or really, anyone just into behind-the-scenes material who wants to know how things are made—the art book will definitely be worth grabbing when it hits shelves on March 3, 2026 for $55.
Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raiderfranchise is taking two interesting roads as it’s got a brand new game in the works. On one side of things, the live-action series courtesy of Phoebe Waller-Bridge has recently moved forward over at Prime Video. And on the other, more immediate end, there’s Netflix’s Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, scheduled to drop in October and looking somewhat like a blast from the past.
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The new show comes courtesy of Castlevania studio Powerhouse Animation and stars Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning’sHayley Atwell as Lara Croft. In this tale set after the events of the reboot trilogy from the 2010s, Lara’s ditched her friends to run solo as an adventurer. While taking on increasingly difficult jobs, she finds herself on a new hunt after a thief’s broken into Croft Manor to steal an old Chinese artifact. The artifact’s not just old, it’s also dangerous, so it falls on her to do what she does best and save the world from peril.
Legend may be in the same continuity as those games, but it’s looking more like a globetrotting, action-packed affair. In fact, it seems like this Lara is becoming more like her original incarnation instead of getting beaten around by gravity and nature every other step. While there’s parts of the reboots that’ve carried over, like her pickaxe and bow and arrow, and her trusty friend Jonah (Earl Baylon), there’s a definite change in the air. Here, she’s riding motorcycles, skydiving, and blasting a shotgun in midair like the hypercompetent hero fans originally loved.
Netflix will premiere Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft on October 10.
Goth fashion isn’t new, but fashion associated with the vampire scene has seen a resurgence as the vampire has once again grown in popularity through the success of the 2022 adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, as well as the Castlevania franchise seeing a resurgence with its Netflix series. Once again, the vampire has permeated the mainstream, sinking its fangs into an entirely new generation, coupled with an interest in historical fashion and what this timeless creature has come to represent. In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, sometime in 2021, while cleaning out my wardrobe, I decided to dress like I could fit into one of Koji Igarashi’s Castlevania games.
The look of the vampire is ageless but hard to define. It exists somewhere between Victorian fashion and goth subculture, and has morphed into different subsets and microtrends over the past few decades. It can be black frocks or Tom Cruise’s frilled shirts and brocade vests in 1994’s Interview with the Vampire. It could be one of Ayami Kojima’s gorgeous oil painting illustrations of Alucard and various Belmont family members from the Castlevania series.
It was my interest in period fashion and various subcultures that brought me to dress like a Castlevania vampire for a year. (That and having disposable income as an adult.) Would I have dressed this way as a teenager? Probably. The modern vampire has often been associated with androgyny, and it’s something I’ve always personally gravitated toward. Naturally, there are also some subsets to this. There is the more industrial goth that is sometimes blended with mid-’80s aesthetics, extremely heavy makeup and all, or the “romantic” goth associated with ruffled shirts, corsets, and modified pieces of Victorian clothing.
The vampire is associated with so many various interpretations that it’s hard to pin down just what exactly defines it — outside of fangs, odd-colored eyes, and a penchant for the night. (I didn’t end up ordering a pair of fangs — I’m a little too self-conscious about my teeth — but someone else I know wears their pair almost religiously.)
Photo courtesy of Kazuma Hashimoto
Photo courtesy of Kazuma Hashimoto
Image: Konami
I scoured the internet for sellers that would provide exactly what I was looking for: linen shirts with ruffles, tightly-laced corsets, leather trousers, knee-high boots, everything I associated with the gorgeous Gothic designs Kojima incorporated in art of characters like Alucard and Mathias Cronqvist, and in one-off illustrations she’s done that feature these ephemeral creatures. I packed my closet with velvet capelets from Dark in Love, scoured secondhand shops for antique Victorian brooches and silk ribbons I would tie my then-shoulder-length hair with. To cement the vampire image, I ordered matte black lipstick to use exclusively on my upper lip, in combination with full-coverage foundation to get that perfectly flawless countenance coined as “vampire skin,” which appeared as a full-blown trend in 2022. Naturally, I also wore colored contacts and heavy eyeliner to further accentuate the look.
I felt great assembling these outfits, spending the time to practice and perfectly apply my makeup, and walking around in clothing that made me feel extremely comfortable. I would get stopped from time to time by random passersby, but since Germany has a history of a thriving goth subculture and scene, I never received any disparaging remarks. It was all compliments, which further cemented my confidence in walking around dressed to the nines, inspired by one of my favorite artists and game series of all time.
Many others are drawn to the way the vampire aesthetic lets self-expression and various interests converge. “Being into Victorian fashion, architecture, and even smaller subcultures like Visual Kei when I was a teenager was sort of how I got my start into vampire fashion,” said Storm, a former member of the fang community (slang for vampire communities, or in some cases even clans) when asked about what drew them to the subculture. “My interests in fashion and subculture merged with my nerdiness when I discovered the game Vampire: The Masquerade.”
Photo courtesy of Kazuma Hashimoto
Photo courtesy of Kazuma Hashimoto
Image: Konami
Don Henrie, “The Human Vampire,” was a popular internet personality in the early 2000s, and was even featured in a National Geographic program and appeared on SyFy’s Mad Mad House. He was one of the first glimpses into what bridging the vampire lifestyle and fashion movement was like during that era. There was also the (moderate) success of Queen of the Damned, Van Helsing, and Underworld roughly around the same time. The website VampireFreaks began in 1999, functioning as a MySpace for goths; it still exists today, now as an online shop that sells goth-related apparel and goods.
This style of fashion has also created a community. “I ended up becoming part of an online community in the early 2000s, which was super into all of the Vampire: The Masquerade clans. It’s actually how a lot of ‘vampire clans’ in the physical world formed,” Storm said. One of the more popular “vampire clans” was featured on Buzzfeed in 2018, where host Selom received her own pair of vampire fangs. Vampire fangs can definitely be a fashion statement; I know a few people who wear them without joining a clan, as they’ve become more accessible through sellers like Kaos Kustom Fangs. But for clan members, it’s more or less a lifestyle they subscribe to. I never joined a clan myself, and only learned the inner workings of them through friends who had participated in the culture, but living in a major metropolitan city meant that I definitely wasn’t alone in dressing outside of the norm. I was friends with former cyber goths, and while they had more or less toned down their looks, they still dressed in mostly all black and gravitated toward voluminous black dresses with heeled boots.
Having orbited those circles and now seeing the resurgence of vampire media, it feels like the scene is in the middle of an upswing. Would I dress like a “vampire” again? The answer is maybe, mostly because where I live now doesn’t accommodate it all that well. (Wearing black velvet in sweltering summer heat doesn’t bode well for anyone.) But it was definitely one of my favorite periods of personal fashion, and a fulfilling period of self-expression. So maybe I’ll throw everything together for a night at the club. Regardless, it’s great to see this subset of goth subculture still alive and well.
Castlevania: Nocturne, the sequel series to Konami’s popular animated vampire saga, Castlevania, recaptures the magic that its predecessor brought to the dance back in 2017. A tightly written show with multifaceted heroes and villains, outstanding action sequences, and imaginative monster designs, its meticulously constructed dialogue will have you hanging off of every word. Simply put, Castlevania: Nocturne makes sure that nearly every scene in its eight-episode season is equal parts purposeful, engaging, and beginner-friendly to viewers who may have missed the original series.
A Saucy Romance Game Where You Play As Dracula
The show,which takes place 300 years after Castlevania and loosely adapts the PC Engine classic Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, is set during the height of the French Revolution in 1792, and follows Richter Belmont, a descendant of Trevor Belmont and Sypha Belnades, who, alongside his adoptive sister Maria Renard, fight to stop a tyrannical “Vampire Messiah.” The pair have the cards stacked against them because the big bad, Erzsebeth Báthory—who’s based on the folklore surrounding a real-life historical figure—has allied herself with counter-revolutionary aristocrats and key political figures around the world, and plans on using her ungodly powers to blot out the sun so vampires can terrorize the world at their leisure. Suffice it to say, this generation of vampire hunters has one hell of a task ahead of them and the show doesn’t shy away from showcasing them being out of their depth.
Rather than setting up Maria and Richter to be hyper-capable carbon copies of their predecessors, as popular generation-spanning anime like Naruto are wont to do, the show instead opts to underscore how their inexperience puts them on the backfoot during nearly every deadly encounter in the show. Unlike Sypha and Trevor, who we meet as fully realized adults in the midst of their epic and perilous quest, Maria, Richter, and their newfound allies Annette and Edouard possess a youthful eagerness to rush into the fray headfirst without a tangible plan, and it backfires. After all, Richter is only 19 years old and hasn’t been tasked with saving the world as often as his ancestors have, so it’s to be expected that he’ll have some growing pains as a hero.
Nocturne’s greatest strength is how it allows its heroes to be vulnerable. While Trevor’s sardonic swagger in Castlevania comes as a result of him weathering years of failure and pyrrhic victories, Richter’s haughtiness derives from his fear that he won’t be strong enough to save the ones he loves. Basically, Richter is the embodiment of the Mike Tyson quote, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” His metaphorical sucker punch comes in the form of Olrox, a charismatic Aztec vampire who murdered his mother when he was a boy, traumatizing him to the point that he can no longer use magic and freezes up in fear or flees whenever Olrox makes a sudden appearance.
Image: Netflix
Richter’s cowardice never comes off as grating, but instead humanizes him by making him a fallible hero who still has a lot to learn before he can face Erzsebeth or Olrox. Personally, I found it beautiful that Nocturne’s hard-knocks coming-of-age tale for Richter let him cry on multiple occasions as he worked through his trauma, something anime protagonists are rarely allowed to do. Rest assured, Richter inevitably comes out the other end as the hero that fans of the Castlevania games have come to love, and he does so in a gratifying way that pays off toward the midway point of the season.
Nocturne isn’t afraid of letting its side characters bask in the limelight, too
Much like how Castlevania transformed Isaac the forge master into the most compelling character in the show, so too does Nocturne with Annette and Edouard, newfound allies of Richter and Maria’s. While the French Revolution provides set dressing for Richter and Maria’s fight against Erzsebeth and her cronies, the show also weaves in the Haitian Revolution, letting its Black characters partake and triumph in their own revolutionary struggle.
In episode three, Freedom Is Sweeter, written by Zodwa Nyoni, we learn that Annetteescaped from slavery in Haiti, where the slave trade was under the vampiric rule of Erzsebeth and her French regime, and partook in the Haitian Revolution using Creole incantations to aid Saint-Domingue ’s freedom fighters. It’s in this episode that we also discover how she and Edouard, a talented opera singer who initially felt at odds with the show’s grimdark premise, used his status as a commodity and a free man to aid Annette in her escape from a slave plantation after the brutal death of her mother. This episode is a clear standout this season, brilliantly meshing real-life events with Castlevania’s fantastical lore. Nocturne does something rare and extraordinary by making these Black characters, who in the hands of another anime might have been fridged to motivate its Caucasian heroes, the emotional lifeblood of the series, even as it establishes the pair as effective narrative foils to Maria and Richter.
Castlevania: Nocturne’s first season lays the groundwork for a series that has the potential to eclipse the greatness of its predecessor while raising the bar for video game adaptations in the process.
While Japanese games of varying genres are enjoying success these days, the 2000s and 2010s weren’t as kind, especially in Western markets. Since then, there’s been a lot of speculation as to why Japanese games struggled during these years, often from westerners themselves, with some pointing to key game design trends. But recent comments from Final Fantasy’s creator Hironobu Sakaguchi suggest that the decline of unique console hardware, exclusives, and cultural differences is the likely cause.
By the late 1990s, Japanese games like Final Fantasy VII, Chrono Trigger, or Castlevania had become must-play experiences for their inspired stories, excellent technical presentation, and engaging gameplay. But the following two decades were a different story. Anticipated entries like Final Fantasy XIII failed to reach sales expectations with the rise of Western RPGs such as TK (and many felt that train came off the rails starting with 2001’s Final Fantasy X). Newer attempts at franchises like Sakaguchi’s Blue Dragon on Xbox 360 in 2006 were met with lukewarm reception at best. Meanwhile, Western-made games like Mass Effect had become the new gaming sensations. While some may point to declining interests in traditional, linear forms of storytelling in games as a likely reason, Hironobu Sakaguchi suspects that dramatic changes in the hardware used to play games presented a tough road for Japanese devs to follow.
Sakaguchi: ‘Consoles like the NES and PlayStation were very specific hardware’
Speaking to IGN along with Castlevania senior producer Koji Igarashi, Sakaguchi discussed why he feels Japanese games were of “higher quality” for systems with ‘“specific hardware”’ like the NES or PSX. The answer, as many students of video game history might suspect, has to do with those very consoles. With specific hardware configurations produced by Japanese manufacturers, devs at the time had to become experts in how to best utilize these devices, and there was no language barrier to gaining these skill sets. Sakaguchi said:
“[Specific, Japanese-made consoles] made it easier for Japanese developers to master the hardware, as we could ask Nintendo or Sony directly in Japanese. This is why—I realize it might be impolite to say this—Japanese games were of a higher quality at the time. As a result, Japanese games were regarded as more fun, but when the hardware became easier to develop for, things quickly changed.”
Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi added that the “long history of PC culture” in the West was better adapted to the hardware trends that would follow in the 2000s, a trend which continues to this day. The PS5 and Xbox Series consoles more closely match PC hardware than dedicated gaming boxes perhaps ever have. That change wasn’t easy.
Igarashi describes the journey as a tough growing pain. “Japanese developers could no longer rely on their speciality as console developers,” he said, “and had to master PC development.”
While some may be quick to point out, perhaps, that the PS3’s unique and troublesomeCell Broadband Engine certainly fits the criteria of “specific hardware,” it was maybe too specific. Though Sony made incredible promises for its performance (and odd commercials), its unique architecture was a chore for developers around the world, leading Sony to pivot away from it for the PS4. But the 2000s and 2010s were also a time where Japanese games, particularly Final Fantasy, made the switch to multi-platform releases. Devil May Cry 4 was another notable series that made the jump to other platforms. This shattered the trend of focusing on a specific set of hardware constraints. And at the time it didn’t really go over too well. It seems natural now to expect a Final Fantasy to appear on multiple consoles, but the announcement of XIII coming to Xbox 360 was quite the surprise in the 2000s.
Sakaguchi believes that where we play our games also makes a difference
Sakaguchi also said that the “cultural differences” between Japan and the West make meaningful differences in what kinds of games are made. “In the West,” Sakaguchi said, “children often get their own room from a very young age, whilst in Japan the whole family sleeps together in the same room.” He continued, “such small cultural differences can be felt through the games we make today […] I believe that cherishing my Japanese cultural background is what attracts people towards my games in the first place.”
While I for one can say that my private bedroom probably enhanced my experience of Final Fantasy VII, Sakaguchi’s comments concerning focused mastery of specific hardware likely explained why such epic experiences often felt so unique to the platforms I was playing them on. Or maybe that’s just the nostalgia talking.
Recently, “AI” machine-learning technologies have been creeping their way into artistic fields in both entertaining and harmful ways. While some AI content creators are just making videos for harmless fun, others, like the creators of a recent AI-generated anime short, wrongfully believe they’ve democratized the animation industry when they’ve really just come up with a more technologically demanding method of plagiarizing other artists.
Earlier this week, Corridor Digital, a Los Angeles-based production studio that creates pop culture YouTube videos, uploaded a video called “Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors.” Written and directed by Niko Pueringer and Sam Gorski, it revolves around two twins vying for the throne left vacant by their recently deceased father. Their battlefield? A game of rock, paper, “twin blade.” By leveraging the machine-learning text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, Corridor Digital gave camera footage filmed in front of a green screen a dramatic anime-like appearance. It’s basically AI-assisted rotoscoping. You can watch the video below.
“It’s part of our humanity to try and visualize things that don’t exist. Like, let’s talk about traditional 2D animation. Cartoons, the most creatively liberating medium, is also the least democratized. It takes incredibly skilled people drawing every single frame of your movie to make it happen,” Pueringer said in a separate YouTube video, titled “Did We Just Change Animation Forever?” “But I think we came up with a new way to animate. A way to turn reality into acartoon and it’s one more step toward true creative freedom where we can easily create anything we want.”
In a pinned comment underneath, Pueringer wrote that their AI-driven animation production technique isn’t meant to replace human animators but as a means to bring visual ideas to life without the “near-insurmountable mountain of work” that a large animation studio with a large budget would need to get the job done.
“Imagine one person, or a few friends, bringing their crazy ideas to life. Imagine if a traditional animator could automatically have their drawings inked and colored. Imagine eliminating the uncanny valley on CGI faces. These tools have the potential to do that. We’re trying to figure out how, and sharing our journey. If we want community-controlled AI tools, we need to develop them as a community, otherwise, they become proprietary tools locked behind a company,” Pueringer wrote.
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In an email with Kotaku, Peuringer said that although someone can train an AI model to learn the styles of many artists, it’s incorrect to assume that is the technology’s sole use case.
“Through this experiment, we’re figuring out how we can use [our] own art with these tools to speed up the process. ‘Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors’ is the first step in our experiments [in] figuring out how any of this works in the first place,” Pueringer said.
Feeding an AI model data isn’t creating art
Despite how appealing the AI behind ‘Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors’ may seem to Corridor Digital’s fans, the group’s AI-powered anime is yet another harmful innovation in the animation industry because it steals from real artists in ways that seem little different than the prospect of other machine-learning technologies copying and selling actors’ voices without consent.
Unlike the breathtaking Dragon Ball Z fan film, Dragon Ball: Legends—which took the indie studio Studio Stray Dog four years to make—Corridor Digital’s attempt at recreating the passion and energy displayed in early-aughts anime comes off as violently hokey and embarrassing because it’s a soulless recreation of animation techniques haphazardly strewn together without any technical skill or artistic merit.
Despite acknowledging the fact that anime is about tying visual language to a story through stylized metaphors and art direction, Pueringer revealed that Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors’ visual style was made by feeding their Stable Diffusion AI model background art and character images they took from the early aughts fantasy anime film Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.
“We tried to grab frames of like different people, some face shots, some torso shots, full body shots, hands, hair, even some abstract things like flowers because, with all these different objects—with each picture effectively being a different object and a different character—when we train the model, it’s not going to learn any single subject. Instead, it’s going to learn the style in which all of these subjects were drawn,” Pueringer said.
Ultimately, Corridor Digital’s trained model shat out a TikTok filter-looking mess in which over-the-top shadow effects constantly clipped through character models, despite their technologies’ best attempts to prevent any kind of uncanny valley flickering you’d see in an anime-filtered Snapchat video. Claiming that you understand the visual language that anime studios strive to portray while blatantly copying the art style of anime studio Madhouse’s work literally frame by frame isn’t a “democratization” of anime creation. That’s just being a hack.
Corridor Crew
While many of Corridor Digital’s YouTube commenters see Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors as a means to make content creation more accessible, others viewers thought the video was an insult to human animators.
“This just seems like a way for tech guys to force their way into the artist’s circle while simultaneously stealing actual artists’ work to use for their ai to learn off of. They should show this to the actual animators that visit them, I wonder how they’d react,” YouTube commentator SouperRussian wrote in response to Corridor Digital’s “Did We Just Change Animation Forever?” video.
Many workers within the animation industry hate it
Unlike many of Corridor Digital’s social media fans, fellow YouTuber animator Ross O’Donovan thinks Corridor Digital’s AI anime is walking on thin ice with professional animators. O’Donovan advised Corridor Digital to find “a first aid kit” to prepare for the discourse that would transpire should it talk to an actual group of animation industry professionals. He specifically suggested Corridor Digital sit down with folks like the team behind Netfllix’s Castlevania series to hear what they think about the creation process of Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Turns out Corridor won’t need to hit Castlevania director Samuel Deats’ line, because he’s already made his opinion known to the public. Deats disagreed with Corridor Digital’s claim that their AI tool was “one step toward true creative freedom,” that would democratize the animation industry. Instead, Deats tweeted that Corridor Digital are just “lazy thieves spitting on an entire art form.”
Deats wasn’t alone in his sentiments toward Corridor Digital’s advocacy for machine learning models in the animation industry. “This absolutely sucks, hope this helps,” Toonami co-creator Jason DeMarco wrote in a tweet. Ralph Bakshi, the legendary underground animator behind Fritz the Cat and the 1978 Lord of the Rings animated film didn’t dignify Corridor Digital’s claim with a response. Instead, Bakshi simply replied “no comment” in response to a tweet cheerleading Corridor Digital’s “incredible” AI-powered anime.
Despite the online backlash Corridor Digital received from folks within the animation industry, Pueringer believes that Anime Rock, Paper, Scissors isn’t any less ethical than the other pop culture-related YouTube videos they’ve uploaded to their channel “to tell their story.”
In a post on the r/Corridor subreddit, Peuringer noted that while sudden change can be a scary thing, “especially if it feels like your passion or livelihood is on the line,” Corridor Digital is exploring the use cases of their AI model as a means to “help shine a light into the fog for everyone” wanting to bring their imaginations to life.
“I see potential for tools like these to let an animator let this process propagate their ink and color easily across [an] entire shot, for example. It’s potential like that that gets me excited about this tech, and why we do these experiments in the first place,” Pueringer told Kotaku.
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