While these controls seem somewhat competent on paper, the system falls apart in-action. To be honest, using the Wii Remote and Nunchuck to control Castlevania Judgment is an unruly mess. You are constantly swinging the Wii Remote at all times during battle, and simultaneously trying to hold the correct buttons to initiate combos and block enemy attacks. What this leads to is the player wildly waving their arms in the air nonstop until the player or the opponent is dead. Why the developers decided to map the primary attack and the primary evade moves to motion control in a fast paced fighting game is beyond my comprehension. You never feel like you have a firm grasp of what is happening, as it all feels like random happenstance as you flail around attempting to pull off some of the more complex maneuvers. At times, it felt like what I was doing wasn’t matching the on-screen action at all, as the motion sensor in the Wii Remote doesn’t allow the split-second accuracy of a button press. It feels almost like the motion control was shoe-horned into a game that was being built for standard controls, a distinction which should never be made with a Wii-exclusive title such as Judgment.

Thankfully, Konami opted to enable use of the Classic or Gamecube controllers with Castlevania Judgment, and I am happy to report that the game experience gets a lot better if you choose to do so. The attacks feel more responsive, the combos seem easier to pull off, and the block and evade system isn’t nearly as frustrating when using one of these controllers, making them the recommended way to play this brawler.

Regardless of which control method you choose, the in-game action of Judgment tends to be confusing and frustrating at times, mostly because of an inconsistent camera. Instead of being fixed at the side of the action like in most 3D fighting games, the viewpoint in Castlevania Judgment tries to provide dramatic angles of the action by constantly moving. This unfortunately leaves the player with a less than ideal view of the fight more often than not. The characters are allowed to run around the contained environments in full 3D, similar to fighting games such as Power Stone and action games like Devil May Cry, while the camera shifts position to try and provide a good view. The problem is that there are times when you will be in front of the enemy, but the camera is behind you foe’s back, making it almost impossible to aim your moves in the right direction and block the oncoming attacks. There have also been cases where the camera has left me unable to see some of the environmental hazards strewn about some of the levels, leading to me taking damage because of my inability to see. Matters are made worse when you realize that you can not move this camera manually in any of the control methods.

Before you get into an actual match, you will be initially amazed at the amount of available single player modes in Castlevania Judgment. This excitement will quickly wane when you realize that they are almost all slight variations of the same mode. You can choose from Story, Arcade, Castle, and Survival, but aside from unlocking a few new in-game items and characters there is no real purpose to beating any of these modes more than once. Castle mode is the most interesting of these, and has you going on mini-missions between regular fights. These missions can be anything from “collect 5 items” to “beat the character with a certain move,” and each level usually lasts about 3 minutes. Story mode features quick cutscenes before and after matches, and has you fighting 10 battles that fit in with your character’s story canon. Unfortunately, these cutscenes are all dialog-driven, feature robotic facial animation, and usually document uninteresting developments that feel fairly pointless in the end. There are also no endings to speak of in Story mode, leaving you little motivation to keep playing. Arcade is Story mode without the story, and Survival is an Arcade mode that continues infinitely until you die. All of the modes have you battling randomly chosen foes that get increasingly difficult as you move on, and none of the differences that each mode provides make it stand out enough from the rest. Castle mode is the only one that attempts to do anything interesting with its mission structure, but after a few rounds, the mission types start repeating and you will eventually lose interest.