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The Castlevania story
is among the most intriguing in the medium's history due to the its heavy
emphasis on historical themes inspired from real events, literary fiction,
mythology, and its many creators' ever-evolving visions. Along the way,
as the lineage expanded, its storyline began unraveling at the seams,
becoming disjointed and generally losing all sense of cohesion; because
Konami's many different teams and divisions have swapped control of the
license and have tinkered with the storyline as they so please, with sometimes
total disregard for past contributions, incoherence has since become the
rule. We were presented an overarching narrative that stated, "Dracula
rises but once every 100 years," but this has turned out to be a
very loose guideline and is conveniently retconned whenever someone so
bold wants to sneak in an early rising. That is, the existence of certain
infringing titles (like Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, Castlevania:
Circle of the Moon, Castlevania 64, etc.) has created a big
mess.
While Konami recently supplied
a fairly functional timeline, as crafted by former director Koji Igarashi
and his team, it still never bothered to fully explain how everything
fits together or why they've held to the original narrative despite Dracula's
frequent resurrections. The only conclusion we can draw is that
Count Dracula can return to this world whenever evil forces so beckon
him, but he can only reach full power by slumbering for a required 100
years (from this we can improvise, or use as a built-in excuse, that the
Count was so easy to defeat in title like Simon's Quest and Harmony
of Dissonance because he lacked for a satisfactory rest-period). To
the rescue is this, my story page, where I do my best to plug the
seams and make sense of it all. You can read through the story in natural
progression by clicking on the teaser links found on each page's bottom,
or you can zip to a desired chapter by selecting its marking on the illustrated
timeline. Those that have no true connection to the series proper, be
they "side stories" or "tales of gaiden," can be accessed
via the markers below the main timeline; it's there where the respective
interlopers are chronicled and subjected to examination.
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