JJ Abrams' Star Trek was a fresh start - a parallel universe where 50 years' worth of continuity could be pushed aside in favour of a return to Kirk, Spock, and the classic Enterprise crew.
It was respectful, it was successful, it was necessary... and it's exactly what Spanish devs Mercury Steam are doing with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.
"Yeah, we wanted to do what JJ did with the Star Trek film and reintroduce the characters and the universe," says Lords of Shadow's producer Dave Cox.
"We wanted to take the eight-bit game as the template and boil it down to what Castlevania's really all about - a lone warrior battling supernatural creatures with a whip."
And so Lords of Shadow follows yet another Belmont, this time in a world yet to be touched by Dracula's umpteen resurrections. It's a world of whip-swinging combat, puzzles, and platforming, and it's the biggest pure action game in 360 history.
"On Xbox 360 it's on two DVDs; on PlayStation 3 it's on one Blu-Ray," says Cox. Castlevania isn't the first 360 game to ship on two discs, but Castlevania is the first to offer an install option on the in-game menu.
This isn't the typical 360 installation method or Forza 3's DLC-on-a-disc trick; it's a PC-style install where you'll install disc one and can then play the entire game from disc two. Mass Effect 2 chewed up two discs and a stack of Japanese RPGs have adopted a similar method, but Castlevania is a pure action game and it's not cut-scenes that are taking up that extra space - it's all game.
"Yeah, our cut-scenes are pretty short," says Cox. "The longest one is 14 minutes, which is the end sequence. It's not cut-scenes that are taking up the space; the game's around 24 hours long and every level's different."
"We have so much variety and we re-use very few assets. Microsoft actually sent their tech guys to the studio to look at the game and look at (how we're) compressing it, but they said 'okay, it's good, you're doing all you can'."
"I think it's something Microsoft are going to experience more and more - that they need to help developers overcome the storage problem. I mean, each console has its own issues," Cox continues, comparing the 360's smaller DVD storage medium to PS3's large storage with slower loading times. "But you have to work around them."
SMART AS A WHIP The Lords of Shadow have worked their magic and cast a spell preventing the dead from passing into the afterlife. Guided by the soul of his recently murdered wife, Robert Carlyle's Gabriel Belmont sets off after them with his Combat Cross whip and a scowl, and towards a confrontation that will inevitably involve driving a stake into the heart of the big man himself.
The game's E3 demo kicks off with a fight in a rain-soaked village, as Belmont and the villagers go to battle against a pack of werewolves, eventually driving the biggest of them onto a wooden stake.
From there Belmont takes off on horseback, fighting more werewolves along the way. It's a combat oriented demo built entirely for show-floor gratification, and shows off only one of Castlevania's three pillars.
"There's a big platforming element in the game that we're unfortunately not showing in the demo," says Cox.
"It's not really all that representative of the game because it's kind of boxed in, but you have to do that for a tutorial."
Castlevania's combat is more button-mashy than Bayonetta but less ham-fisted than God of War and isn't nearly enough to carry an entire game, but as the biggest action game on 360, there's way more to it.
"Outside the demo there's much more climbing, swinging across gaps using the combat cross, climbing up sides of buildings, rappelling down obstacles, jumping, platforming and that kind of thing," says Cox. "There's much more to the game than people might imagine.
"Later on in the game we allow the player to explore and we have areas where players can take different routes and find lots of secrets and things like that."
"We've also got our puzzle elements where you'll need to figure out how to reach a key or activate a complex lever."
Lords of Shadow's platforming is less Prince of Persia and more Super Castlevania IV. The SNES classic has been a powerful influence on every aspect of the new game and it's a title Cox returns to again and again:
"I'm a Castlevania fan. I grew up with Castlevania. Super Castlevania IV has been a big influence on the game and there are things that I wanted to bring back for this one. I wanted to go back to that classic kind of feeling where the room is turning around and you're swinging on the chandeliers - that kind of spectacle."
NICE AND THREESY The three elements come together in Castlevania's boss fights. Each one is a one-man war against a mountainous, screen filling colossi, as large as the biggest creatures in PS2 classic Shadow of the Colossus.
"It's where all the skills players have learned are put to the test," says Cox. "The bosses are these giant enemies you can climb on and have to work out how to take down. All those boss fights are in real time; no QTEs. All of those battles are real because we didn't want players to be taken out of the game."
As huge and as ambitious as Mercury Steam's new Castlevania is, it was a tough sell for Cox and the Spanish developer. Lords of Shadow was the second game Mercury Steam pitched to Konami, and their first project since Clive Barker's leather-clad masturbatory goth-'em-up Jericho.
Jericho had its kinky face kicked off its pervert head by just about every critic in the business, and Castlevania's half-dozen shots at 3D have reeked like the insides of Dracula's coffin - so Mercury Steam came to Castlevania with a real point to prove.
"They did this short demo with the tech, the castle and Simon Belmont and everything," says Cox.
"We showed it to the Japanese and it was really impressive, but there was this trepidation because it was so very different to the usual Japanese-centric approach."
Lords of Shadow was originally presented as an all-new IP without the Castlevania name; it wasn't until Hideo Kojima jumped on board that Mercury Steam's game became known as the next Castlevania.
HIGH STAKES So, exactly how much input does Kojima have? "He has been really more of a mentor if you like; watching from afar. He always says to me 'Dave, it's your call. You're the producer and you run with what you think is right.' But you have to take his advice seriously because this is my first big project, while he's been doing this for 25 years.
"When Mr Kojima came on board with us, he said, 'I want to help you guys. We're going to push this through.'"
"There's an awful lot of political stuff that goes on in a company like Konami. I think Mr Kojima became a guardian for the project. He was like the reassurance to the Japanese side that it was all going to be okay."
"I've known him since 1997 when I joined the company, and I've worked with him on Metal Gear games when I was product manager. We get on well and I think he just thought - 'you know, this guy's struggling and we've got to help him'."
"I think this really needed to be done," Cox says of the first ever western Castlevania game.
"I would talk to people and say 'do you like Castlevania?' And they were like, 'Castle what?' The management felt that the series had kind of lost its way a little bit; that it had been appealing to a smaller and smaller core fanbase with each release."
"In the days of the Super NES, Castlevania was a massive title - one of the biggest around - but over the years it kind of lost its place. Lords of Shadow is going to address that." And based on what we've seen so far, he might be right.
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