... moment where Richter has his epiphany and Divine Bloodlines starts playing...

... I was delighted to see Alucard show up at the end in the cliffhanger before we get more episodes! That got a fangirl "Squee!" out of me - as noted above, he's my favourite Castlevania character.

I was already very disappointed with S4 of the last show because how badly they handled Council of Sisters and whole Styria story. So I didn't expect much from the spin off either. But what I didn't like in particular is just how cringe and one dimensional villains are. Previous show had villains with complex motivations and personalities (not counting Death and some like Ratko in S4, they were also bad).

Erzsebet here with her "everyone will kneel before me" feels boring and bland. Her plan to plunge the world into darkness makes no sense either. Why would vampires benefit from new ice age? Everyone will be starving, even vampires in result. And even more interesting ones like Drolta feel simply too evil and don't even get any development besides being killed off (and not even in some epic battle but just in an inglorious sneak attack).

Basically, too much "humans - good, vampires - bad" there for me. Previous show (before S4 ruined it) was much better in showing that humans and vampires aren't better than one another and delivered that "who is the real monster" theme well.

Here, they literally have a complex and bloody historic period of French revolution, and it's not even used in an interesting way. Yeah, they show some execution and Abbot makes a passing point about revolution being an abomination, but it's very minor versus their general attempt to portray revolutionaries as "good guys". And that's especially for the region where revolutionaries massacred people to suppress a revolt in a bloody and cruel fashion.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vend%C3%A9e
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infernal_columns

I get that their world isn't really historic, but they picked a specific location and time period borrowing some historic details, so they at least could avoid this heavy handed "humans - good, vampires - bad" especially projected to "revolutionaries - good" in that context, and instead could show how any of them could be monsters, but not all of them are. I.e. like show some vampires who want more peaceful coexistence with humans, show how Jacobins can be murderous villains without any need for vampires and so on.

In short, S1-S3 of the previous show reminded me The Witcher in their story complexity and often moral ambiguity of characters and their choices. S4 in contrast was very disappointing and spin off reminds S4 in its problems and didn't bring back that feeling that S1-S3 of the previous show had.

I did read about games themes though, and if anything the show was an improvement in initially giving vampires free will, which is what I mentioned above was the idea that vampires and humans aren't better than each other.

S1-S3 stressed how idea of hating or seeing other side as completely monstrous / having no innocents is wrong and evil in itself, which equally applies to vampires hating humans and to humans hating vampires.

I quite liked that. But then S4 (and Nocturne too) leaned heavily into portraying humans as redeemable and having free will and pushing on vampires the idea of being doomed and lacking it. That was a major part of what I disliked.