Oh, I think I linked to a Death Note image by error.... sorry about that... oh wait, it does say Castlevania Judgment.. weird...

A Castlevania fighting game? Inconceivable! But it’s true. And despite all low expectations, this is actually not too bad.

Though I’ve only rented it, I’ve played a substantial amount of time and went through most of the story modes(and a few “True” story modes),  lots of VS(tried all the characters) and a bit of Castle mode. Read on for more info and my impressions.

Graphics
For a Wii game, this looks great. The textures aren’t that good from too close up, but when you’re fighting it will look very nice. The environments are pretty varied, the character models are really good, the animations are pretty smooth. Overall this game looks very nice. If i had one thing to complain about, it would be Death. He looks awful. Or at least he doesn’t look like Death at all. Death isn’t Death without his badass cloak.
Otherwise, by Wii standards, this is a very nice looking game. It obviously won’t compare to most PS3/Xbox360 games, but for Wii I can’t fault the graphics much. 

Sound
I’m a junkie for Castlevania music. And this doesn’t disappoint. Taking music from the older games and giving us remixes/remade version is awesome, and in general they sound great. A Castlevania fan will definitely be all over the music in this game. 
Otherwise, the voice acting isn’t bad. Not overly good, but satisfying enough. Some of the voices are a bit emotionless, but overall the VAs do a good job.

Story
The story(or any semblance of it) is nothing to write home about. Each character has his own story, and it’s never really strong. They all start exactly the same way: Character goes somewhere, Aeon (a new character exclusive to this game) tells them they entered a time rift (whatever that is), then they fight other characters for seemingly no reason, and sometimes said characters come from other time periods. Some fights are predetermined, but others seem random. The stories are mostly just.. wacky and out of place. Maria’s story in particular is pretty stupid. She fights Shanoa because she’s hot (and she called her a little girl), she fights Sypha because she has big boobs, and she fights Carmilla because she has big boobs. Pretty ridiculous stuff.

After finishing all the story modes (except for Aeon, since you get his story later), you get the true story for each character, which is… exactly the same thing, except it adds a second battle against Aeon, and a boss battle against the Time Reaper, who is actually pretty hard to beat(pretty easy with Dracula though). There’s no real explanation as to who the Time Reaper is, what he does and why he wants to kill your character, but I guess that it’s besides the point……. yeah…

Overall, don’t get this game for the story, you’ll regret it. 

Gameplay
Fighting (NOTE: I ONLY PLAYED WITH GAMECUBE CONTROLLERS, BECAUSE I DIDN’T FEEL LIKE FLAILING MY ARMS AROUND FOR HOURS, SO I CAN’T COMMENT ON THE WII CONTROLS, ONLY GC CONTROLS)
Fighting here I would compare to Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm or Power Stone, but a bit simpler.
You move around freely in a 3D arena. To attack you either use subweapons or attacks. There are a few types of attacks: Normal attacks(B button), special attacks(A+B at the same time), Charged attacks (holding A until your character flashes a bit, and press B while still holding A), Block Breakers (L+B) and Ultimate Attacks (X).

Attacks change depending on if you’re pressing in a direction while pressing the button/button combination or not, so in the end there’s a good variety of attacks. Don’t expect to do huge combos here, but you can link various normal attacks to special attacks and such, so the combo system, while a bit limited, isn’t too bad. Like in all fighting games, there’s priorities on attacks and suck, but in the end it’s all pretty simple, making this a great pick up and play game.

Another interesting thing is the stages. In VS mode you have the choice to set on or off Stage Hazards. Each stage, except the throne room, have some kind of hazard. Not sure about the clock tower, but others can have monsters appearing, parts of the stage breaking, molten lava coming up at times, blades and spikes impaling you. This again adds lot of variety to the game, and if you don’t like it you can just turn it off.

Ultimate attacks (Finishers)
Now Ultimate attacks. These are actually a bit annoying. You have a bar at the bottom of the screen that fills up as you attack or get hit, and when it’s full you can use an ultimate attack. By pressing X, your character will launch his attack, and if it hits a cinematic starts with the character’s attack, and in the end it removes around 45% of the opponent’s life bar. These wouldn’t bother me much, but they last up to like 20 seconds, they can get pretty long, and watching them all the time gets tedious. And you can’t skip the animation. And they’re pretty overpowered too. Overall, I think they just needed ot be implemented better.

Subweapons
Ah, subweapons. A staple of the Castlevania series and they’re back here. Also comes destructible stuff that gives subweapons and hearts. In every stage, random boxes/candles/other stuff will appear that you can destroy and get hearts to use your subweapons, or other (randomly chosen) subweapons to replace your current one.

There’s a good variety of Subweapons. Most are ranged weapons, but some have other functions. Knifes go straight, axes move in an arc (not vertically), the cross works like a boomerang and can hit twice,  Holy Water stays on the ground a bit and hurts anything that touches it and finally the stopwatch. Other than the normal subweapons, there’s earth magic that makes spikes come out of the ground, bats that make opponents stagger, a gravity circle that hits everywhere around you, birds that pierce (i see little use to that though) and poisonous gas that does damage overtime. 

The subweapons add some good variety to battle, and each item has a super move which takes a few more hearts.

Modes
There’s a few modes here. Story is pretty much as explained before: randomly fight a bunch of people and… that’s it. The battle in the middle will be against one of two types of minions: Merman or Zombies, and after fighting a few of those you’ll either encounter a Minotaur or an Iron Gladiator, which are pretty much the same.
Arcade mode is pretty much the same, just a series of battles.

Then there’s the Castle mode, which is strangely reminiscent of Soul Calibur 2. You have a bunch of missions to get to the end of the Castle. Missions mostly ask you to beat your opponents, but sometimes they have boosted stats, or you have lowered stats, or you just have a certain condition to complete, like winning with an ultimate or landing an high number of hits in a combo, or doing a ring-out. This is a very fun mode, and it gets you accessories to change the look of your characters for their third and fourth costume.
Yeah, you can accessorize your characters to really make them look like you want to… or at least put on cool accessories on them, so your Maria can look different from your opponent’s. 

Added to those are Versus, tutorial and training modes. Overall there’s a bit of variety, mostly to be found in Castle mode.

Overall
This is really not a bad game. But it’s also not worth buying at full price. It’s nice to be able to play as all those Castlevania characters, the gameplay is good, if not a bit too simple. Don’t get this expecting a really deep fighting game, just something to pass the time. It’s not even really balanced(Dracula is broken).
Castlevania fans will probably like this, non-fans should at least check it out. And if you have Order of Ecclessia, you can get extra stuff in both this game and OoE by wirelessly connecting your DS to your Wii. 
My suggestion: RENT IT (or wait for a price drop)