>worth watching
Eeeeeeeeaaagh.
It's a simple "let's go kill the bad guy" story from a video game franchise which only ever had the barest of plots, so this anime tries to compensate by adding in some OCs who consequently get most of the screen time and attention rather than the actual characters from the source material while REALLY overplaying the sympathetic villain angle, making the main characters feel more like tag-alongs if anything else. It screams of someone having to adapt a story not suited for anime without changing a lot of the established lore that they end up having to write around by letting the source material fall to the wayside.
While the OCs do manage to be the most interesting characters (by virtue of having the most fucking screentime), they ironically end up being the least relevant to the main plot so they can be kept alive for future seasons and hype up some villains for the next arc. Since they don't write Dracula up to be pure evil, they can hardly have him come back to Earth again and have him wreak havoc again like he always does in the games. Though the end result is that S2 feels unresolved.
The animation is mostly fine. It's just that when it gets QUALITY, it's a special kind of QUALITY, one which you simply don't see elsewhere in regular anime. It's as if instead of reducing the quality per frame they just remove the in-between frames, so the end result is that you get something even choppier than your usual 3DCG, which looks absolutely abhorrent. I like the English dub more than sub. This dub is actually good because they had proper voice direction for this one since it's an actual Western production. The Japanese dubs almost feel clichéd in its casting and stereotypical performances for each character archetype.
Even from a fanservice standpoint it's just blegh. It's an adaptation from Castlevania III but Grant is nowhere to be seen. Most of the demons have fairly generic designs, but almost none are used from CV's bestiary. Death as Dracula's right hand man is no longer a thing either. There's like one scene which involves some platforming around giant clocktower gears, but most of the more traditional Castlevania settings are absent. The entire soundtrack is generic cinematic crap save for one remix of Bloody Tears playing at an opportune moment, though by now Bloody Tears is so much of an overplayed and overremixed song from a franchise with huge amounts of great songs waiting to be remixed, that hearing Bloody Tears AGAIN feels like someone trying to reference Castlevania in the basest way possible.
Castlevania is a highly traditional and self-referential franchise. Practically every game arranges some songs of previous games, the gameplay largely stays the same (the Classicvanias anyways), the classic subweapons are always present in some capacity, and you always fight Dracula at the end, who always has a second phase where he transforms into a giant monster. You always play some buff dude with a whip, you fight classic horror movie monsters, and there's always fresh turkey in the walls. That the anime doesn't pay some kind of lip service to these traditions in a series where tradition is woven in its DNA just makes it feel less like Castlevania.
It's also got some incredibly out of place crude juvenile horror which doesn't gel with the setting or tone of the franchise at all. It's just jarring. People will say this anime also really tips its fedora hard, and while it does shit on corrupt clergy, I think it's more aimed at shitting on religious fundamentalism rather than Christianity itself, even if that wasn't the writers actual intent. Like the writer probably hates Christianity, but doesn't realize he does so because he just hates the Church, not necessarily because of the idea of faith.
It's whatever. It's got some cool fight scenes and nice backgrounds and some neat ideas, it's not particularly offensively bad, but it's whatever.