First of all, thank you for spending so much time and effort thinking about such a nonsense topic. I agree with everything you said but it got me thinking even more.

Pirate movies are definitely more cost-prohibitive than Westerns, but I wonder if that also led into a feedback loop of keeping Westerns in the public consciousness. Since Westerns kept being made, it kept people thinking about Westerns, which kept the desire for more Westerns alive. I also think there’s an aspect of the Hays Code at play where you were able to make righteous characters in Westerns (those boring John Wayne movies I can’t sit through) yet you can’t really make a “righteous pirate” character. So pirates were always delegated to the role of “bad guys”, if they were present at all. There just wasn’t a demand for pirate movies to expand into supernatural elements.

And yet none of that explains the lack of supernatural pirate stories in literature (or video games) where your imagination is the main limiting factor. Even if we ignore movies, there are very few dark fantasy pirate stories prior to PotC. And I guess this just comes down to my own lack of awareness to, I guess I’ll say ‘the zeitgeist’ even though that makes me sound pretentious. In my mind, I lump together gunslingers, pirates, and hackers as “outlaws glorified for living by their own code”. And yet it seems one of them is drastically less popular than the others. I never really thought about how few people actually care about pirates. Weird West and Cyberpunk are both niche genre fiction, yet dark fantasy pirate stories don’t even have a label. That’s a weird realization for me.

The modern POTC series literally invented pirate dark fantasy film genre.

See, this is crazy to me. I can’t believe that the Weird West genre has been around since the 1950s and yet an equivalent “weird pirates” genre wasn’t created until 2003 by Disney! But I can’t think of a single work prior to that which fits the description. I know Weird West isn’t a huge genre, but I was able to come up with at least 50 posts for !weirdwest@lemmy.zip . It’s so weird for an equivalent pirate genre to have what, 5 entries? I feel like there must be more out there and I just can’t find them. This isn’t like, say, the creation of cyberpunk, which couldn’t really be created until after computers existed; pirates and zombie stories have been around for centuries and yet they were never brought together??

Sorry, I’m not disagreeing with anything you’re saying, I just wanted to go on a rant of disbelief. I made this post because I felt like I was missing something but you just confirmed I really wasn’t.

Exactly, One Piece and Peter Pan are perfect examples of “pirate fantasy” but are missing that lawless aspect which (in my opinion) drives the romantic view of pirates (and the Wild West). Or maybe not “lawlessness” but the “living by their own code” aspect of it.

It’s strange how dark/light fantasy shouldn’t have any impact on whether the lawlessness of pirates is glorified, yet it seems to work out that way.

Well now that’s interesting… I never really considered how well point & click adventure games would work on mobile devices. That’s a good idea.

For example, there’s a book series called Liveship Traders which I guess has pirates and magical living ships but it’s all “high fantasy”. At least, that’s my understanding (I haven’t read them). I’m also not looking for steampunk/airship pirates, which you could consider fantasy.

I guess I’m broadly looking for more “horror themed” fantasy elements, if that makes sense. I agree that most pirate settings would lean more towards horror elements, but it isn’t a guarantee. I mean, there’s a Tinkerbell movie called The Pirate Fairy. Not interested.

I guess I really missed out on the Monkey Island games, they seem to be getting mentioned here a lot.

Is it OK to start with Return or do I need to play the older games first?

Awesome, thank you! You’re right, that description sounds perfect!

Perfect, thank you! You’re right, “undead pirate” or “ghost pirate” is exactly the type of thing I’m looking for.

I’ve been aware of the Monkey Island games for awhile but I guess I never knew there were supernatural elements to it. And I’ve never played any of the Total War games so I guess I need to look into those too!

It’s weird how many times I proofread this post and still missed these typos. Also in the SotN section, I called it “Dracula III” rather than Castlevania Iii (Dracula’s Curse). Oops.

I don’t want to say it’s a bad game or shame you for liking it, but it’s just a bit too far of an outlier for me to really embrace in a meaningful way

It’s funny, after beating Lords of Shadow, I didn’t have an overly negative reaction to it. I thought it was a decent enough game, just a tad long for my liking. But then a couple years later I had an itch to replay it. So I tried watching a youtube video with all of the cutscenes strung together (a “Lords of Shadow movie”). And with each boss cutscene I thought to myself “oh man, that’s right, I hated that boss”. After that happened with basically every boss in the game I realized “hold on, I don’t think I liked this game at all…” and decided not to replay it. 😄

OP, you did not mention Vampire Survivors

That’s true, I stuck with the “official” Castlevania-named games. I didn’t mention any of the collabs. Because there’s a Vampire Survivors expansion, a Dead Cells expansion, and a V Rising expansion. While I love those games all got homages to the Castlevania franchise, they aren’t really “Castlevania” games to me and I don’t feel compelled to play them. Although I have actually played Vampire Survivors and Dead Cells…

Definitely. Each handheld game is unique and tries something new, but at that point you’re balancing the pros and cons of each distinct feature rather than saying “this is obviously the worst in the series” or “this is obviously the best in the series” since they all get the basics right. While I wouldn’t say “they’re all the same” since they each try something new, I also can’t provide any specifics that would inform a newcomer to “focus on this one” or “stay away from that one”. It’s just down to preference at that point. On the other hand, I can confidently say “you can skip the Game Boy games” and not feel bad about it.

Thanks, fixed it!

Thank you for highlighting those two. I know there are differences between all the handheld games but I’d already rambled on so much about the other games I didn’t want to start splitting hairs on the differences between a bunch of games that are all worth playing. Also, I legitimately can’t remember which one is which. So this really helps!