Bosses are the spine of Castlevania: Belmont's Curse. Each one Rose defeats is sealed into a tarot card and becomes an Arcana, which is how she gains spells and traversal abilities. Konami's commentary material calls them corrupted legends, and the story treats most of them as victims rather than villains: defeating one breaks the spell on it.
Konami has named six bosses and adds that more appear, alongside Count Dracula himself. A total of fifteen bosses in the base game has come out of preview coverage and has not been confirmed by Konami, so the remaining slots are unknown. No names for them exist, and the roster of any earlier game in the series is not a guide to this one.
Named Bosses
Boss | Status | Description |
|---|---|---|
Fought in the preview build | A mysterious monster terrorising the people of Paris, and the first threat Rose meets in the sewers. | |
Joan of Arc | Fought in the preview build | A French heroine who received a divine revelation and played a prominent role in the Hundred Years War. |
Medusa | Fought in the preview build | A monster with the body of a giant serpent, whose gaze has turned countless people to stone. |
Isaac | Named, not yet seen | A devil forgemaster who creates and commands demons, with a history with Trevor going back twenty years. |
Carmilla | Named, not yet seen | A renowned vampire awaiting Rose in Dracula's Castle, in a bloodstained dress. |
Death | Named, not yet seen | Dracula's right-hand man, whose soul-reaping scythe can slice through space itself. |
Count Dracula | Named, not yet seen | The immortal vampire king, defeated by Trevor twenty-three years earlier and on the verge of returning. |
The Opening Three
The first stretch of the game gates the Catacombs behind a single large door that needs three keys, and each key sits with a boss. Preview accounts of the same build encountered them as The Fallen, then Joan of Arc, then Medusa. Whether that order is enforced is not settled: one hands-on account describes deliberately taking them out of sequence and finding it harder but possible, while others assumed the order was fixed after playing straight through. Konami has not stated either way.
The Fallen
A hulking figure with metal claws, fought in the sewers. He leaps, throws a boomerang Holy Cross and lands a whip attack that reaches most of the screen. His health pool is large and his attacks are well telegraphed. Preview accounts describe cutting the thrown cross out of the air as the trigger for a second phase, in which he grabs Rose with a far-reaching whip and swings between the walls. He is the only named boss whose true identity the game withholds. Full detail is on his own page.
Joan of Arc
Fought on the burning roof of a tall prison tower. Reaching her is a climb rather than a corridor: drawbridges are raised, doors are unlocked, and the route moves in and out of the structure several times. The fight itself is a duel. She stabs, slices and swings a huge broadsword, and her hits kick fireballs into the air that erupt as columns of flame once enough of them have spread. The whip swing is needed to stay off the burning ground. Several previewers found her the hardest of the three.
In-game text describes how she came to be there: burning at the stake, she heard a voice offering escape, explicitly not the voice of God, and accepted. Beating her grants three separate rewards, the Infernal Pyre spell, the Holy Light ability and the Burnt Sword of Fierbois, and afterwards she is the most straightforwardly helpful of the absorbed bosses.
Medusa
Reached beneath a cemetery: down a hole under a tree, past a giant fountain, into ancient Roman baths filled with Medusa Heads. The fight is large and multi-stage. She swipes with clawed arms and a thrashing tail, fires lasers from the snakes of her hair, and has a near instant-kill death ray that covers the screen. Her signature move is a petrifying gaze, and the counter is to turn Rose's back on it rather than to dodge. She is referred to as the prophetess and claims to see the future.
She drops a petrification Arcana and a sword and shield described as the kind Perseus would have carried. Uniquely among the absorbed bosses she stays hostile afterwards and wants Rose to fail.
Named but Not Yet Seen
Isaac, Carmilla and Death appear only in Konami's character material. No previewer reached any of them, so no fight detail exists. Carmilla is stated to wait in Dracula's Castle, which does not exist on the map at the start of the game and rises during the story. One preview account describes Death as the one engineering Dracula's return, which Konami has not stated; treat it as unconfirmed.
Speculation circulating about which of these bosses occupies which area, or about who resurrected whom, has no source behind it and is not recorded here.
Boss Rewards
Beating a boss pays out more than one thing. One hands-on account put it as three or four new items per boss, and Joan of Arc is the clearest documented case with a spell, an ability and a weapon at once.
Boss | Confirmed rewards |
|---|---|
The Holy Cross Arcana, the whip ability, and a key to the Catacombs gate | |
Joan of Arc | The Infernal Pyre spell, the Holy Light ability, and the Burnt Sword of Fierbois |
Medusa | A petrifying gaze Arcana, and a sword and shield |
Sealed bosses do not disappear from the story. They become voices Rose can speak with, and what she hears is the version of them from before they were corrupted, freed by their own defeat. Their personalities differ and they have their own agendas. How the resulting cards work is covered on the Arcana System page.