Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc is one of the three bosses holding a key to the Catacombs gate in Castlevania: Belmont's Curse, and she is the one most hands-on accounts of the preview build named as the hardest. Konami's own character material introduces her as a French heroine who received a divine revelation and played a prominent role in the Hundred Years War. What the game does with her is darker than that summary suggests.

Reaching Her

The approach is a climb rather than a corridor. She waits on the burning roof of a tall prison tower, and the route up moves in and out of the structure several times: drawbridges are raised, doors are unlocked, and the path doubles back on itself. The tower is one of the districts given its own colour identity, in its case a bright yellow, which is the game's substitute for a waypoint. More on that on Exploration and Map Structure.

Whether the three key bosses have to be taken in a fixed order is not settled. One hands-on account describes deliberately going out of sequence and finding it harder but possible; others played straight through and assumed the order was fixed. Konami has not stated either way, so neither reading is recorded here as fact.

The Fight

Her encounter is a duel rather than a crowd fight, and it is built around a single large weapon and the ground state of the arena.

The flame columns are what make the fight a movement problem. Standing still on burning ground is not survivable, so the whip swing earned from The Fallen is the tool that keeps Rose off it. Details of how the swing behaves are on Whip and Traversal.

Her Story

In-game text explains how she ended up on that roof. Burning at the stake, she heard a voice offering her escape, and the game is explicit that it was not the voice of God. She accepted it. That places her with the rest of the roster as a victim of something rather than a villain in her own right, which is the pattern Konami's commentary material describes for the bosses generally: they are corrupted legends, and defeating one breaks the spell on it.

Rewards

She is the clearest documented case of this game paying out several things at once for a single boss. One hands-on account put the general rate at three or four new items per boss.

Holy Light matters well beyond her own fight. There is no parry at the start of the game, so beating her is what adds one, and it changes the shape of every encounter after that point. It also doubles as traversal: the same trigger lets Rose pass through surfaces that solidify as she approaches, and some puzzles require swinging through one and releasing at the right moment. Releasing late drops her into spikes. How the resulting card behaves is on Arcana System, and the parry itself is covered on Combat and Controls.

After the Fight

Sealing a boss into the tarot deck does not remove it from the story. Rose can talk to the ones she has absorbed, and what answers is the version of that character from before the corruption took hold, released by its own defeat. Of the three bosses anyone outside the team has fought, Joan of Arc is the most straightforwardly helpful as a companion. That is a contrast worth noting against Medusa, who stays hostile.

Voice Cast

Konami announced the English cast on August 24, 2026. Japanese performers are credited in kanji only on the game's Japanese character page, so no romanisation is given here. The full cast is on Characters, and the rest of the roster is on Bosses.