[Johnny Undaunted]

Before Konami lended the Castlevania brand to MercurySteam for Lords of Shadow under Kojima's blessing, it seems that Koji Igarashi's team were working on an in-house developed Castlevania installment for the PS3 and Xbox 360, which was announced during the Tokyo Game Show in 2008, complete with a CGI teaser.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3u3oFjjiFo
http://www.famitsu.com/event/tgs/2008/1218817_1829.html

I'm guessing it was canceled so that Konami wouldn't had to fund two competing projects under the same brand, since Lords of Shadow was also announced in 2008 but as an original IP.

I haven't played Lords yet, but if the canceled IGAvania was going to be anything like Lament of Innocence (which I found to be a snorefest), I don't think we missed out on much.

[7HeroesForceBattle]

I imagine the game would have been closer to Curse of Darkness, although many things that were bad in Lament were also pretty poor in Curse (the main offender in both being the nearly lifeless level design). That raises the question of how IGA thought he could get away with a SOTN sequel where Alucard's wide rage of movement (super jump, form of bat, form of mist, etc) would be either nerfed or removed. Either he truly was unable to learn from his mistakes (which I don't fully believe) or he planned to produce a game dramatically different from his previous 3D efforts (which is a nice thought but basically moot at this point).

I remember reading a half-crazed fan theory that Igarashi had been trying to sneak a bigger series-wide story about time travel in the backdoor via seemingly minor aspects of the titles from Aria onward, with the theory concluding around something like this SOTN sequel being about a huge battle with Galamoth. I guess we'll never know.

Whether someone likes Lords of Shadow seems kind of a coinflip. Personally, I see a lot of good in the game (the aesthetic quality of the environment design is easily in the top five of the past decade of games), but it fumbles a lot of things and basically every statement the designers made about the game being 'true to Castlevania' was a load of absolute shit. It's a mash-up of Ubisoft Prince of Persia, God of War and most of the other successful third-person action games from the past two generations, and that isn't inherently a bad concept, but it very quite different from what they promoted the game as.