In a 2005 interview with the game's producer Koji Igarashi published in the official Konami strategy guide, he chose the theme of "revenge" for this game, because the Belmonts had been seen as the good guys up to that point, and he thought it would be nice to try something other than a moralistic "good triumphs over evil" theme sometime. Another reason why was that Castlevania still had "an excellent world for telling a "dark hero" story", with Alucard being an example of this even though he's still considered somewhat good since he is fighting for the just cause of stopping Dracula. For Castlevania: Curse of Darkness however, he wanted the motivation itself to be impure, so he came up with the theme of revenge, and then he thought it could be a lot more interesting if each side was out for revenge against each other.