I enjoyed playing Lament of Innocence, it had an amazing OST but it did establish something I wasn't too comfortable with. Before Lament, the whip was described by some manuals as a holy weapon which would make sense why it destroyed vampires. Lament made the whip into a magical creation of alchemy holding the soul of a vampire that trusted the first Belmont (I'm not sure why she trusts the succeeding Belmonts) and has emnity with it's own kind.
While it did make everything fit, why only Belmonts could use it which led to the drama behind Portrait of Ruin, it broke the narrative of the whip being a holy weapon. Because it's a creation of magic holding a vampire's soul, it sounds more like an
unholy weapon because holy means something consecrated to God, or blessed and sanctified by Him and the whip now sounds like the opposite. And if Leon was catholic, I wonder if it occurred to him that by implanting Sarah's soul in the whip, he would be depriving Sarah of Heaven and her eternal rest. In any case, the implication here is that they had to resort to using possibly dark magic instead of holy powers to destroy a vampire.
Beyond the classicvanias, there were other things Iga added that I wasn't comfortable with either. It took 1 or 2 Shinto priests to imprison the WHOLE castle into an eclipse. In other words, they did something Christians or western powers couldn't do. Was there some kind of hidden religious statement Iga hid there that Shinto was superior to Christianity? Or Japanese culture was superior supernaturally?
My Catholic sensibilities were one of the things that made me like Castlevania. Inside Dracula's castle, a vampire hunter seeks to destroy Dracula, carrying a holy whip along with holy sacramentals, a cross and holy water as well as a silver knife, axe...and a stopwatch that um...stopped time. (Well, I'll just pretend it's a holy relic of St. Tempus or some other pretend saint since they never said where it came from...

). In any case, the original idea was appealing. But Iga added some things which disrupted that.