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Alastor replays and ranks all the Igavanias (Mission complete!)


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4 minutes ago, Rapier said:

I find leveling up to be more effective than these items, although they are useful.

It's not a question of which makes you stronger, it's more that now your stat boosts are tied to exploration and what resources you've progressed enough to have access to, rather than the mere act of playing the game continuously "rewarding" you with an easier time. It makes it similar to Hollow Knight's system of exploring for powerups and earning them, though this way is a good bit grindier, which obviously isn't ideal.

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Yeah, I really liked how Hollow Knight handled this too, although it isn't optimal. Some pins were too expensive and I spent most of my points in pins that enhanced my platforming ability than anything that made me directly stronger. They have very specific builds and that's it.

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1 minute ago, Rapier said:

Yeah, I really liked how Hollow Knight handled this too, although it isn't optimal. Some pins were too expensive and I spent most of my points in pins that enhanced my platforming ability than anything that made me directly stronger. They have very specific builds and that's it.

We all tend to have our favorite setups.

Also, since I beat the game, the embargo on open discussion of Bloodstained is lifted.

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...

Bucka up, Buckleroos. This is a long one.

 

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Alright. Here it is. The last one. The culmination of a 22 year legacy, 4 years in the making, and 10 years overdue. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. The Castlevania game in everything but name. The giant, crowdfunded middle finger to Konami and everything it stands for. And now comes the big question: is that giant, crowdfunded obscene statue made out of gold... or something else?

I tried my damnedest, with surprising success, to avoid learning anything of substance about the content of this game until I played it myself. And after waiting for the release, waiting for the Switch version, and then waiting for my new computer so that I could play the PC version because the Switch version turned out to be glitchy trash... here I am, having played through the game, ready to judge it, its place in the grand hierarchy of Igavania titles... and maybe talk a bit about something else of dire importance to the series' future.

Let's get started. And while I dance around a few of the bigger twists, beware of spoilers.

 

Overview

I wasn't sure what to expect of Bloodstained, but I can sure as hell tell you what I was hoping for from seeing the promotional materials before my self-imposed media blackout on it. Judging by Miriam's obviously-taken cues from Shanoa, I was hoping for a game that took the formula of Order of Ecclesia and all the myriad improvements I gushed about in my review of that game, and brought it into a more traditional castle exploration format similar to the games that came before it.

That is... not what I got. Almost none of those refinements to the formula made it into this game. Not the abolition of using a regenerating resource for special attacks, not the vast expansion of basic attacks to include magic, and not the drastically reduced emphasis on grind. While it's obvious that Bloodstained is an all-star lineup of the most popular mechanics from most games in the series, the clear star of the show here could not more blatantly be Symphony of the Night. The one that started the show, and the one whose core mechanics, you may remember, I did not particularly care for. Most important among these being the wide-open world with no particular defined path, focusing on freedom of exploration over a tight difficulty curve.

Thankfully, Bloodstained does at least achieve that goal. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind that Bloodstained is better than Symphony. There is no question which game I would rather be locked in my house with until I finish it. It has better combat, better weapons, better magic, better difficulty, more features, and a comparable amount of space to explore without making the second half a worthless upside-down repeat of the first. This game is definitely going above Symphony of the Night on the list, I will leave you in no further suspense about that question, and it addresses many of the complaints I had about that game. But as for how it goes for the rest of the list, that is extremely difficult to work out, because, like Symphony, it's so difficult to compare to the others due to being so different and the strengths and weaknesses being so disparate and hard to compare one-to-one. But unlike Symphony, this game also has a lot of baggage that none of the other games have due to the circumstances of its creation.

This is going to be a messy one, and even as I write this, I don't know what its place on the list is going to be. Let's get right into it and see if I can sort things out.

 

The Good

Spoiler

 

Most of the praise I have for this game stems from the fact that it took full advantage of being the first Igavania in 22 years to be on a console. This game is huge. My first playthrough was more than 20 hours, start to finish, counting all the times I died, and nearly all of that was spent exploring new places and doing new things, because I pretty much never hit roadblocks beyond getting stuck on a handful of difficult bosses.

Everything's bigger in this game, most notably the control scheme. This is the first game in the series to make full use of a twin-stick controller, which, interestingly, I would not have had in a PC-compatible form if I hadn't sprung for the Switch pro controller in anticipation of playing Bloodstained on Switch. So I guess that purchase turned out to not be a waste after all!

The main innovation to the control scheme that ensues from this is one of the two new additions to the shard system, this game's version of the soul system from Aria and Dawn of Sorrow. The standard three return: Bullet, Guardian and Enchant (here renamed Conjure, Familiar and Passive respectively, and it should be noted that conjure is now its own button rather than pressing up and attack). But they are accompanied by two more, the first of which is the one I alluded to: the Directional shards. These can actually be aimed using the right stick before firing with the right trigger, and they turned out to be my favorite ones to use (well, one specific directional shard in particular, but more on that later). The other one is only technically new. It's new to the soul system, but not to Castlevania, as it's basically the same as a feature in SotN. They're called Familiar shards, and they essentially allow a demon ally to follow you around constantly without MP cost, capable of leveling up as they travel with you.

This also takes the concept of quest items and materials from Order of Ecclesia and cranks it up to an insane degree, introducing a massive crafting system of equipment, items, food, and even shards you can create to fight the monstrous horde. I liked this system in general throughout the course of my first playthrough. I certainly enjoyed it better than the shops of games past that only Symphony and Ecclesia managed to do right. I much prefer the less-grindy system of finding all your weapons by exploring the castle, but at least here you get plenty of supplies to make stuff without getting stuck in one continuous chain like in Dawn of Sorrow. You don't need to make the third katana if you have the materials to make the fifth one, for example.

Incidentally, this game has a shop too, but you barely need to buy anything from it since most of its stock is gained by crafting things for the first time. I mostly used it to buy this game's version of the magic ticket, cooking supplies, and like one weapon in the midgame.

But on that note, I wanna talk about cooking. Basically, there's a whole bunch of foods you can make using foodstuffs you buy from the store, find in chests, and harvest from the freshly-slain corpses of your enemies. And every time you eat a specific dish for the first time, it'll give you a permanent stat boost. Not just to things like HP, MP, Strength and Intelligence, but also to things that leveling up usually can't even boost, like exp growth and mp regen rate. I cannot tell you how much I adore this system in theory. Something like it could have, and I would argue should have, replaced leveling up as the method by which you get stronger. Because it's a method of growth that scales with the amount of the castle you've explored but doesn't continuously grow indefinitely just by the mere act of playing the game. You are as strong as the range of ingredients you have access to, and no amount of screwing around in the starter area will make you any stronger than what you can find there will make you.

I really don't think the concept of experience and leveling really works in metroidvanias, or in most games, really. It works best when the game has a method of controlling how much experience you have access to and it becomes a task of managing how much you get and what you do with it, like in Fire Emblem. In RPGs and the metroidvanias that have a leveling system but an infinite amount of opportunities to get it, all it really amounts to is a system that makes the game easier just from the mere act of playing it, which I always found annoying. It's like I'm being punished for trying to enjoy too much of the game's world. I hated feeling pressured to skip all the sidequests in Octopath Traveler, even while reducing the random encounter rate, just to stay weak enough to keep feeling challenged by the main story bosses. I much prefer my open-world exploration metroidvanias when you get stronger by collecting things through challenges and exploring new areas, rather than just the mere act of playing.

And, as it turns out, there is a level 1 max mode, it's just locked to the hardest difficulty. So I did get the chance to test it out and see how it works in that capacity, but more on that later.

One other thing about Symphony that I think Bloodstained really improved on, at least in my experience, was pacing. I never ran out of places to explore. I never got stuck or lost on how to proceed. While I've heard testimony that I got lucky with the water jet shard and that it's not a guaranteed drop, and that thus some people took a while to figure out they needed a random drop from a specific monster to proceed, that never happened with me. Closest I ever came to getting lost was the fact that it took me ages to figure out that the giant hand power could be used on those iron maidens. It took me until my attempt to get into the oriental sorcery lab to realize that there wasn't a special powerup specifically designed to let you get past that. All in all, it was an uninterrupted adventure through the castle from beginning to end.

Also, this was easily one of the hardest Igavanias, even on normal mode. It blatantly improved on the mess that was Symphony of the Night's difficulty, both by actually having difficulty settings, but also by being far more reasonable with boss and enemy design. Some bosses were still pretty damned brutal, with some attacks being extremely demanding on the reflexes while still having one or two Ecclesia-esque “how the fuck do I dodge this” puzzles, but in this game, unlike Symphony of the Night, when a boss rips your heart out and pisses on it in front of you, it doesn't then proceed to let you win anyway and make you feel like a big angry loser who only won thanks to stats and gear. When you don't know how to handle a boss's attacks in this game, you lose. It won't let you win until you've earned it, and it doesn't leave you guessing whether or not that fight was even fair, because it makes you figure it out for yourself.

...That isn't to say there weren't some fights I managed to cheese by simply unloading a full magazine of MP into their asses before they could get off too many attacks, especially when they were bosses I could have fought a while ago. Like I said, this is a natural weakness of combining an XP system with open exploration, and yes, the game suffers for it just like Symphony did. But the best of the bosses in this game really stand out. Even on normal mode, they're up there with some of the best bosses in Ecclesia, just with a little less puzzle and a bit more twitch to them. In fact the first phase of the final boss scratches basically every itch (except thematic) that the Soma vs. Julius boss fight in Aria of Sorrow scratched. That same battle against a very human opponent with a variety of attacks and mobility powers (and they even use a whip), and also the fact that it's a boss fight you can actually make use of the speed boost power in and it feels totally natural and intense when you do. It might be new competition for my favorite boss fight in the whole Igavania canon. And just in general, I don't think any game in the entire series before now has tested my mastery of the short-hop land-cancel style of attacking as much as this game has. These bosses do not hold still, and attacking conventionally on the ground with just about any weapon is a recipe for suicide given how quickly some bosses can attack you. This is a game that knows how people played the old ones, and provides tools that suit it.

The two main weapons I found myself using this time were, hands down, the katana and whip. Both of these are the best suited, by far, to the short hop, having really tall vertical hitboxes, land-canceling, and attacks that come out fairly quickly. The whip is quite a different animal here than it was in the hands of the Belmonts and Morrisses. Rather than lashing it forward to its full, terrifying length, Miriam instead wields it like a lion tamer, lashing it into the ground in front of and below her. While this gives it probably the worst range of any whip since Julius's, and it has a rather nasty gaping hole in the middle of its hitbox that can cause it to miss small flying enemies entirely if you aren't careful, it's land cancelable now, and this new downward-pointing trajectory means that even when short-hopping, Miriam can still reach the ground to attack those nasty, quick-moving, not-dying-in-one-hit monkeys and frogs that constantly menace her toes. The katana, meanwhile, comes out slightly quicker and is thus a little easier to short-hop with, has a better vertical reach, has a hitbox without a hole in it, and does slashing damage where the whip does impact damage. And for the record, I loved switching between them with the new shortcut system. Brilliant. Not just the choice to expand it to up to eight loadouts instead of two or three, not just the ability to choose what the loadout even changes, letting you leave some things alone and change as many or few of your shards and equipment as you please, but the choice to make selecting your loadout pause the game. This was way more comfortable to use than doppelganger or gylph sleeves ever were.

Other miscellaneous good things:

1: Finally, fucking finally, after 22 goddamned years, these obviously European characters are speaking with actual European accents! In this case British since that's where it's taking place. I didn't fully grasp how weird this convention had been until I saw this game do it the right way. I love it. The voice acting's pretty great overall too.

2: I can't even begin to hope to explain this properly, but I love the save rooms. The fact that there's a big comfy couch you sit on to save is just fitting and adorable. I like how it feels like the first save room in the series it would be comfortable to take a break in, unless you count the fact that Alucard's probably right at home in his save room's coffin.

3: Some of Miriam's interactions with NPCs were amusing. Some standouts were the coachman's “giant hand” line, which made me chuckle, and her interactions with barber scissorhands. Not quite as good as Order of Ecclesia's dialogue, but it definitely had more stand-out moments than most other games in the series.

4: The map system is a definite improvement over previous games. Not only can you place markers with B (though it doesn't explain this), but it also lets you know where chests are, so you never forget that you can still do things in a room just because you happened to see a chest you can't reach.

5: The huge glasses that actually zoom in the screen were a cute gimmick.

6: The vampire librarian has a hole under his seat leading into the room below. That's a really cute callback to the librarian from SotN, even if I have no godly idea what the point of it was there either.

7: The big train ride was a pretty fun time, start to finish. Had a blast.

8: The lyrics of the song the fairy familiar sings when you sit at the piano with her are actually competently written! No cramming words where they didn't rhythmically belong! And the singer was pretty good too! Good on you, game!

...So, this is probably sounding like pretty high praise, right? Well, it is. But unfortunately...

 

 

The Bad

Spoiler

 

Now, two of the most glaringly obvious issues this game's presentation has owes to the fact that this is Bloodstained the crowdfunded project, not Castlevania the Konami-funded project. Granted, it's become apparent that the Konami that would have made this game is long, long gone, and I'm speaking of a hypothetical game that could not possibly exist until and unless several key people working in Konami... stop... working... at Konami... but the game still suffers greatly in terms of aesthetics and integrity both from abandoning the Castlevania IP and from being a crowdfunded game.

Let's start with the fact that it's not Castlevania anymore. The new art style and monster design aren't really a problem, though I initially thought they were. I took issue with them at first, but I think that was just difficulty getting used to the weird new paradigm of this not being Castlevania anymore, and not a sign that the new designs they came up with were bad in and of themselves. By the end of the game I had adjusted and think the monster designs and general aesthetic are fine. My issue is more with the game's new lore.

It's not bad, exactly, as a stand-alone thing. A bunch of alchemists lashed out at the world in fear of an age of science making them irrelevant, created a bunch of magical super-soldiers with crystals in their bodies that let them use the powers of demons, then used them as a human sacrifice to open the gates of hell. Only two of these “shardbinders” survived, and now one of them has seized the book the alchemists used to open said gates and is threatening to destroy humanity, while the other takes on the task of stopping him and saving the world. It's not fantastic as far as stories go, but Castlevania games were never really known for having really deep stories on the whole. But what they did have was a lore fertile with fun and compelling excuse plots and sequel hooks. And this... does not have that. At all.

My main issue is that there's nowhere to go from here. What exactly is the sequel going to be like? The Dracula stand-in is dead, the Death stand-in is dead, the Belmont stand-in is dead, the literal king of demons is dead, the castle is destroyed, the book the villains used to summon the demons and the castle in the first place is securely in the hands of people with no desire to allow it to continue to exist, and we know of nobody left alive with the desire and ability to use it for evil. The section of the alchemist's guild that started this whole mess is pretty much extinct now, as are the super-soldiers they created, save for our solitary heroine.

They didn't exactly make a sequel impossible, but they didn't leave any openings for any kind of narrative remotely similar to the original Castlevania. No generation-spanning battles against an undying and ancient evil, and not even a hint that there might be anything more dangerous than the king of demons Miriam wiped the floor with to menace mankind later. What did they leave themselves to work with? What reason is there, in fact, for the sequel to take place in this same universe at all?

I personally can't find any. And I also can't think of any questions I have about the universe that I'm remotely interested in seeing answered. It feels like Koji Igarashi wanted to create a world that would allow for one Castlevania-like plot, but didn't think about whether or not it would allow for any more than that. But it's like I said before: there's no real need to keep going in this setting. It's not like he took an existing rich and fertile lore, beloved by millions and ripe with possibilities, and burned it to the ground by swinging at plot hooks with an executioner's axe. He can just try again and make an entirely new continuity to place the next Bloodstained in, like Fire Emblem does every game or two. Hell, he could even make that second attempt ripe with the kinds of possibilities this first one should have had, and move forward from there as if the first never happened, though in hindsight that would make this game a little weird lore-wise unless they tied the events of this game in as a significant catalyst in some way, recontextualizing it as a prequel. But my point is that this isn't exactly the biggest issue. It's just a bit of an inconvenience I'm curious to see how he handles.

The larger problem stemming from the nature of Bloodstained is that it's a crowdfunded project, and a lot of the backer rewards just... do not gel with the aesthetic the game was going for. It didn't occur to me until I played it for myself, but when I actually saw in action those backer rewards I remembered reading through from the kickstarter... I kind of cringed.

The castle, namely the first few areas, is littered with fancy-looking portraits, but after I saw the fourth or so one, with this guy wearing a cheap Dracula Halloween costume complete with obviously-plastic fangs, I realized that these were photos of the backers dolled up to look like paintings. And to their credit, quite a few of these generous backers put some real effort into looking like they belonged on the wall of a fancy demonic castle. Others, however... did not. And they stick out like sore thumbs and really break the aesthetic of the game. As, to a lesser extent, do the giant disembodied puppy head enemies (and I'm guessing, but cannot confirm, the giant cat demons that basically look like somebody took a regular cat and put demon horns and wings on them) that represent the “unleash the hounds of hell” tier reward where people got to put their pets in the game as enemies. And of course their models are extremely big so that the backers who made them can appreciate every last detail of their pets being brought to life in that game, but that just serves to even further highlight the fact that these aren't demonic monsters, these are just house pets stuffed into some of those goofy Halloween costumes that you know they're trying to get off of themselves the second their owners aren't looking. And hey, good on these people for contributing like 3 thousand dollars each to the project to make this happen. But those things just do not belong in a game with this sort of aesthetic. These two backer rewards combined add a rather goofy, campy, tongue-in-cheek feel to the whole affair that really bothered me for the first half of the game. Thankfully by the end these things stopped being as prevalent and the full natural art style of the game managed to re-assert itself, but man... that was a very clumsy implementation of backer rewards, and it definitely tainted the game's first impression.

But unfortunately, those two issues aren't where the issues with the aesthetics of the game end. There is something much, much worse about the game's general presentation that I cannot ignore. I was deeply crushed to discover this after my long history of loving this aspect of the Castlevania games, but I'm sorry to report that this game has the worst soundtrack of the entire Igavania series. And I am half-comfortable including Harmony of Dissonance when I say that.

There is not a single Castlevania game in the entire series where I haven't at one point gotten bored with something and thought “I'll look up [some music from X game] and listen to it for fun.”

I've listened to Castle Dracula, Crystal Teardrops, and The Tragic Prince from Symphony of the Night.

I've listened to Awake and a few of the assorted old-school remixes from Circle of the Moon.

I've listened to Clock Tower, Heart of Fire and Top Floor from Aria of Sorrow.

I've listened to Scarlet Battle Soul, Bloody Tears, and Into the Dark Night from Dawn of Sorrow.

I've listened to Invitation of a Crazed Moon, Dance of Sadness, and (though it's not in the game itself), the Simon's Theme remix from Portrait of Ruin.

I can listen to pretty much the entire damned soundtrack of Order of Ecclesia consecutively without boredom or complaint, but the highlights are Empty Tome, Ebony Wings, Tower of Dolls, Sorrow's Distortion, Lament to the Master, and Order of the Demon.

Hell, once or twice I've even had a hankering to listen to Successor of Fate from Harmony of Fucking Dissonance.

But I have not once, ever, in the entire time since I've gotten this game, felt an urge to listen to a single one of Bloodstained's forty-plus musical tracks for fun.

They all bore me.

To tears.

The closest one to being any good is the first area theme, Voyage of Promise. But it's hampered by the same thing that plagues the entire soundtrack: none of the people playing any of the instruments have any passion or intensity to them. It certainly sounds like it could be in a Castlevania game, but it feels like this is a cover of it done by an orchestra that doesn't really give a shit about capturing the urgency or intensity of the original piece, like that godawful orchestral cover of Bombing Mission Square Enix released years ago that had no punch to that famous piano baseline, or basically the entirety of the Fire Emblem 25th anniversary concert. And to confirm that the performance was indeed the problem, I checked out multiple covers of the song. Every single one of them had more passion and heart to it than the original song. The original's drumbeats are too subdued, quiet and lifeless, the instruments aren't on enough fire, and nobody seems to understand they're performing a song meant to play while a badass magical woman is fighting for her life against hideous monsters on a giant storm-rocked ship.

This problem pervades the whole soundtrack, unfortunately, and this results in the sad fact that the best-sounding and least awkward tracks in the game are the more relaxed and mellow ones like Dominique's shop theme or the title screen music, because at least then the lack of intensity is intentional and more fitting. But alas, even they aren't really my thing. And even when they break out the full heavy metal for the most-commonly-used boss theme, the guitars sound muffled, like they're coming from another room, even when I listen to the soundtrack with headphones. My disappointment with the soundtrack in this game is immeasurable, and it kind of kills my soul to see the total lack of complaints there have been on this front. When I heard Jim Sterling praise the music after I finally started looking at reviews after beating the game, I was just staring at the screen like “what!?”. It's depressingly mediocre. Not actively painful to listen to or anything, just waaaaaay below usual Castlevania standards. I'm not sure how much of it was due to not getting the best orchestra to perform the songs, and how much of it was Michiru Yamane having a rough year when she composed this stuff, but all in all it was quite the let-down.

As for a last point on presentation... I don't really like Miriam. I don't like her design, I don't like her story arc, and I don't really care for her personality. Honestly she just feels like an inferior knockoff of Shanoa, to the point that I'm compelled to compare the two in the same terms as I might compare Beck and Megaman. In fact, the second I unlocked the barber, I changed Miriam's hairstyle so she spent the rest of the game cosplaying Shanoa in a weird dress and I never looked back. ...And yes, the white-hot, searing irony of me preferring Shanoa's personality to Miriam's, when the entire premise of Shanoa's character is that her personality literally does not exist, is not lost on me. But I stand by it. Shanoa was far more entertaining of a character, essentially the ultimate straight woman to a village full of lovable, ridiculous weirdos, not to mention the fact that even though she doesn't have emotions, she clearly starts giving a shit about her situation in interesting ways by the time the big twist happens, and the story she's a part of is just so much more compelling to experience through her than anything that happens to Miriam. Really the only thing Miriam has any significant reaction to at all is when Gebel comes into the picture, and that's basically two times in the whole game.

As for lack of polish, well... this game is just kinda buggy. Not in any majorly game-breaking way, at least not on PC (Switch at launch is an entirely different story), but in very visible and conspicuous ways. This is most easily noticed with item drops and any time the game uses its “circling around a 3d map” gimmick. Several times item bags will get stuck in the walls, get stuck on the ceiling, or not register you picking them up at all until roughly 30 seconds later when they'll randomly open themselves and add their contents to your inventory as long as you touched them even once.

As for the 3D sections, basically, this game contains a few areas, namely the Towers of Twin Dragons, that abuse the now fully 3D environments to wrap the X axis around a spiraling tower. This is a problem for two reasons: One, much like trying to draw a map of the continents of Earth on a 2D plane, stuff gets warped and wrapped around and misrepresented, making the 2D Map you have access to excruciatingly confusing. Two, this is extremely buggy. At least two times as I was traversing just the Towers of the Twin Dragons, navigating the wrapping and winding X axis somehow dislodged me from the game's newly-existing Z axis in such a way that none of my enemies' attacks could hit me, but I could hit them, allowing me to attack them all with impunity... only to discover that even though I could attack them, I couldn't pick up their loot, because I was out of alignment with that too.

And last but certainly not least...

The three questgivers in the town can throw themselves into the biggest fire they can find.

I can barely find the words to express my sheer disappointment with these women and their uninspired, obnoxious, mediocre quests that make a mockery of the ones in the other games. What follows, however, is my best attempt to do so.

There's Lindsay, who gives you a bunch of quests revolving around avenging the deaths of the countless innocent villagers slaughtered by the various demons of the castle when it first showed up. I love this concept. I love her voice too. This had so much potential. I can just imagine getting a quest and then hearing this as the briefing:

 

“Meredith and Duncan... now those were good people, as good as you were like to find anywhere. Meredith, she was the town florist. The things she could do with a basket of flowers... you'd have to have seen it. Duncan, he was the town blacksmith. Horseshoes, keys, pots, you name it, he made it. But his true passion was swords. Oh, the way his eyes lit up like a schoolboy's whenever he had an excuse to put a sharp pointy end on a piece of metal... I can scarcely blame the lass for lovin' him so damned much. They... they were even goin' to have a baby. ...Couldn't've been more than a week away.”

“Not that that damned cat had cared. Oh, Duncan, bless him, he tried to hold it off... but he hadn't a tenth the skill swingin' a blade as he did makin' one. That wretched beast toyed with him like a fresh-caught mouse before gougin' out his throat with a single lazy claw. Meredith and I, we tried to flee together, but her leg got caught under a rafter, and she begged me to save myself... so I ran. But I still heard the flames... and the screams. Sweet God in heaven did I hear Meredith's screams. And I'll swear to every saint in heaven and half of them again... I heard the child screamin' with her!”

I want... its eyes. I want both of them, big and round and bloody, rolling around at my feet, so I can look right into those cursed slits as I stomp them to a gooey pulp with my own two feet! I don't even need to know what you do with the rest of it. Use your imagination. But I want. That. Damned. Cat's. Eyes.”

 

...Something like that, except not written up in five minutes, would be awesome. These tragic tales from a woman consumed by revenge, yearning to see unspeakable torment rained down upon the monsters who wronged her and everyone she loved.

This... is not how these quests work.

You are indeed tasked with hunting down the various demons of the castle and exacting the village's vengeance upon them. But instead of being tasked with unique punishments for each one, it's just a “kill x number of this enemy” quest. Ad infinitum. And instead of having a handful of well-written and well-acted stories from an angry, bitter woman tormented by loss and demanding bloody retribution against the denizens of hell, you get... one line. One exact. Same. Line. Every single time you accept a new quest. And keep in mind, these quests unlock in sets of four or so, so you'll be hearing this, voiced, every time you go to accept the latest batch of quests:

Help Ishmael the fisherman rest in peace. KILL THOSE MURDERERS DEAD!”

Help Matthew the potter rest in peace. KILL THOSE MURDERERS DEAD!”

Help Bartholomew the butcher rest in peace. KILL THOSE MURDERERS DEAD!”

Help my nephew Alex rest in piece. KILL THOSE MURDERERS DEAD!”

Every. Single. Fucking. Time.

This is amazingly uninspired and boring. I would have traded all of these for a tenth of them in a more imaginative form. This is World of Warcraft “twenty bear asses” levels of unimaginative horseshit. The best I can say about it is that it's quick and dirty. It rarely takes more than a few minutes, especially since they never demand more than five kills. Really, it's more of a reward for proving you have access to a certain kind of enemy, which is far more quick and painless than I can say the others are.

Next there's Susie, an old lady who wants you to cook a bunch of food for her, but she can't remember what any of it's called. However, she remembers facts about it that are basically just excerpts taken out of the food's flavor text, and the moment you accept the quest a thought bubble appears over her head with a clear image of the food she wants that stays until you give it to her, so you're never left to actually guess. Basically all this boils down to is taking an action you were likely to be doing anyway for the stat bonuses, that being cooking meals, and then doing it twice. And she also provides an extremely annoying voice, with the exact same conversation happening every single time you accept and complete a quest. I hate her. I hate her so, so much.

And finally there's Abigail, a woman who wants to give the dead of the village a proper burial, and to do it you need to give her certain pieces of equipment they were fond of to bury with them. She's the least annoying in terms of voice repetition, but her problem is that you can only unlock these quests of hers one at a time. Which means that, on your first playthrough, the quest line probably goes like this:

Okay, a tunic? Right, I already outgrew that, take it. A ring? I just got three of them from Lindsay, sure, take one. A Brigandine? ...Okay, I don't know how to make more of those, but I can make something almost as good at the lab and with better magic defense to boot, so fine. Bat wings? ...Ugh, okay, guess I'll make another one of those and give you this...”

...WHAT THE FUCK IS A RHAVA BÚRAL!?”

And then the quest line is over. Forever. For the rest of the game. Because you can't craft them, you can't find them in chests, they aren't in any secret room, and if you're like me and don't like using a guide until your second playthrough onward, you'll never find them for the entirety of your first playthrough until you're playing hard mode with a friend, show off that quest, and then randomly get it from one of those scissorhands enemies and find out it's a random drop from those enemies and available nowhere else.

But until that point, for the entirety of my first playthrough, the entire rest of that woman's quests were off limits to me. Because you can only do one at a time.

One. At. A. Time.

Imagine, if you will, if Portrait of Ruin didn't let you unlock the Nest of Evil because you never figured out where the fucking nun shoes were. Imagine if it never let you do any of those quests after the quest for the healing spell because you never found out where the fucking nun shoes were. Are you imagining it? Are you imagining how unbelievably frustrating and ridiculous that would be? Because in Bloodstained, you live that absurdity. Continuously.

Personally, I feel the quests really suffer from this game's decision to voice act every line. They really give the impression that they did not have the budget to do too many voice lines for quests, but they made a commitment to voicing everything, so they recycled as much dialogue as they possibly could. And it shows. There are only three types of quests in this game, and they're all ridiculously interchangeable and generic. Kill X monsters. Give her a piece of equipment. Give her food. Those are all the quests you get in the village. All of them.

Sure, Castlevania games had stuff along those lines too, but they also had way more bizarre and interesting ones. Order of Ecclesia had you recording the screams of a banshee, or drawing sketches of exotic landmarks, or taking a picture of a ridiculously dangerous cave troll while standing five feet away from its twenty foot tongue. Portrait of Ruin had you figuring out how to talk to Wind while cursed, or hunting down secret enemies that only spawn in one room he gives a clue to, or finding ways to get a specific stat as ridiculously high as possible. Hell, even Dawn of Sorrow had fun sidequests where you have to find pages of a tabloid National-Enquirer-style newspaper that gives clues about the location and method of fighting weird secret cryptozoology-themed monsters with 100% soul drop rates. None of the quests in Bloodstained feel remotely as inspired or interesting, and they're just plagued by this overbearing pall of repetition hanging over the whole lot of it.

The quests are garbage and the game would literally be improved by removing them all entirely and just randomly adding the stuff they give you into the game's pre-existing chests and secret rooms.

Moving on...

...Now, originally I planned to vent in some shape or form about the game's nightmare difficulty and my rather unpleasant 8 hours with it. But ultimately, since that difficulty level is so hard that I suspect it might even be beyond my level of skill (though it may have just been impatience and a desire to get this review complete before Three Houses arrives to consume my life), I don't feel qualified in judging it all that thoroughly. However, what I will say is that despite its pretenses to stripping the player of any ability to grind in order to force them to win through skill alone...

...It's still open to a shitload of grind and abuse, not the least of which being the early access you can get to the dullahammer head, which if you grind all 9 shards for it will give you five allies who are more than four times stronger than Miriam is at her current level of equipment. And it took me eight hours combined playtime before I could fight Zangetsu while having enough HP to tank even a single hit from him because I had to go that deep into the food crafting system, grinding alkahest to reverse-engineer the uni rice bowl because that's the only method the game gives you to get soy sauce until 80% of the way through the game, and even then one of his attacks was still a one-hit-kill. I have to say, the food system was a bit of a disappointment. It's absurdly grindy when you try to use it to its fullest extent, and in its current implementation it isn't nearly the fix to the experience issue that I hoped it would be. All in all, as a mode intended to test the player's raw skill, nightmare is open to soooooooooo much ridiculous abuse and grinding at the moment that I cannot in good conscience consider it a success.

Other miscellaneous complaints:

1: I saw several script errors. The voice lines were fine, but several of the sets of text that accompanied them either were missing entire words for some reason, or said something completely different.

2: A bit of a nitpick considering the game's tradition for fake final bosses, but Gebel not being the real final boss was painfully telegraphed from his first cutscene.

3: They brought back soul stacking from Dawn of Sorrow. And they made it worse by adding a second dimension of grind to it. Jesus Christ. Why? Isn't the whole appeal of this system supposed to be getting a bunch of new toys and getting to try them out to mix and match your favorite ones? Would Custom Robo have really been improved by adding a leveling system to each individual part, leaving you with no idea if that new toy you got will be better than your current standby because it'll take an hour before you get it to a comparable level of power?

4: Given that the British characters have British accents, I found it kind of disappointing that the clearly Japanese guy has an American accent. Granted, he was well-voiced for the most part (as well he should have been, given who voiced him), but it's still jarring given that clear step towards authenticity they made with the others' voices.

5: Like I said as a caveat in the positives, the game doesn't explain that you can place map markers on the map screen by pressing B. Also, the fact that it doesn't by default center on your current location is awkward given how large the map is and how it doesn't all fit on the screen.

6: This may just be personal experience, but it was about 3 hours into the game before I got my first shard that wasn't conjure or directional. I was kind of getting sick of conjure shards by that point, and nothing I found could beat true arrow.

7: The village, both the areas with villagers and the areas overrun by monsters, are completely devoid of music, and even though I don't much care for the game's music, it's still jarring.

8: As a friend of mine pointed out when I streamed a replay with him, it is kind of ridiculous how poorly equipped Miriam starts off as, given where she's headed to. There isn't even an equivalent of the series standard of “casual clothes” in this game for her starting armor. She literally isn't wearing anything on her torso on the equip screen, and doesn't bother to pick out a weapon until moments before they're attacked at sea.

9: The double jump animation is breathtakingly lame, just barely beating out Harmony of Dissonance. I was hoping for something like rainbow butterfly wings propelling her upward or something imaginative, but no, you just conjure the weird rainbow thruster aura from that boss you got it from, and she doesn't even do a cool pose while jumping.

10: Speaking of, she has the exact same dive kick trajectory as in Harmony of Dissonance, and it feels just as weird here as it did there. Miriam propels herself way too far forward when she dives, and it just doesn't feel comfortable or natural. Also, the fact that you can move slightly faster by spamming jumps and dive kicks was weird, and I hated that I got used to doing it.

11: Underwater mobility is awkward as shit. At first it was an interesting change of pace to have to propel yourself through the water by using a water jet directional shard. Getting through the underwater segment using this was awkward, but a reasonably fun challenge. But then you get the real underwater mobility powerup. The one that lets you walk along the ocean floor like usual. And it suuuuucks. It's way too slow, jumping up is cumbersome and looks ridiculous due to the rapid ineffectual flailing that results, at base the underwater movement speed passive shard barely helps, and worst of all, you can't even use the water jet shard to propel yourself through the water while this silver skill shard is active. I barely had to stay in that area for another 15 minutes to get where I needed to go, but those 15 minutes felt so unbearably tedious and painfully slow.

12: Watching Miriam cook things and do a cute little victory pose while still having a neutral, dead look on her face is just dumb. Why did you let us look at a close-up of this every time we cook?

13: Given that there's, as far as I can tell, no purpose whatsoever to sitting in most chairs, having some of those chairs be freakout monsters in disguise seems like a waste. But then... I fell for it. Immediately. The first chance I got. So what the hell do I know?

14: While the fight with Alfred was challenging and engaging, I didn't much care for the permanent slow effect he casts on half the battlefield when he's weak, or the fact that the circular battlefield means a lot of my shard powers are completely useless beyond point-blank range because they just fly off the side of the screen without following the curve of the battlefield. Now, this could be an interesting limitation of the battle, but it's a limitation that only exists because of interface screw in a way that obviously wouldn't apply if this fight were real, so basing a challenge around game-exclusive combat limitations, even if intentional, seems pretty dumb.

15: The 5 second wait time whenever those bone dragon monsters assemble themselves gets tedious after a while.

16: The fact that Ann serves literally no purpose in the story and yet constantly sticks around was one of two big clues as to what the story had planned, and I didn't much care for how awkwardly she was put in for her purpose.

17: Not a fan of the giant area with the giant rooms and giant monsters. Quite the pain to fully navigate, though it does at least get you the speed power up.

18: It's a bit of a dick move to have a boss that punishes you for having a lot of money, then gives you a shard that rewards you having a ton of money, and then have that shard be completely useless against both phases of the final boss.

19: I don't like the second half of the game's overabundance of cave areas with narrow corridors you can't jump over enemies in.

20: Fuck. This. Game's. Cutscene. Skipping. System. Why the hell does it only skip to the end of the current dialogue chain and not let you skip action sequences? This makes the final boss take like 8 seconds to start even when skipping all of the cutscenes. It's infuriating, and that's only the most egregious example. There are plenty of other instances of that system biting me in the ass. Why doesn't it think I'd want to skip nonverbal cutscenes?

21: A few bosses had some attacks that feel kind of ridiculous and unfair. The first phase of the final boss has this light laser attack, and it both does a ridiculous amount of damage and stun-locks you to hit multiple times if you're unlucky. It shouldn't do both considering how hard it is to dodge to begin with (that, and attacks that slowly and inescapably do major damage to you just annoy me). Also, the Bloodless boss has collision damage and front and back dashes with no windup. Pick one of the two, you can't have both. It becomes annoying to face an enemy with attacks it's impossible to dodge. It becomes a game of learning enough about the enemy AI to know when they'll do them and get out of the way in advance, much like the fight against Albus in OoE, rather than a test of your reaction times or puzzle solving skills. I did eventually figure this out, but I shouldn't have needed to. It wasn't a well-designed aspect of the boss's difficulty.

22: The cutscene after you beat the fake final boss the right way is utterly ridiculous, with a character just spontaneously materializing out of nowhere to catch the book everyone's fighting over before it hits the ground, and then the person you just caused to drop the book is just like “G-get back here you little brat!” like it's some kind of cartoon. I didn't have any moment to appreciate the awesome spectacle of what I had just done, and it killed the moment instantly.

 

 

 

Final Ranking

Spoiler

 

This was a pretty difficult decision to make. Bloodstained, like Symphony, is hard to compare to the other games, and to make matters worse, its quality is all over the place, with me loving many parts and hating many others. I honestly had no idea where to place it for the longest time. And so, to try and make sense of my feelings about the game, I took a set of seven categories and ranked all the Igavanias from best to worst in each of them:

 

World: How fun is the game’s world to traverse and explore?

Bloodstained

Symphony of the Night

Order of Ecclesia

Portrait of Ruin

Aria of Sorrow

Dawn of Sorrow

Circle of the Moon

Harmony of Dissonance

 

There's no two ways around it, Bloodstained simply has the biggest world, with a bunch of new and interesting powerups to use to explore it, and without recycling much of anything to make the world that big. All in all I found the locations in Symphony to be a tad more memorable, but that comes down to aesthetics, namely music and art direction. Bloodstained is still the clear queen here.

If you're wondering why Ecclesia is so high up despite not even being an open world for the most part, it secures its spot due to having the most memorable, varied and exotic locales of the non-open-world games, which, might I remind you, is every Igavania except Symphony and Bloodstained.

 

Combat: How fun, varied and responsive is the game’s combat system?

Order of Ecclesia

Bloodstained

Aria of Sorrow

Dawn of Sorrow

Portrait of Ruin

Symphony of the Night

Circle of the Moon

Harmony of Dissonance

 

Order of Ecclesia is still the queen of this front, with its brilliant stroke of genius incorporating magic into your character's core moveset by making every basic attack cost magic to use. Being able to cast magic pretty much whenever makes it way easier to get practice with it and thus do more fun things with it. Plus, while I have some gripes about the dual-wielding system of spamming y and x the game encourages, I love how it actually gives the vulnerable position of attacking on the ground an actual advantage by doubling your DPS when you do it.

Bloodstained, however, comes right after, largely because it felt as twitchy and intense as Aria's did at the later stages (though without any enemies quite as interesting as the killer mantle) but with more than one viable weapon type.

 

Difficulty: How significant, but consistent and fair, is the game’s challenge?

Order of Ecclesia

Portrait of Ruin

Bloodstained

Aria of Sorrow

Dawn of Sorrow

Harmony of Dissonance

Circle of the Moon

Symphony of the Night

 

Bloodstained gains a lot of points here for having some of the hardest (and most fun) bosses in the series, but unfortunately suffers a lot because the difficulty curve is all over the place just like Symphony. It'll never achieve the smooth curve of the more linear Ecclesia and Portrait. Unlike Symphony, however, the bosses are far more reasonable, with somewhat easier to dodge attacks but way more damage, so that they're actual challenges you have to overcome rather than brief exercises in humiliation. And while I was tempted to rate Aria higher for the utterly fantastic last few areas, I had to remind myself that I beat a lot of my favorite bosses in that game on my first try, and most of the first half of the game was pretty uneventful save for headhunter. So while the challenge isn't consistent, it at least has bigger (satisfying!) highs than Aria, and indeed therefore every other game below it on the list. That said, I may need to revisit this if I ever have time to play Aria on hard mode. I deeply regret that I couldn't do that in time for this retrospective.

 

Grind: How much does this game respect the player's time?

Order of Ecclesia

Aria of Sorrow

Harmony of Dissonance

Symphony of the Night

Portrait of Ruin

Circle of the Moon

Dawn of Sorrow

Bloodstained

 

And this is the one gameplay area where Bloodstained takes an absolute nosedive. There is an absolutely asinine rabbit hole this game can send you down trying to get the materials to cook foods, craft weapons, max out your shards' rank, max out your shards' grade, grind alkahest to reverse-engineer ingredients you won't gain conventional access to for a while, and complete quests. This game's grind has more dimensions to it than a staircase in Rl'yeh, and I will never understand the appeal of this kind of nonsense. Give me Order of Ecclesia's treasure chests and glyph-granting obstacle courses any day of the week, along with its brilliant way to seamlessly incorporate “grind” into your practice runs. Make me do something difficult to get my fancy prizes, don't make me do something easy a thousand times. The fact that this game actually managed to make Dawn of Sorrow's unfortunate changes to the soul system even worse is very disappointing.

 

Visuals: Which game looks the best?

Symphony of the Night

Order of Ecclesia

Portrait of Ruin

Dawn of Sorrow

Bloodstained

Aria of Sorrow

Circle of the Moon

Harmony of Dissonance

 

Bloodstained's 3D Graphics are objectively prettier than all of the gba games, but I honestly feel the PS1 and DS ones felt cleaner and more polished. Also, they all have better-designed main characters than this game, and don't have jarring 3D zoom-ins to emotionless faces that totally kill the illusion of life.

 

Music: Which game has the catchiest, best-composed and most memorable music?

Order of Ecclesia

Symphony of the Night

Portrait of Ruin

Dawn of Sorrow

Aria of Sorrow

Circle of the Moon

Harmony of Dissonance

Bloodstained

 

Like I said, it's a bloodbath, and if you'll look closely you'll see Bloodstained right there at the bottom, clogging up the drain. Harmony of Dissonance wins out by at least managing to have one memorable and catchy track. Even if it's my least favorite of the memorable and catchy tracks I listen to, Successor of Fate still at least made that list without me having to listen to fan-made metal remixes of it.

 

Writing: Which game has the best story, dialogue, voice acting (where applicable) and characters?

Order of Ecclesia

Portrait of Ruin

Dawn of Sorrow

Aria of Sorrow

Symphony of the Night

Bloodstained

Circle of the Moon

Harmony of Dissonance

 

This was a tough one to work out. Order of Ecclesia wins hands down, with its awesome characters and compelling, tragic story. The only real hiccup here is Albus's behavior being weird to hide the twist, but I've come up with a handful of justifications in my head that make sense of that. Portrait has a mediocre story, but a reasonably well-written one with a likable dynamic between its two leads. Dawn and Aria mostly coast by on their awesome premise and main character while fumbling with the writing a tad (mostly in Aria). Symphony, I realize, has absurdly cringey voice-acting up the wazoo while Bloodstained's voice acting and writing are way better, but the story of Symphony, the estranged son of Dracula coming back to stop him to keep a promise to his mother whose death is the very reason Dracula is on a rampage... that's just way more compelling than the stuff Bloodstained cobbles together. It does, however, manage to surpass the minimal story of Circle and the “AAARGH! DEATH HAS RETURNED!” of Dissonance.

 

Overall

So as you can see, if we ignore the grind category, which you easily can if you don't get too far out of your depth difficultywise, Bloodstained averages a second place in terms of gameplay, but between a 7th to 6th place in the presentation half. Combine that with the fact that it's the only game in the series where I found myself noticing cut corners and a significant lack of polish, and...

 

1: Order of Ecclesia

2: Aria of Sorrow

3: Portrait of Ruin

4: Bloodstained

5: Dawn of Sorrow

6: Symphony of the Night

7: Circle of the Moon

8: Harmony of Dissonance

 

Honestly, it came down to asking myself “What is the highest-ranked game on this list that I can confidently say Bloodstained improves upon enough to forgive the loss of polish everywhere else?” And for that, the easy answer is Dawn of Sorrow. It's the one game aside from Symphony that I can find the most parallels to, what with the shard system that permeates the whole experience. And I can say with confidence that Bloodstained kicks enough of Dawn of Sorrow's ass in the gameplay department that I can forgive just how awkward and unpolished it is elsewhere, especially since Koji Igarashi has committed to continued updates with the game. Dawn of Sorrow has basically nothing besides polish and music that it beats Bloodstained in. If we were talking pure, raw gameplay, ignoring the village and the music and the visuals and the story and everything else that brings this game down, it'd be in second place, beating out even Aria of Sorrow. But I just can't ignore those aspects and how much they make the game feel incomplete, and Portrait and Aria are just more well-rounded and polished games than Bloodstained.

So, in short, this game was disappointing in many areas, but excelled enough in others that not only did I still wind up enjoying it a lot, but I am very excited for the non-crowdfunded sequel now that Koji Igarashi has his bearings.

...So... that's it, right?

...Well... not exactly.

 

 

 

Spoiler

 

...The Hollow?

So far, I have been ranking and judging these games solely with reference to each other. Which one beats what, which does what things better, which ones I liked the best between them. But now I want to talk about something a bit different. Something incredibly relevant to the future of Igavanias, and what they need to do to stay relevant moving forward. You see, over the course of playing these eight games, I have discovered three key issues, an unholy trinity if you will, that I feel are holding a lot of this series back from true greatness. While Order of Ecclesia came the closest, none of these games have fully thrown off and surpassed these issues. And so to discuss these things, I'm going to step outside of the realm of Igavania for a bit.

You see, in the time between the initial Kickstarter campaign for Bloodstained in 2015 and its eventual release in 2019... a game came out. A metroidvania game. An incredible metroidvania game. And upon replaying it recently in-between finishing Order of Ecclesia and getting Bloodstained, I have concluded it is better than pretty much all of them. If I were to put it on the Igavania list for some godforsaken reason, despite my historic love for this series, the only question in my mind would be whether or not it would beat out Order of Ecclesia. It is an absolute triumph of game design, and if you want to play a game about fighting and exploring your way through a vast world full of monsters and malice, with epic boss battles against horrific beasts and mighty warriors, then you owe it to yourself to play this game. Because it's one of the best you will ever play, and easily the best fifteen dollars you will ever spend on a video game.

And I am going to bring this game up because nearly every problem I have with the core, 22-year-old formula of the Igavania model is a problem that this game very pointedly, and very intentionally, does not have. As a result it is an excellent means by which to highlight and discuss these problems. This isn't to say that the way forward is to make Bloodstained exactly like this game. This game is fundamentally different from Igavanias in design philosophy in many ways, and what's good for this game might not necessarily be good for an Igavania. No, Bloodstained is going to have to find its own solutions to the problems I'm about to mention, if indeed Iga would even agree that they are problems, which he might not.

But I do. And this is my retrospective. So I'm going to discuss them.

And so, without further ado...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Igavanias need to learn from Hollow Knight

Over the course of playing every Igavania in the series, I have come to the conclusion that there are three fundamental flaws with the series that, with the partial exceptions of Order of Ecclesia and Aria of Sorrow, none of the games in the series have addressed. And so, in this section, I am going to go over these one by one, describe how Hollow Knight avoids them, and then suggest a potential way Igavanias could solve them. They are as follows:

1: Using a common, and utterly broken, action RPG model of restoring health and magic.

2: Various elements of grind and waiting that demonstrate a general lack of respect for the player's time.

3: Basing its entire combat meta on a glitch.

 

Let's go through these in order, shall we?

 

1: Menu healing is garbage and here's why

Hit points, as I'm sure you're aware, represent how much damage you can take without healing before you die. Essentially, particularly in action games, they represent your permitted margin of error. A combination of your defensive stats, the enemies' various attack values, and your HP determines how much your are allowed to screw up while performing a task before you don't get to call the attempt a success anymore and have to start over. In Igavanias, typically these tasks fall into two categories: navigating and fighting your way from one save point to another, and defeating a boss. Now, with all that established, I'd like to ask a very important question:

What exactly does it do to the difficulty of a task when you give the player the ability to extend their hit points by as much as five thousand percent?

Is there any challenge that would be hard with 100 hit points that would still be hard with 5,000? Would there be any challenge that's still hard even with 5,000 that it would be remotely reasonable to expect of a competent human being with 100?

Because unfortunately, the way healing items are implemented in Igavanias (and indeed in many, many action RPGs), that's all the existence of healing items represents. A flat, no-strings-attached increase to the amount of damage you're allowed to take and still win. And a potentially ludicrous increase at that. In Igavanias, depending on the number of healing items (which largely depends on how many grades of potion there are and how many varieties of food they put in the game), you can extend your “maximum HP” by a factor of anywhere from 10 to even beyond 50 times, and all you need to do to access it is grind for the resources beforehand and then press a single button. If you take advantage of this, all your HP stat realistically even means is how much damage you are capable of taking in a single hit and still surviving.

I'd like you to take a second to think about how you heal in other video games. Let's take Fire Emblem as an example, since it's a game everyone on this forum is basically guaranteed to have played. One of your units is injured. How do you heal them? Simple: for the most part you spend either their turn using an item, or another unit's turn using a staff.

How do you heal in Final Fantasy? Somebody spends their turn using an item or magic or weapon effect on either themselves or a party member.

How do you heal in Igavanias?

You pause the game, go to the menu, and then use as many of your healing items as you like. Then you unpause the game to continue, instantly healed.

Do you see the difference between these methods? If you don't, imagine how radically the difficulty of Fire Emblem would drop off if, while one of your units is being swarmed by enemies on the enemy phase, you could pause the game, access their inventory, and make them chug one of the twelve doses of elixir you bought for them. Obviously, that would be ridiculous. It would completely obliterate any concept of difficulty in that game. Your squishy healers would never be in any danger as long as you packed some supplies with them. None of your units would be in any danger. There wouldn't be a single challenge, even in Conquest, that couldn't be brute-forced through by simply buying potions to temporarily extend the amount of damage a unit can take in one turn. You'd never even have to think about how much damage a unit might take. All you'd have to do is pay attention to their health bar and top if off when it's getting low.

The Igavanias' healing system... is even more dumb. At least in a few Fire Emblem games, particularly Conquest, there would be a system of resource management that would at least slightly punish you for spending your finite resources that way, even if it wouldn't be enough to stop it from being utterly game-breaking. In games with infinite opportunities for grinding and resource collection, however, the only cap on how much healing you can pack with you is your maximum inventory size, and there isn't a single Igavania where that's a big enough limitation to mean anything at all.

But anyway, I trust the difference is now obvious: in Igavanias, there's no challenge or opportunity cost in the act of healing yourself. No action you need to find an opening to perform. No alternate action you could be using said opening to perform instead. You just pause the game, and then you do it, as a simple free action. As much as you've ground up to buy. Whenever you want. Which basically means that all healing items represent is the game throwing its hands in the air and saying “here, you decide how big your HP bar is.”

And I deeply resent that kind of game design. If a game, at its base, provides so many means to break it that a monkey could do it, and then makes it the player's job to construct house rules they have to impose on themselves to make the game remotely challenging, that is a failure on the part of the developers. Creating and balancing the game's difficulty settings should have been your job, not mine. Super Mario Odyssey doesn't put an invisible floor over all of its platforming challenges and then expect people who want a challenge to invent the challenge themselves by doing a “no invisible floor run” and warping back to the last checkpoint whenever they fall onto that safety net instead of walking along the net to get the next challenge for free. If I'm playing on a difficulty setting intended to be hard, anything still available to me on that difficulty setting that makes the game trivially easy is bad game design, plain and simple. The best games are the ones where you can be as cunning as you like, exploit every single resource the game gives you, and still feel like you've accomplished something when you win. And these sorts of systems just don't allow for that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not entirely opposed to the concept in general of player-controlled difficulty. Invisible Inc's in-depth difficulty customizer is one of the many, many reasons why it's one of my favorite games of all time. But not only is intentionally adding broken mechanics to a game a breathtakingly inelegant way of doing such a thing, difficulty customization is an advanced setting that shouldn't be expected of someone who's never played the game before and has little personal grasp of what these settings mean. That's the entire point of default difficulty settings. Challenges set up by the developers, the people who have actually designed the game and have the slightest idea what the player needs to get through a certain challenge.

As a personal anecdote on the subject: earlier this week I tried out Nier Automata for the first time. It was a bit of a bizarre adjustment (I haven't played many games not available on Mac or Nintendo in 10 years, so a huge amount of AAA releases and basically entire mainstream genres have escaped my reach for a while), but for the most part I was enjoying myself. But this game has the exact same problem with instantaneous from-the-menu healing, and also gives you a skill that automatically heals you from your inventory whenever you're sent below a certain HP threshold, so as long as enemies don't do too much damage in a single hit, you don't even need to pause. But a moment that really drove home the problems with this system was when I was told my next destination was in the desert, and that resupplies would be difficult while I'm there so I should stock up now. Therefore, I was instructed to buy enough healing supplies to make it through the next area. I can't quite remember if this occurred to me completely at the time, but I'll tell you what I think about that moment now: I was essentially being asked to decide how much HP I was going to have for the upcoming challenge. If I bought too many healing items, the next area would be a cakewalk. If I didn't buy enough, it'd be a meatgrinder.

Why was this my job?

I didn't know how long or hard that next area would be. I didn't design it. I hadn't even seen it. And yet the developers had indirectly declared that it was my responsibility to blindly decide how much damage I could survive in the upcoming challenge, a decision with a sweet spot I had basically no hope of correctly guessing, because I didn't play-test this game.

And all of this annoyance happened because the game didn't add in either some realistic limitation to how much healing you can bring, or, even better, some layer of difficulty or strategy to the act of healing itself. If it had been like Hollow Knight, having a ridiculous supply of healing items wouldn't have been an issue at all.

For you see, in Hollow Knight, you have essentially infinite healing. More accurately, you have infinitely renewable healing. There's no limit on how much total damage you can take between benches (Hollow Knight's version of save rooms) before you're screwed.

The difference, however, is twofold. First, the MP meter you draw from to restore your health can only be refilled by directly fighting enemies in melee combat, so you have to play well in order to break even on the healing front. No waiting around for your soul to slowly replenish, no consumable items you can chug to instantly bring your soul back to full. Second, healing is a time-consuming and incredibly vulnerable action that takes somewhere between one and two seconds per “mask” you replenish. It's not something you can do in the middle of heavy combat without either knowing exactly what you're doing, or forcing an opening by doing sufficient damage to a boss to put them in a vulnerable state.

In Hollow Knight, healing becomes an additional part of the challenge that's factored into difficulty, not a consequence-free power multiplier you have to set house rules for how much you can use. Yes, you can still ignore healing altogether and challenge yourself to beat the game without using it if you're really skilled and daring, but for everyone else, a satisfying level of challenge was constructed with healing in mind, such that you've still accomplished something no matter how much you make use of it.

How could Igavanias do something similar? Well actually, this came to me pretty easily and, personally, sounds really, really fun. Because Symphony of the Night came very close to doing it, it just missed the mark by a little. See, at least in Bloodstained, there is a single, unused face button, which by default is whichever one is on the right. What if, instead of using healing directly from the menu, you equipped a healing item, like in Symphony of the Night, which you then pressed the A or Circle or whatever button to use. We then would see an animation of Miriam either drinking or eating something depending on whether it's a potion/drink or food, during which she can't move, and upon its completion, that item's healing effects happen.

This results in several interesting possibilities that could actually add an entire dimension to Bloodstained's vast cooking system. Suddenly the raw numbers of what an item heals are no longer the end-all-be-all of what a food item does. Some items might replenish a lot of HP or MP, but what if they took longer to use? What if some healed less, but could be used quickly and thus could be fit into tighter openings against a boss? Heck, what if some items healed both HP and MP at once? Because when it takes time to use an item, suddenly that's an actually relevant and useful feature an item can have. What if some items were pretty good at both healing and speed, but made you take more damage if you were hit in the consuming animation, making mistakes more dangerous?

Honestly, with a system like this, healing items could even be made much cheaper. Hell, gameplay-wise there wouldn't be anything unfair about them being unlimited use as long as rooms were designed around it, but that would be a bit silly in the context of the game, so cheap to restock would probably be better, and maybe you can only carry one type at a time.

Now then, with that part of the unholy design trinity out of the way, let's move on to:

 

2: Keep that grindstone away from my goddamned nose

Confrontational section title aside, I understand that this is something that not everyone is going to agree with. A few of my friends, not to mention the continuing popularity of certain genres, tell me that a lot of people have no issue with, or actively enjoy, grinding in video games. The act of repeatedly doing a task, sometimes for hours on end, in the hopes of progressing towards some larger goal in a video game, is something that not only doesn't deter many gamers, but in many cases is part of the appeal of entire genres.

But I just...

Do...

Not...

Get it.

Say there's a power-up in the game. If you ask me whether I want it gated behind a gameplay challenge that it'll take me an hour of attempts to complete, or I want it to cost an amount of money at the store that it'll take me an hour of grinding to obtain, I can sure as hell tell you I'll pick the challenge any day. And I can't understand why anyone would pick the grind. I just don't get the mindset. I know I used to, but ever since my third successful run of Fire Emblem Awakening's Apotheosis map made me realize I had spent something like ten hours to prepare for a battle that took ten minutes, I've essentially been soured to the concept of grind entirely and can't really make sense of my original mindset that liked doing that kind of thing in RPGs.

That isn't to say I can't put up with it if I want the grind-gated thing badly enough. I'll put on some youtube videos in the background, figure out the most efficient way of doing something and the best place to do it in, and then maybe even have some fun perfecting the specific task I'm repeating to turn it into a learning exercise, at least when we're talking about a game where skill is actually involved in the grinding process. That last bit, incidentally, makes grind much more tolerable in an action RPG. I will do it, if sufficiently motivated. But I don't exactly enjoy it, it will greatly diminish my desire to replay a game, and I will always, always have more respect for a video game that has more respect for my time.

Grind has been a component in every previous Igavania, but to varying degrees. Circle of the moon and Dawn of Sorrow have had it the worst, while Order of Ecclesia and Aria of Sorrow have it the least. And in all honesty, the amount of grind present in the latter two is completely acceptable and fine to me. I don't have an issue with random drops, especially not when they add significant replay value by randomizing the tools you have access to when you go through the game normally, like what Aria of Sorrow does.

It's when we get to things like Dawn of Sorrow, where the entire weapon upgrade system is gated behind grind, and those random souls you get won't reach their full power until you grind even more to get them eight more times, that things get ridiculous. When I hear that a gameplay feature is gated behind that kind of grinding, there are two possibilities here:

1: The grinding is entirely unnecessary for you to be able to handle the challenges of the game, in which case you can think of the grind-gated content as either overpowered and poorly balanced, not remotely worth the effort, or a difficulty slider that it takes up to ten hours to slide from hard to easy. But whichever one it turns out to be, you don't really have to think about it too much.

2: The grinding is entirely necessary for you to stand a chance against the end-game challenges unless you are speedrunner levels of skilled, in which case, yet again, ten hour difficulty slider, but this time you actually need to use it.

Plus, as I said before in the main review (and this is a big reason of why I like Aria of Sorrow so much better than Dawn of Sorrow), surely the appeal of a system where you randomly get a wide variety of powers is that you get to mix, match and experiment with them to come up with your favorite loadout, and that at any moment you might find a new favorite that supplants one of your old mainstays? If you force an individual grind requirement into each one of these powers, then if you put any investment into your current favorites at all, there's very little chance that any newcoming challengers to that spot are going to measure up right away, giving you no idea if they're even good or not, and placing what is potentially a ridiculous amount of investment into trying out each one.

Hollow Knight, however, doesn't have this problem. Mostly because it doesn't have experience points, or random drops, or any grind at all. Instead, it has a system that's much better suited to the type of game that Symphony and Bloodstained in particular want to be: exploration-based open world design. Just about every method this game gives you to get stronger is gated behind some combination of exploration, combat and platforming. You increase your health and magic by finding this game's version of Zelda's famous pieces of heart. You gain new passive abilities by finding the equippable charms that grant them. You get new spells by beating bosses, and you upgrade them by finding the upgrades hidden in the world. And none of these things are going to be enough to turn stuff you save for later into a cakewalk. The progression system is such that by the time you get everything, your health and magic will merely double, and your strength will merely quadruple. This drastically reduces the amount of difference the order you do things in makes while still giving you a sense of progression and improvement. And since there's no level system, you're free to explore at your own pace without any risk of spoiling the challenge by the time you get to bosses you initially missed.

The only resources you can grind for are money and technically essence (a resource that increases your score with a certain questgiver who gives you a bunch of rewards the higher it gets), and in both cases you're way better off getting these things organically through challenges and exploration than grinding for them (especially with essence). As long as you don't make a habit out of dying and then dying again before recovering your dropped money, the mere act of playing the game will give you way more than enough geo to buy everything you'll ever need. The game also rewards skilled play with a charm that increases the amount of geo you gain as long as you don't die.

Hollow Knight doesn't waste any of your time. There is never a single moment in the game where you'll need to stop and do a repetitive task in order to enjoy any aspect of it. The only things this game will ever ask of you in order to obtain something are platforming, combat and observation skills. And I never felt this more strongly than when I was playing Bloodstained on nightmare. My efforts to explore the full lengths of this game's various sidequests and cooking systems led me to do so much grinding over the course of eight hours that I'd find myself playing for 3 hours of Bloodstained one afternoon, then playing an hour of Hollow Knight before bed, and finding myself accomplishing much more, and having much more fun, in the time I spent with Hollow Knight.

Now, as I said, of the three problems, this is the one that Igavanias have demonstrated the greatest capacity to fix. Really, they've already done it. Order of Ecclesia basically has no grind whatsoever, with the exception of a handful of glyphs and a few quests (and even then it hardly takes any time at all). It also has an awesome habit of locking a lot of the game's abilities and resources behind puzzles or challenge gauntlets, much like Hollow Knight. Aria of Sorrow is also pretty damned close, with a lot more random drops but with no real obligation or encouragement to grind for them until an optional post-game sidequest. As long as they keep things like those games, the only real issue they need to find a way to address is the whole “leveling in an open world” thing. And honestly, they don't even need to get rid of the leveling system to do that. At least not for everyone. I realize tons of people like leveling systems. But for those like me who don't, the issue could be resolved by just keeping the level 1 cap modes well-balanced, with game design that de-emphasizes the individual impact of levels and gives greater weight to the player's equipment, like Order of Ecclesia does. Ideally this would also be available on all difficulties, not just the hardest ones. I'd really love to see “normal level 1” modes in the future. That would be a very fun way, at least for me, to do a first playthrough, especially in a well-balanced game.

Also, if you want to add things like crafting systems and more intricate random drop systems, more things like Symphony of the Night's Luck Mode and Alucart gear could help here. Stuff that lets you do a harder challenge for a shorter length of time rather than an easier one for a longer length of time.

 

3: Enough already with the hopping and the canceling

This is probably the most drastic change I'm proposing to the series. What I am about to suggest is going to uproot decades of high-level strategies people have used to beat these games. But I genuinely feel this is long overdue. It's time to address the elephant in the room:

With the exception of Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance, most advanced strategies in these games revolve around exploiting a glitch that hasn't been patched out in 22 goddamned years.

For those of you not fully aware, allow me to quickly explain. When you attack on the ground in an Igavania, your character enters their attack animation. Depending on the weapon they're using this could take anywhere from a quarter to all of a second, possibly more. And during that attack animation, they can't move, or jump, or do much of anything. However, when you attack in the air, as long as you're airborne you can move back and forth freely, repositioning yourself and dodging attacks as much as you like. Naturally, this means attacking in the air is better. Much better. So much better, in fact, that unless you're fighting an enemy who can only be hit while crouching, there is literally no reason, whatsoever, to ever attack while on the ground. Ever. At all. It's a stupid idea, a rookie mistake, and something that people who know about this only ever do by accident.

But that's not all. See, while many types of weapons will shift to the ground-based attack animation upon hitting the ground and render you immobile for the remainder of the animation, other weapon types will just flat-out “cancel” their airborne attack animation the moment they hit the ground, allowing you to simply jump and attack again. This means that with many weapons, you can attack far more rapidly by short-hopping, attacking and landing in rapid succession than you can by simply spamming the attack button on the ground. Furthermore, in most games, with most weapons, to the point that I can't think of a single instance of this not being the case, if you press L to backdash, you can backdash even while attacking on the ground, and the attack animation will instantly be canceled to allow this.

So as you can see, this naturally meant that once people figured this out, high-level play for pretty much every game in the series revolves around abusing every little aspect of this network of systems to avoid ever having to get stuck in that vulnerable, stationary ground attack. Short-hopping, land-canceling, backdash-canceling, you name it, they do it. And at some point, not sure when but definitely by now, Iga and the rest of the dev team realized this. You can really tell when playing Bloodstained that the devs now know that nobody skilled at the game is ever actually stuck in a stationary position while fighting. And they design challenges accordingly. Certain enemies are moving constantly and darting wildly, hitstun basically ceases to be a thing by the midgame so that not even accurately hitting the enemy will save you from getting punished for attacking on the ground, and there's hardly a single humanoid boss in the whole damned game you can execute a full on-the-ground greatsword animation in front of without getting brutally punished for your troubles.

And to all of this I ask:

Why?

Why does attacking on the ground suck so much? The entire meta of the game has revolved around avoiding using that unbelievably shitty attack. Why was the devs' response to run with this and keep that attack so shitty instead of, well... fixing it?

In one sense I can understand the mindset. It demonstrates an understanding of where your fans are coming from and, in a sense, designing challenges suited to their level of skill. But on the other hand, this entire meta arose because the core system around it was broken. Pushing the abuse of this broken system to its very limits only more greatly exposes the flaws of the system itself. I said earlier in the positives of Bloodstained that it really pushed the limits of my skill with this combat system. The flipside to this is that, either due to suboptimal programming, the Switch pro controller not being as good as I think, or simply a greater amount of demand of it, I flubbed that button combo more times in this game than I did in the entire rest of the series combined. That ground attack is starting to become a major nuisance, and if the series pushes it any harder, it's going to get ridiculous.

Now, I get why this was originally the case. The reason why you're so much more mobile while attacking in the air and unable to control where you're going while attacking on the ground (which, amusingly, is the exact opposite of real life, but let's not drag real life into this too much) is because when the protagonist moves while attacking in the air, Iga's team didn't need to animate their legs moving independently of the swinging arms of the attack animation. Given how ludicrously, beautifully detailed the spritework of the Igavania games was, allowing the player to move back and forth, with actual moving legs, while an entirely separate attack animation was playing out simultaneously, would as far as I can tell be a ridiculously complicated task. I don't think it's a coincidence that the only weapons you can freely move on the ground while using are weapons like the valmanway where Soma doesn't actually move his arms to attack at all.

I get it. I get the limitations of the time. But we're in the realm of 3D models now. We don't have to deal with expensive, painstakingly-animated and far less flexible sprites. This time there was absolutely nothing stopping Iga from making it so that you can still move forward and backward while executing an attack on the ground. Miriam's arms could do attack animations independently of her non-stationary legs, after some slight adjustments to the animations to make sure that doesn't look weird. This is something Iga's team could easily have done. And why shouldn't they? What would be so bad about letting the player freely move while making ground attacks?

The answer is nothing. Absolutely nothing. There would be no grand downside to this. At least if Hollow Knight is anything to go by. In Hollow Knight, the Knight has total freedom of movement while attacking. He can attack left, he can attack right, he can attack up, he can attack while moving, he can attack up while moving, and he can attack in every direction, including down, while he's in the air. And he can do all of this without a single frame of lost control. No matter how he's attacking, or where, or when, he will always be able to move just as freely as if he weren't attacking at all. And they still managed to build tight and satisfying challenges around quick reaction times and problem solving without building the most basic, fundamental layer of the combat system around a convoluted, weird-to-look-at, and easily-fumbled fighting game button combination.

Yes, I do readily concede that if they let you move while attacking on the ground and didn't change anything else, the games would all become easier. That's practically a truism. And thus I feel this is really a question of what sort of challenge we want the games to offer. What sort of thing do you most want to be at fault for a player getting hit: failing to react in time to an enemy's attack, or failing to L-cancel in response to their own accidental input of Y-B instead of B-Y?

As it stands, the most basic of player input is needlessly complicated. It's like if you were playing Street Fighter and the button input for the hadouken were necessary to do a simple punch. And I submit that there are plenty more places to demand dexterity and rapid button inputs of the player than the most fundamental and basic method of attack. If there's no strategic merit to the game's most basic attack, then the game's most basic attack needs to change to have strategic merit.

 

Bringing it all together

If you're still with me after that bit of a rant about game design, first of all, thank you. A ton.

Second of all, my point here is that while the Igavania is a genre I have grown to love over many, many years, playing the games back to back like this and then looking at what else the world of gaming has accomplished in the many years since Igavanias were in their heyday have shown me that we shouldn't be afraid of addressing flaws with the premise itself, and that there is a danger in sticking too closely to core formula in the name of nostalgia and tradition. I genuinely feel that addressing the issues outlined above would go a long way to keeping what I sincerely hope will become “The Bloodstained Series” relevant and amazing as we move forward into the future.

...And with that... our long and epic journey through time comes to an end. ...Honestly, after all this time and all of this effort, I'm really having difficulty coming up with the right words to wrap this up. All I can really say is...

Thank you so much for sticking with me, and thank you quadruple for sitting through this utter mammoth of a finale. Thank you everyone, and from the bottom of my heart, enjoy Three Houses!

 

 

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I feel sorry that Bloodstained was somewhat disappointing. Although I'm still going to get it whenever they patch up the Switch version.

 

I'm aware of Hollow Knight, I watched the Switch trailers for both it and its sequel. But the difficulty I've heard might be a little steep for me.

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15 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

I feel sorry that Bloodstained was somewhat disappointing. Although I'm still going to get it whenever they patch up the Switch version.

 

I'm aware of Hollow Knight, I watched the Switch trailers for both it and its sequel. But the difficulty I've heard might be a little steep for me.

It could have been much much worse, a lot of it is forgivable due to the rocky circumstances surrounding it, and it managed to do some things better than any other game in the series, so all in all I'm happy with the purchase. I just wish it were a bit more well-rounded.

 

As for Hollow Knight, I'd still recommend it anyway, because it's 15 goddamned bucks for at least 60 dollars of content. You may find you can handle it better than you think you can!

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I'm in the camp that's waiting for the Switch version of the game to get a patch before buying Bloodstained, but at least now I know to temper my expectations. I think reviews for this game(especially store page consensus ratings) seemed a little caught up in the hype when I was hoping to find more opinions rooted in a more critical eye. Then I remembered this forum and I got what I wanted. Sounds like Bloodstained will be a game I'll mostly enjoy, but not something I'll walk way from feeling like I had just experienced a masterpiece like so many claim.

Also on Zengetsu's voice not reflecting his ethnicity, I'm wouldn't be surprised if the localization team/voice director just wanted to take advantage of the fact that they were working with David Hayter and go full Solid Snake because let's be honest, in the realm of video games there aren't many voices as iconic as David Hayter's Solid Snake so who wouldn't try to emulate that when given the perfect opportunity to do so? Not saying I agree with typecasting though. I've always loved doing theater, but I've been cast as a sailor 3 times in a row before and I really hope that doesn't become a pattern.

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7 minutes ago, TheGoodHoms said:

I'm in the camp that's waiting for the Switch version of the game to get a patch before buying Bloodstained, but at least now I know to temper my expectations. I think reviews for this game(especially store page consensus ratings) seemed a little caught up in the hype when I was hoping to find more opinions rooted in a more critical eye. Then I remembered this forum and I got what I wanted. Sounds like Bloodstained will be a game I'll mostly enjoy, but not something I'll walk way from feeling like I had just experienced a masterpiece like so many claim.

Also on Zengetsu's voice not reflecting his ethnicity, I'm wouldn't be surprised if the localization team/voice director just wanted to take advantage of the fact that they were working with David Hayter and go full Solid Snake because let's be honest, in the realm of video games there aren't many voices as iconic as David Hayter's Solid Snake so who wouldn't try to emulate that when given the perfect opportunity to do so? Not saying I agree with typecasting though. I've always loved doing theater, but I've been cast as a sailor 3 times in a row before and I really hope that doesn't become a pattern.

Happy I could help!

And yeah, I'm not saying having David do a Japanese accent would have been better. It's a minor complaint, but casting someone as good as him with a Japanese accent would have helped the presentation a bit. I get the appeal of going with him though.

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I didn't know what the monster slaying quest dialogue was going into your Bloodstained review and when I realized you were creating an original quest backstory I was genuinely heartbroken for a moment! Granted the use of religious imagery I related to (as made evident by my cheeky comment on page one) might have had something to do with it, but it was a really powerful tale for just a critical example. I really felt the villager's love for her neighbors and her grief over their fate. Just... wow put a big ol' "Emotional" warning next time!

After looking at a few elements of the game I actually became a little more cautiously optimistic rather than hyped regarding Bloodstained and I see now there may be a little more to my concern than just my weird tastes. Although considering your mark of relative quality compared to the other Igavanias, (it is in the upper half of your list after all) I'd say it still looks pretty fun. Even though Three Houses is about to make me all kinds of broke anyways so who knows when I'll get around to it. 😛

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18 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

...

I’m kind of surprised that you didn’t mention the technique mastery system, especially since the katana has, hands down, some of the best skills-and, I think has the highest quantity of techniques as well. The whip technique is also pretty good, since it adds a second hitbox that adds more verticality.

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1 minute ago, Dai said:

I’m kind of surprised that you didn’t mention the technique mastery system, especially since the katana has, hands down, some of the best skills-and, I think has the highest quantity of techniques as well. The whip technique is also pretty good, since it adds a second hitbox that adds more verticality.

Sorry about that, but I never really ran into that much. I read the books that told me how to use techniques, but the fact that they cost magic and took a fighting game prompt made them feel too unwieldy to get invested in.

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1 minute ago, Alastor15243 said:

Sorry about that, but I never really ran into that much. I read the books that told me how to use techniques, but the fact that they cost magic and took a fighting game prompt made them feel too unwieldy to get invested in.

Yeah, the cost became a problem for me early game as well, but the inputs are a bit...rough. Often times, I actually wound up pulling them off by accident in normal play.

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2 hours ago, PeaceRibbon said:

I didn't know what the monster slaying quest dialogue was going into your Bloodstained review and when I realized you were creating an original quest backstory I was genuinely heartbroken for a moment! Granted the use of religious imagery I related to (as made evident by my cheeky comment on page one) might have had something to do with it, but it was a really powerful tale for just a critical example. I really felt the villager's love for her neighbors and her grief over their fate. Just... wow put a big ol' "Emotional" warning next time!

I'm flattered!

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After doing a guided run-through of the castle’s cleanup, I gotta say, I’m more than surprised at just how many breakable walls that I missed. Hell, there’s a few upgrades that I found that aren’t even behind any breakable walls! Who’d think to climb on top of the tallest train car and walk back? It’s kind of the same thing with the Valkyrie Sword’s location, being beneath a floor in the Twin Dragons Tower where the ground and chest aren’t even visible.

Gotta admit, though, I do like some of the background details. But I have to ask...why is Valac here?

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So, I don't think I have comments to make on your discussion of Bloodstained.

I do find the last spoiler discussing ideas to take from a certain insect-themed title the most interesting, much as I don't have much comment for the 2nd and 3rd points. The first point on the other hand I want to get into. First, is it restricted so that healing can only be done through the button at all times (with or without selecting what item in the menu) or could you heal in the menu in "safe areas" (how tight that definition is up to interpretation)? And would the option of that button having a submenu to select which healing item you want if you hold it down also be an option? I feel the latter should be an option regardless, unless you were to change how potions work in these games entirely and base them off of percentages, where I could live with holding down for longer based on how much you want to heal by.

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41 minutes ago, Dayni said:

So, I don't think I have comments to make on your discussion of Bloodstained.

I do find the last spoiler discussing ideas to take from a certain insect-themed title the most interesting, much as I don't have much comment for the 2nd and 3rd points. The first point on the other hand I want to get into. First, is it restricted so that healing can only be done through the button at all times (with or without selecting what item in the menu) or could you heal in the menu in "safe areas" (how tight that definition is up to interpretation)? And would the option of that button having a submenu to select which healing item you want if you hold it down also be an option? I feel the latter should be an option regardless, unless you were to change how potions work in these games entirely and base them off of percentages, where I could live with holding down for longer based on how much you want to heal by.

Well, since healing items under that system would have their own slot on the equipment screen, they'd be compatible with shortcuts if you want quick switching.

As for quick healing in safe areas, that could be doable, but it would require a good deal more work to define what a safe area is. I suppose a room with no enemies, but then that would complicate platform challenge rooms a tad.

All in all it's a very messy question, as not too many action RPGs have thought about it beyond the ones that seriously focus on giving a compelling challenge like Soulsborne and the like. It's just kind of been a thing nobody's really given too much thought since it's existed basically as long as action RPGs have.

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3 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Well, since healing items under that system would have their own slot on the equipment screen, they'd be compatible with shortcuts if you want quick switching.

I just recently learned that the item slots on the shortcut shards do that, with every healing item that isn’t food. You can even use the Waystone there.

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6 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Well, since healing items under that system would have their own slot on the equipment screen, they'd be compatible with shortcuts if you want quick switching.

As for quick healing in safe areas, that could be doable, but it would require a good deal more work to define what a safe area is. I suppose a room with no enemies, but then that would complicate platform challenge rooms a tad.

All in all it's a very messy question, as not too many action RPGs have thought about it beyond the ones that seriously focus on giving a compelling challenge like Soulsborne and the like. It's just kind of been a thing nobody's really given too much thought since it's existed basically as long as action RPGs have.

See I haven't played Bloodstained at all at this stage so that part on shards hadn't sunk in. I was thinking like if you held the heal button down that it could open up the submenu (with time slowing down or not as decided by design) and that you could then choose the item and it would do the expected animations from there.

A good point on platforming challenges, though there's not as many of those that don't have obstacles that also have no enemies so this wouldn't be that much trouble (see: any clock tower-inspired rooms) and like I said as strict as needed (hell, free healing could be limited to rooms like the transition rooms that are a feature of the other Igavania titles, but I think that could be too little.).

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In this interview, Igarashi set a rule for Bloodstained bosses.:

That is...the developer who creates the boss must beat their own boss without taking a hit and only using a dagger! (We almost didn't make it...)

 

A bad thing or a good thing?

It's good in that it means a player of any skill and preparation levels should be able to defeat a boss.

The problem is that in practice, people will have more than the bare minimum. And does not taking into consideration what that extra stuff may likely include, make the bosses therefore too easy or simple?

And is anyone up to trying out Igarashi's rule themselves?

Edited by Interdimensional Observer
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3 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

In this interview, Igarashi set a rule for Bloodstained bosses.:

That is...the developer who creates the boss must beat their own boss without taking a hit and only using a dagger! (We almost didn't make it...)

 

A bad thing or a good thing?

It's good in that it means a player of any skill and preparation levels should be able to defeat a boss.

The problem is that in practice, people will have more than the bare minimum. And does not taking into consideration what that extra stuff may likely include, make the bosses therefore too easy or simple?

And is anyone up to trying out Igarashi's rule themselves?

That suggest a very high level of skill among their programmers for some of these. But on the other hand, given their intimate knowledge of how the bosses work, maybe that's a good handicap. I agree it is important to personally know a boss is beatable, but you should think about the types of information you have and if all of it is reasonable. Whoever programmed bloodless, for example, I'm sure knew exactly when she back dashes and forward dashes. But that doesn't make it good game design to give it no windup cue.

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On 7/23/2019 at 4:30 AM, Dai said:

... the Valkyrie Sword’s location, being beneath a floor in the Twin Dragons Tower where the ground and chest aren’t even visible.

The Valkyrie items have yet to be patched in on select versions of the game (the Switch comes to mind).

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1 hour ago, Karimlan said:

The Valkyrie items have yet to be patched in on select versions of the game (the Switch comes to mind).

...That’s...wtf? The Switch doesn’t have the Valkyrie Gear, but it has Iga’s Back Pack? What kinda sense does that make?

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8 minutes ago, Dai said:

...That’s...wtf? The Switch doesn’t have the Valkyrie Gear, but it has Iga’s Back Pack? What kinda sense does that make?

I'm stumped on that one, too. I'm not sure if the Switch is the only port where the Valkyrie set (some people call this the Pure Miriam set--it does change Miriam's looks, not just headgear) hasn't been patched in (PC has it for sure, PS4/XB idk).

The most recent update on the Kickstarter page informs us of what they have been working on (I've referenced this on an earlier post), which runs totally contrary to what people (especially those who got the Switch port, myself included) have been clamoring for--fixing the input lag and framerate drops. They were talking about watering down the efficacy of some Shards, possibly in preparation for online play, which strikes people who've been waiting for said changes as a literal poke in the eye.

To date, there haven't been any new updates on the Kickstarter or FB pages.

 

Edited by Karimlan
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