KickStarter Bloodstained - Koji Igarashi's new metroidvania game

[Modron]

The problem with castelvanias you can outlevel/outgear/outshard the difficulty even on hard and shiet.

 

[Grauken]

The problem with castelvanias you can outlevel/outgear/outshard the difficulty even on hard and shiet.

that's a pro, not a con

 

[Valky]

Spent a good part of the day playing the game and just got to the train with the boarding pass. Shield was nice but the small range and low damage made me go back to the mace. I found this sword that shoots out and boomerangs back to me and it's fantastic, currently my favorite weapon. Bosses so far feel like damage rush - the game because the hitboxes are jank and they move too fast without much hint on what they will attack so I just take the damage and spam the lingering fireball shard.

 

[Modron]

I found the flying sword to be inferior to just about everything, attack rate is so slow that similar damage normal swords, katanas, daggers, and spears were all far more useful. Not to mention you're left without a means to defend yourself besides moving while the blade is returning.

 

[Valky]

It gives range that nothing else besides a gun has and I usually line it up so it hits on the return, doing double damage every time I throw it out.

 

[Ash]

This game was quite the disappointment.

Balance/difficulty is shot to shit worse than SotN. Most of SotN's OP stuff only became abuseable late game.
Level design is rather bland save for an area or two (Dragon Towers, Oriental Lab)
Signposting is non-existent and not easily stumbled on by being thorough (where the fuck do I go IGA!)
Music is possibly the most disappointing aspect. Truth be told the composer has been on a decline post-SotN in hindsight. Sadly.
Enemy variety. It's been said: copy-paste galore.
DS Vania Quest design with +10 laziness
Art/Graphics/SFX/Atmosphere: it's not bad but it has the same weird vibe of the DS vanias, rather than the awesome tone of SotN. It looks pretty nice in some areas. Other times it appears lazy. I had to turn off voices sfx volume as while the voice acting was good, Miriam's battle cries in combat got annoying real fast.
Minimal innovation. This doesn't bother me much at all, I'd rather a solid game, but this is neither innovative nor solid.
The game is also pretty short. ...Almost wished for an inverted castle

It has only one pro over any other vania, and that is mechanical/systemic variety. Too bad most of it's broke in terms of balance, or useless, or identical to some other ability. It's not right when a game feels like it could be improved by streamlining.

7.5/10 - worth playing, decent, but left a lot to be desired. Play SotN, Hollow Knight, or a number of other IGAvanias instead -- Most of them are better.

It's madness that some people are claiming this game is a masterpiece and return to form. There is little to nothing remarkable about it.

 

[Valky]

1) Why do I keep finding chairs placed throughout the levels?
and
2) Why do I keep sitting in them for no reason?

 

[Modron]

You'll sit in everyone until they betray you then continue on sitting on them anyways.

 

[Damned Registrations]

1) Why do I keep finding chairs placed throughout the levels?
and
2) Why do I keep sitting in them for no reason?

I mean, you answered both your questions with your second question.

 

[Valky]

There are CHAIR MIMICS in this game, Iga you betrayed my trust.
Does he have a chair fetish?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

The best seat in Bloodstained.

 

[Valky]

I take back what I said earlier, bosses aren't damage rushes, I was just misunderstanding the nuances of the game. In my defense, there is such an incredibly limited array of movement options right now that the bosses up to this point have felt like I'm given no choice but to face tank in many situations.
I.E. I just beat the Bloodless boss, that was pretty fun. I'm back on my shield and it took at least 2 dozen tries, but I finally did it. I can't tell if I made it harder for myself by using such a short range weapon or if I'm just massively crutching on the block ability.

 

[Sukhāvatī]

Koji Igarashi's Top 5 Games of 2019

https://www.giantbomb.com/articles/koji-igarashis-top-5-games-of-2019/1100-5934/

Spoiler

1. Astral Chain
The action part of the game was done very meticulously. It was especially fun controlling the chained Legion, making the battles really enjoyable.


2. Castlevania Requiem: Symphony of the Night & Rondo of Blood
Not only are these two games I was deeply involved in, but the launch was also around the same time as Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night in Japan. It felt like it was fated.


3. Slay the Spire
This is a game I bought on Steam after seeing all the rave reviews. This reminds me of the first time I played Magic: The Gathering in English. The way the deck of cards evolve also gives it that Dominion-like quality, which was very fun to play.


4. Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Although I'm not far into the game yet, I really like this type of game and it's one of those titles where I want to sit back and take my time.

Personally, the romance element is a bit abashing, but the character development and seeing their growth in this series has a consistent quality every time.


5. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
The game I put the most time into playing! It was really special to play a game that is very close to my heart. Also, the reason it's on the list is it illustrates that I have not had the chance to play very many games this year...

 

[Valky]

He has time to play games between 2 hours of sleep a day and the japanese work ethic?

edit:
Oh my fucking god, I just spent the last 3 hours fighting Alfred until I finally managed to beat him. That was fucking ridiculous, I was using all melee until his bullshit time slow phase where I desperately fired like 5 of the seeking lightning bolts at him and finally killed him. Was using a spear this fight.

 

[pocketroid]

1) Why do I keep finding chairs placed throughout the levels?
and
2) Why do I keep sitting in them for no reason?

They heal your MP faster. I have a Shortcut set so I can summon the Grade 9 Rank 9 chair shard to quickly restore my MP.

 

[Valky]

Just found this inversion shard. Wow that is a cool idea in these types of games. I also got around rank/grade 7 of tis rozain, this is a seriously busted shard. It barely requires any mana because all you need to do is tap the button and it does damage instantly where the beam appears, and there's a cooldown for damage on enemies anyway so it's a waste of mana to just hold it on top of an enemy. So all you have to do it press the button and spin the analog stick to hit everything on the screen for 200-300 damage instantly for like 5-30 mana.

 

[kaisergeddon]

I love Bloodstained, definitely a spiritual successor to SoTN for me, and you can tell IGA really put in the work to make it feel that way, but IGA my dude, where is that free DLC??

 

[Valky]

I have millionaire and horseman's doors locked still. I got through the corridor of spikes in the entrance by chugging pizzas to outheal the damage, that was a pretty stupid gate to get past. Now I've got zangetsu's sword and killing Gebel still does nothing and I have the map otherwise full around 80%.

I'm surprised by the lack of discussion ITT on how OP the n-bit shield line is. Against most bosses besides something like Alfred who is too mobile, you can practically stand in their face spamming attack and you block all damage automatically while killing them. Very much a cheese weapon IMO.

 

[pocketroid]

I have millionaire and horseman's doors locked still. I got through the corridor of spikes in the entrance by chugging pizzas to outheal the damage, that was a pretty stupid gate to get past. Now I've got zangetsu's sword and killing Gebel still does nothing and I have the map otherwise full around 80%.

I'm surprised by the lack of discussion ITT on how OP the n-bit shield line is. Against most bosses besides something like Alfred who is too mobile, you can practically stand in their face spamming attack and you block all damage automatically while killing them. Very much a cheese weapon IMO.

I was stuck exactly where you are for a while. Would you like some hints? Or you could take your own time and figure it out.
Also, I don't have any shields I don't think, how do you get that?
The cheapest thing I've done is Invert and stand on the ceiling, and the boss isn't programmed to beat such a thing. I've only done this on one or two frustrating bosses after dying 10+ times and failing to beat them even after learning their pattern.

 

[Tigranes]

I have millionaire and horseman's doors locked still. I got through the corridor of spikes in the entrance by chugging pizzas to outheal the damage, that was a pretty stupid gate to get past. Now I've got zangetsu's sword and killing Gebel still does nothing and I have the map otherwise full around 80%.

I'm surprised by the lack of discussion ITT on how OP the n-bit shield line is. Against most bosses besides something like Alfred who is too mobile, you can practically stand in their face spamming attack and you block all damage automatically while killing them. Very much a cheese weapon IMO.

Bloodstained has quite a few different OP toys to play with might be the reason. E.g. for a while the portrait shield shard was Easy Mode, as it was a ridiculously cheap thing to always have on and be useful in 90% of situations - and remains mostly very good even after nerf.

I don't think I ever played with the shield line in my two playthroughs, favoured mobility, but perhaps I was missing something good there.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

I have millionaire and horseman's doors locked still. I got through the corridor of spikes in the entrance by chugging pizzas to outheal the damage, that was a pretty stupid gate to get past.

The Aegis Plate armor nullifies the damage from those spikes.

Now I've got zangetsu's sword and killing Gebel still does nothing and I have the map otherwise full around 80%

Were you wielding the Zangetsuto sword during the fight?

Spoiler

There's a secret involving its use during the battle.

 

[Valky]

Yeah I switched to using the zangetsuto to kill Gebel after smacking him in the face with my 16 bit shield for a bit.

 

[TigerKnee]

Yeah I switched to using the zangetsuto to kill Gebel after smacking him in the face with my 16 bit shield for a bit.

Take a look at the sword's description

but IGA my dude, where is that free DLC??

It's probably that stupid Switch port's fault and the worse thing is that it's been so long and they've only made minor improvements there - I'm not sure if it's actually salvagable

 

[kaisergeddon]

It's probably that stupid Switch port's fault and the worse thing is that it's been so long and they've only made minor improvements there - I'm not sure if it's actually salvagable

That's a shame and a big goof on their part. It did sell very well on PC anyways, but the Switch is where the money is at for these sort of games. They apparently messed up their Japanese release too. The publisher, 505 Games I think, just completely bungled it:

https://www.frontlinejp.net/2019/11...-japanese-backers-still-cannot-play-the-game/

At least they're getting to play the game finally. Hopefully 2020 brings IGA some relief so his team can concentrate moving forward on future content.

 

[Valky]

That was a really retarded gimmick to get past Gebel. The problem is that the game was never presented as a puzzle game up to this point and there was no indication that the gameplay involved esoteric environmental interactions like that. I would expect that in La Mulana, not in this game. It was totally out of character and in my opinion badly designed since there was no such gimmick earlier preparing players to expect that sort of thing. It was always "look for hidden wall", "explore every unexplored map area", and "kill enemies to get shards" that constituted the method of progression in the game. Iga you make me butthurt.

Finished the game. Den of Behemoths was cool in the sense that I got SMB 3 giant world vibes, but it still felt lazy with asset reuse, since they had already recolored enemies, and now they just resized enemies as well.

Overall, the game for me is a 7/10, on a real /10 scale, not IGN /10 scale, so above average but not perfect. I think it was definitely one of the best games this year, although it was a poor year overall, but I would absolutely recommend it even if it came out in a year with other games similar like Hollow Knight, because it has its own uniqueness in the 2D action platformer genre that Hollow Knight doesn't. I didn't have a console and missed the Castlevania DS games, so this was my first game from Koji Igarashi.



The visual fidelity is nice, everything looks very well polished, but the visual direction was a bit bland and didn't stand out or WOW me besides a few areas like the Twin Dragon Towers and Oriental Sorcery Lab. In many instances, the abundance of colorful 3D graphics ended up working against the game by giving me poor indication of where hitboxes were and leading to me taking damage in situations that I would have been able to avoid so were the game as tight and clearly indicated as Hollow Knight. But overall, it was impressive considering that spritework is largely superior in games like this and it still managed to be enjoyable throughout.
Story did as story exists to do and served to allow the gameplay to speak for itself. There was a fun few unexpected things near the end, but hey, there's a castle full of demons that you need to explore and kill demons in, you don't need anything else to incentivize playing the game from there.
Sound design was not bad, but only really serviceable. There were some more good tracks but overall it wasn't anything I could say that I remember for being particularly catchy. It did its job, but didn't go above and beyond.

Gameplay had its ups and downs. There were very few options for movement at the start of the game and so up until double jump, everything played very slowly and as a result, many of the bosses felt very fast and at times had attacks I felt were basically worthless trying to dodge and I just had to facetank and damage rush them to death. Once I got double jump though, it opened up more and I was starting to zip around boss fights in ways that made it feel like I had full control over Miriam and I could engage in an equal test of skill against the bosses. Coincidentally my favorite bosses ended up being ones after I got double jump; Bloodless, Alfred, and Gremory.

Itemization was easily the strongest point of the game, and was an absolute joy that made the game feel incredibly free for me to approach at my own playstyle. There are a staggering number of weapons in the game, with a great variety in playstyles from boots giving your full attack damage on sliding into enemies, to guns at full range, and various slashy melee weapons in between. The 8-bit coin crafts immediately caught my eye, because besides the single 8-bit coin at the start of the game, you get no others, making them very rare weapons, and additionally unique. I instantly used the 8-bit shield because a playstyle of hitting enemies with a shield really interested me from a novel/fun aspect. At this point I found out about the additional variety of uniqueness to weapons like weapon arts. The shield didn't have a weapon art, but it engaged damage blocking hitboxes during use. (Which led to a few bosses becoming incredibly trivialized, although I didn't use it on every boss) Shards also added to the itemization by being unique magic spells that you could cast or obtain as passive benefits or abilities, and familiars. This part was great, because almost every enemy in the game had a unique shard, which all could create their own playstyle through use. This kept new enemies being always fun to find so you could figure out what shard they had, but also gave you the sense that you could obtain most of the attacks that every enemy in the game possessed, which is something really inventive and fresh for a game.

Exploration of the map layout itself had a fair amount of what felt like freedom due to how large the areas felt playing through the first time, but technically all ended by the boss gates blocking progression. It didn't feel like the environmental exploration with backtracking and blocked off areas that I come to expect in this sort of game was as pronounced though. Double jump was the main ability that unlocked access to many previously inaccessible areas, but most of the ones after like inversion, water sinking, and the reflector ray only ended up being useful to go through 3 or so areas and then were forgotten (besides inversion's use in the Gremory fight, which was absolutely fantastic and great fun). In this sense the game was a lot more linear in the exploration than I hold to my standards.

Enemy variety was a mixed bag. Initially, there was a great collection of a few dozen enemies that were all unique and interesting, but as the game went on in later areas, enemies you knew previously would be reskinned and given new attacks or damage types and constitute new entries in the enemy list. I'm not opposed to this decision in principle because it can be done well like in Monster Hunter, and there were some reskins that were fairly unique that I believed they really deserved to be considered new unique enemies by their own merit. However some of them also looked barely different and didn't have enough new attack variety that it did start to feel like the budget was running out, particularly the giant enemy area which were reskins, but instead of skin, they resized previous enemies and called them new. The bosses though were all unique and great fun to fight.

I used the cheat NIGHTMARE entered as character name for my save to do my playthrough on hard mode, and while there were some frustrating times, it felt like the definitive way to play the game, as it was properly challenging (dying a dozen or more times to some bosses, actually having to learn their patterns and not being able to slam your head against a brick wall to break through). If it lacks the same challenge on the normal difficulty, I wouldn't nearly have had the same enjoyment. Overall, a pleasant experience clocking in at ~26 hours, but due to not counting for deaths, probably almost 35 hours total. I didn't grind for the most part besides 1 or 2 shards I was a bit more interested in, but doing so (also for crafting) could easily inflate the game time if you try to 100% all items. The itemization allowing so many playstyles gives it great replayability, and some time in the future I will want to come back and try a playthrough where I use boots and guns, along with other shards I ignored.