KickStarter Bloodstained - Koji Igarashi's new metroidvania game

[---]

People wanted 2D metroidvania.

All I needed

 

[Great Deceiver]

Pretty sure the gameplay will be a floaty mess.

 

[SCO]

Hirooka's artstyle is very good, it was a much needed change after the downright dreadful DoS/PoR art. Nothing will replace Kojima's extremely lavish style but Hirooka did a very good job.

There is a romhack ongoing to replace those portraits unsurprisingly.

 

[grimace]

People wanted 2D metroidvania. Got 3D meh.
Hopefully at least gameplay will be good.

I wanted high resolution pixel art, 2D sidescroller. A modern Symphony of the NIght!

Pretty sure the gameplay will be a floaty mess.

No pixel perfect jumping like Super Meat Boy controls here.

 

[RapineDel]

Is this the next Mighty Number 9?

 

[Great Deceiver]

When it comes to Castlevania, I honestly don't get the hardon people get for the SotN style. In my opinion, the older, linear games are infinitely superior. Modern Castlevanias are a combination of boring straight corridors and gimmick Pokemón weapon mechanics, there's no actual platforming and they're all too easy (with the exception of OoE, which was actually decent).

SotN itself gets a pass because it was mostly fresh at the time, despite its horribly broken mechanics and pitifully easy difficulty.

 

[dunno lah]

Metroidvanias can be difficult if you're not grinding and you're trying to kill everything in a room before moving to the next. The hardest time I've had was in Circle of the Moon's uncleansed waterways.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Platforming has always been garbage in castlevania games anyways. It's just a bunch of pixel jumps and memorizing the troll spawns of enemies near gaps. It's not like a good platformer with sustained action and tests of skill. The older castlevanias are like 60% walking along empty rooms doing nothing because you can't run and the levels are padded as fuck, or whipping the same enemy 12 times because it's stunlocked but won't die any time soon. They survived on excellent music and atmosphere. Basically the proto graphic whore game for consoles.

SoTN at least rewards exploration and changes up the gameplay frequently, even if the challenge is mostly down to your luck with where you went first and what gear you stumbled into. Sorry it has like 2 long corridors in an immense and incredibly varied map.

 

[Morality Games]

Platforming has always been garbage in castlevania games anyways. It's just a bunch of pixel jumps and memorizing the troll spawns of enemies near gaps. It's not like a good platformer with sustained action and tests of skill. The older castlevanias are like 60% walking along empty rooms doing nothing because you can't run and the levels are padded as fuck, or whipping the same enemy 12 times because it's stunlocked but won't die any time soon. They survived on excellent music and atmosphere. Basically the proto graphic whore game for consoles.

SoTN at least rewards exploration and changes up the gameplay frequently, even if the challenge is mostly down to your luck with where you went first and what gear you stumbled into. Sorry it has like 2 long corridors in an immense and incredibly varied map.

That stuff is just wrong. Almost nothing takes more than 4-6 hits to kill in Castlevania NES games, except bosses, and most things don't take more than 1-2.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Platforming has always been garbage in castlevania games anyways. It's just a bunch of pixel jumps and memorizing the troll spawns of enemies near gaps. It's not like a good platformer with sustained action and tests of skill. The older castlevanias are like 60% walking along empty rooms doing nothing because you can't run and the levels are padded as fuck, or whipping the same enemy 12 times because it's stunlocked but won't die any time soon. They survived on excellent music and atmosphere. Basically the proto graphic whore game for consoles.

SoTN at least rewards exploration and changes up the gameplay frequently, even if the challenge is mostly down to your luck with where you went first and what gear you stumbled into. Sorry it has like 2 long corridors in an immense and incredibly varied map.

That stuff is just wrong. Almost nothing takes more than 4-6 hits to kill in Castlevania NES games, except bosses, and most things don't take more than 1-2.

Sounds like he only played Castlevania 2.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Oh forgive me, only 6 hits of hitting a stunlocked enemy. That shows up like 4 times in a row (so hitting the same enemy 24 times really) in a single room. Which is nothing but a straight corridor with like 2 gaps in the floor. Such platforming, best gameplay ever.
The bosses are just as bad though, pretty much all of them die to holy water basically freezing them permanently.


Or we could look at 4 instead of 1:

 

[Hobo Elf]

Looks like more than just a corridor with two gaps. You're just acting butthurt now because you don't like Castlevania. You even proved yourself wrong with your own examples. Dunno what the problem is when there's the occasional enemy that soaks up more than 1-2 hits, that's what the special items like the Holy Water and Boomerang/Cross are for.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I mean, that'd be true if the enemy did anything except soak up hits. The guy uses holy water in the video but it's entirely wasted, the things can't even fire back at you. I'm just giving people some truth instead of the bullshit 'castlevania was the greatest platformer ever made!!!one' shit that gets slung around by people that wouldn't know decent gameplay if it bit them in the ass. Plenty of decent platformers back then, castlevanias generally weren't among them (I'd make an exception for 3, which did some cool shit with alternate routes and multiple characters.)

I mean, what exactly is great about the first castlevania? The awkward controls full of invisible recovery frames and janky stair climbing? The bosses that either wrecked your shit or stood still and died without ever fighting back? The enemies that posed no threat at all and were just there to delay you, or the enemies that were there to get free kills on anyone that tried to jump over bottomless pits without waiting 3 seconds first? The incredibly linear level design that almost never offers any alternate route at all and forces every single run to be played in the exact same way? Megaman, Mario, Ghouls n Ghosts and plenty more shit all over Castlevania. But Richter was edgy and cool while mario is a dorky cartoon guy that fights mushrooms, so who cares about gameplay, right guys?

 

[Ash]

Yeah, there's plenty classic platformers and the original Castlevanias would not be in my top picks.

 

[Somberlain]

Where did this "the original Castlevanias were the best platformers evar" strawman even come from? Who said that? Nobody in this discussion as far as I know. That said, I don't think Castlevania 1 and 2 are THAT good. However, 3, Bloodlines and Rondo of Blood are superb. Dracula X and Super Castlevania 4 are very good too.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Right, well, I'll just call your post shit and say you've never played the games in question and I'm sure you'll draw the conclusion that it's because I slightly disagree with it and not that I take some sort of opposite view.

 

[Somberlain]

 

[Morality Games]

I mean, that'd be true if the enemy did anything except soak up hits. The guy uses holy water in the video but it's entirely wasted, the things can't even fire back at you. I'm just giving people some truth instead of the bullshit 'castlevania was the greatest platformer ever made!!!one' shit that gets slung around by people that wouldn't know decent gameplay if it bit them in the ass. Plenty of decent platformers back then, castlevanias generally weren't among them (I'd make an exception for 3, which did some cool shit with alternate routes and multiple characters.)

I mean, what exactly is great about the first castlevania? The awkward controls full of invisible recovery frames and janky stair climbing? The bosses that either wrecked your shit or stood still and died without ever fighting back? The enemies that posed no threat at all and were just there to delay you, or the enemies that were there to get free kills on anyone that tried to jump over bottomless pits without waiting 3 seconds first? The incredibly linear level design that almost never offers any alternate route at all and forces every single run to be played in the exact same way? Megaman, Mario, Ghouls n Ghosts and plenty more shit all over Castlevania. But Richter was edgy and cool while mario is a dorky cartoon guy that fights mushrooms, so who cares about gameplay, right guys?

Well, for better or worse, egoraptor made the videos that most comprehensively appraised the value of the NES/SNES era Castlevanias.

 

[Somberlain]

He's pretty clueless about the later games though. At the end of the CV1 vs. CV2 video he is basically saying that Igavanias are shit because they are all about gearing and leveling until you are invincible and you can just brute force your way through everything. That's a legit complain for Symphony, Aria and Harmony but not at all true for the later games. He's saying that while showing footage from Portrait of Ruin and Order or Ecclesia where the strongest enemies can kill you with a few hits even when you have the absolute best defensive gear and some grinded levels.

 

[Morality Games]

He's pretty clueless about the later games though. At the end of the CV1 vs. CV2 video he is basically saying that Igavanias are shit because they are all about gearing and leveling until you are invincible and you can just brute force your way through everything. That's a legit complain for Symphony, Aria and Harmony but not at all true for the later games. He's saying that while showing footage from Portrait of Ruin and Order or Ecclesia where the strongest enemies can kill you with a few hits even when you have the absolute best defensive gear and some grinded levels.

Yeah, he doesn't understand them.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I mean, that'd be true if the enemy did anything except soak up hits. The guy uses holy water in the video but it's entirely wasted, the things can't even fire back at you. I'm just giving people some truth instead of the bullshit 'castlevania was the greatest platformer ever made!!!one' shit that gets slung around by people that wouldn't know decent gameplay if it bit them in the ass. Plenty of decent platformers back then, castlevanias generally weren't among them (I'd make an exception for 3, which did some cool shit with alternate routes and multiple characters.)

I mean, what exactly is great about the first castlevania? The awkward controls full of invisible recovery frames and janky stair climbing? The bosses that either wrecked your shit or stood still and died without ever fighting back? The enemies that posed no threat at all and were just there to delay you, or the enemies that were there to get free kills on anyone that tried to jump over bottomless pits without waiting 3 seconds first? The incredibly linear level design that almost never offers any alternate route at all and forces every single run to be played in the exact same way? Megaman, Mario, Ghouls n Ghosts and plenty more shit all over Castlevania. But Richter was edgy and cool while mario is a dorky cartoon guy that fights mushrooms, so who cares about gameplay, right guys?

Calm down. No one said they were the best, and the examples you used, Castlevania 1 & 4, while are decent games, are a far cry from being the best examples of the classic styled Castlevanias. Castlevania 4 is especially a way too easy game because of the new whip mechanic while the level and enemy design is still made for one directional whip action. Boss design wasn't all that great either and Castlevania 4 has the most disappointing Dracula battle of them all. If you want a truly good classic Castlevania experience then Rondo of Blood, Bloodlines, Castlevania 3 and Adventure ReBirth are where it's at. Dracula X is fine aswell. Lots of people complain that it's a gimped Rondo, but I disagree. It reuses the assets of Rondo but it's an otherwise different game.

Rondo of Blood, Castlevania 3 are filled with alternative routes that lead to alternative/secret levels. Dracula X has some too. Bloodlines has some alternative routes depending on which character you are playing as. It's again pretty clear that your familiarity with the classic series is dubious at best. And Richter was not edgy or cool until Symphony of the Night came along. In Rondo of Blood he was a typical 80's/90's anime good guy hero.

"Edgy and cool"

 

[Jick Magger]

He's pretty clueless about the later games though. At the end of the CV1 vs. CV2 video he is basically saying that Igavanias are shit because they are all about gearing and leveling until you are invincible and you can just brute force your way through everything. That's a legit complain for Symphony, Aria and Harmony but not at all true for the later games. He's saying that while showing footage from Portrait of Ruin and Order or Ecclesia where the strongest enemies can kill you with a few hits even when you have the absolute best defensive gear and some grinded levels.

That's a general issue with Egoraptor. His brain just kind've falls out of his skull when he tries to talk about any game released after 2001, and yet he likes to still pretend he knows what he's talking about when bringing them up.

Rondo of Blood, Castlevania 3 are filled with alternative routes that lead to alternative/secret levels. Dracula X has some too. Bloodlines has some alternative routes depending on which character you are playing as. It's again pretty clear that your familiarity with the classic series is dubious at best. And Richter was not edgy or cool until Symphony of the Night came along. In Rondo of Blood he was a typical 80's/90's anime good guy hero.

"Edgy and cool"

Wouldn't even say he was that edgy in SoTN. He behaves like a pretty generic shounen action hero from what little you see of him non-brainwashed (if anything, he reminds me of Jonathon Joestar). Not even Alucard was that edgy, all things considered.

 

[Somberlain]

 

[dunno lah]

The classicvanias from 1 to 4 didn't have the challenge provided by something like megaman where the enemies were faster and tracked better even with your big health bar and controllable movements. Classicvanias were a slower paced experience and didn't have really efficient enemies sometimes, but that aspect got a lot better post-CV4, from Rondo onwards. Castlevania x68k/chronicles, to me is the most well-designed classicvania as far as its moment-to-moment gameplay goes.

The only thing thats stupid about the classic controls, is the subweapon's up+attack, which made subweapon usage on stairs ridiculous.

 

[Dev_Anj]

I honestly don't get the hardon people get for the SotN style.

I obviously can't speak for everyone, but in my case, it's the "broken mechanics" that make me enjoy these games as much as I do. It's true that they do lack challenge, and the balance is often nonexistent (until Order of Ecclesia anyway) but the few games in the sub genre I like just happen to give so many tools to experiment with, and given that I like screwing around in games, it's just a big plus to me. That said, I do wish the mechanics were better balanced and there was more emphasis on a medium sized pool of interesting powers rather than a huge pool of mostly junk powers(looking at you, Aria of Sorrow's soul system ).

As for the level design, yes I do agree they're lacking in these games, especially the ones on the DS. I wish they would have atleast worked more on the Symphony style of level design, where there was an attempt to create a semi believable world that still provided some level of platforming (not much though, unfortunately). Of course, more engaging platforming wouldn't have hurt either.

By the way, have you tried the level 1 Hard mode of Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia? I wager that would certainly go some way into providing a challenge, though it does get unfair at places and suffers from a declining difficulty curve.