Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by bigbadboaz »

Sounds more or less like what it looked like all along...
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Blinge »

^I'm glad to disagree here.
Saw some gameplay.
It assuaged many of my fears actually, the movement looks alright.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Klatrymadon »

My PC can barely run it (it hovers around 50fps, often dropping far below) but I've been really enjoying this, so far. It's a lot more polished than I was expecting it to be, both in terms of how it looks and how everything works. The variety of weapon types (all with their own heft and feel) and combat manoeuvres at your disposal is really impressive - I can barely keep in my head the amount of choices I have at a given moment. The level design is really strong, or at least a lot more interesting than it has been, and the place is absolutely rammed with secrets - it feels as though any surface could be hiding something.

What's been interesting to discover is that it feels like a deliberate culmination of Igarashi's work over the last couple of decades, in the sense that it incorporates and expands upon systems from many of the games he has worked on. It has fighting game inputs for attacks similar to Symphony's spells, which you gain mastery of with extended use, like Portrait's subweapons. You gain shards (abilities) from defeated enemies as with Aria's subweapons, which become more powerful when you get duplicates like in Dawn. The weapon crafting feels like it grew out of Curse's fusion system, and you can take on quests from NPCs in a clear fleshing out of Ecclesia's idea. Even relatively minor 'gamefeel' details have been revisited, such as how the wind-up times on attacks reset each time you land on the floor, so that you can do small hops before swinging and swing again as you land to dish out damage a lot more quickly. Pretty much every 'mechanic' or 'system' from the post-1997 Castlevanias seems to have been included, or at least studied.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by MJR »

Played up until first boss; went with PC version and it runs just smooth and fine on my rig. It is surprisingly good and slick, and the 3D has been put to good use, there is a very nice sense of depth when you move around. Characters dont stand any scrutiny when viewed up close, but during the gameplay everything looks just fine. There seems to be lots of depth, lots of game mechanics and lots to do, it feels very Symphony of the night, but most importantly, this is clearly not a tired rehash but a labour of love.

Ignore the less than stellar looking screenshots, this seems to really be game worth getting for Castlevania fans.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Turrican »

Playing on ps4 here, reached second boss. The game seems built on solid foundations. It has a smoothness and a relatively quick pace that I presume must have been hard to achieve. Once you can get past the generally unpleasant look of the textures, you are going to have fun if you remotely enjoyed any of Iga's previous efforts.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by CStarFlare »

I've been having issues with the sound starting to distort and stutter. The longer it goes on the worse the game seems to run - then everything corrects itself for a while, then it happens again. It's quite frustrating - the game seems fine enough but I will probably hold off on playing further until a patch comes out.

When I first started the game it zoomed way in on the upper left corner and wouldn't zoom out until I got into the options menu and changed the settings. The water affect on the boat is quite poor. And when the little cinematic played between the boat and the village, I get the feeling it cut off a second or two too soon. It's a shame - the game needed a little more polish and I'm sure it will get it, but I'm a bit annoyed that after all this time the concerns I had seem to have been overblown but at the same time multiple bugs are barriers to immersion. The Kickstarter curse comes in many flavours.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Leandro »

Played about 4 hours, 20%of the map completed, just got the double jump ability. Decent

If you liked the GBA and DS Castlevania games (and I enjoyed them all), you will like this one. I still prefer Circle of the Moon above them all though, this one plays and feels exactly like Aria of Sorrow and later games.CoTM was a different beast
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Sumez »

CStarFlare wrote:I've been having issues with the sound starting to distort and stutter. The longer it goes on the worse the game seems to run - then everything corrects itself for a while, then it happens again. It's quite frustrating - the game seems fine enough but I will probably hold off on playing further until a patch comes out.
What platform?
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by CStarFlare »

PC. Reading the Steam forum I get the impression that these issues are at least somewhat common, though some people seem to be able to play without experiencing anything.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by MX7 »

I think you would have to be VERY BRAVE to expect a Japanese gamedev to make an action game that actually run well on PC. Especially a kickstarter project. Obviously this shouldn't be the case.

Guessing the Ps4 version is much more stable. And comes with a box for the same price. Probably substantially lower if you grab it second hand in a few weeks.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by blackoak »

I guess I've been spoiled by Hollow Knight, or the 2.5d aesthetic isn't really doing it for me, but it's a bit of a letdown here. It ticks off a lot of the Metroidvania boxes but somehow there's something disjointed and empty about it... hard to pin down. I'm surprised at how linear it is as well. It's a competent SotN clone but it doesn't seem to have learned anything about the gameplay or balancing since (in stark contrast to Hollow Knight). The liberalness with which shards are given out seems cool at first but it blends into an achievement-throttling blur of fatigue at some point.

I think I'm most disappointed with the boss fights. Maybe the 2.5d plays into this, but I feel like most of them were designed as visual setpieces rather than satisfying fights. The tower dragons is a good example, the loosey-goosey nature of the 2.5 hitboxes is one thing, but the lack of clear telegraphing is another. Foreground threats are difficult to distinguish from background decorations too--then there's the problem with the flashy shards, which often obscure so much of the screen that you can't even see the boss you're damaging, much less predict the patterns. The fight with the mage on the tower started out cool, but then the developers thought adding huge, sight obscuring slow bubbles would be a good idea. Had they been just 30% smaller, they would have made reasonable obstacles. It's little things like that, but it just feels like a way less talented development team than say, Hollow Knight or Hyper Light Drifter. And I get that combat isn't usually the strong point of metroidvanias, but... like I said, I've been spoiled now haha.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Squire Grooktook »

The game is good.

It's basically Aria of Sorrow 3. A 1:1 replica of the Igavania's controls, mechanics, exploration, everything. There's 0 innovation, but that's fine I guess.

Two biggest things it has in its favor so far are:

1) It's a bit more challenging then I expected. Regular enemies are fairly agressive, and some of the boss fights are intense and challenging. The first Zangetsu battle was hype.

2) The castle is much bigger. MUCH, MUCH BIGGER. You have to zoom in/out on the map now. This also makes traversing areas feel more like gauntlets while having lots of branching paths and exploration.

The biggest issue is the visuals. It doesn't look bad, but it doesn't look good either. The atmosphere utterly falls flat as a result, and a lot of moments that would of otherwise been nostalgia rushes or otherwise had me going "FUCK YEAH, IT'S (not)CASTLEVANIA" just did nothing for me.

They really, really should have gone with sprites or some sort of hand drawn graphics. Between all the dev time and money it took to create a buggy game (see below) that looks mediocre at best, I think it's time to put to rest the idea that 3d is cheaper/easier. Basic ugly 3d that looks like shit? Yeah, that's cheaper. But it takes just as much if not more of a time/money investment on top of sizable technical expertise to make a 3d title that looks GOOD (reminder that Mori/Daisuke said that Xrd's visuals ended up costing just as much if not more than Blazblue's sprites).
MX7 wrote:Guessing the Ps4 version is much more stable.
Technical difficulties I've run into so far on PS4:

-on day 1, the game got stuck loading forever every time I died. Would have to turn off the game and restart
-had a weird musical bug today where entering another area and then coming back caused the music in the previous area to die
-one of the shard attacks causes fps to drop by half whenever used due to the particle effect on its startup. Every single time. And this is a very useful and fun weapon that I find myself wanting to use a lot.
-The 2.5d "tower of dragons" areas also have wonky fps/slowdown and generally feels janky.
-the game straight up crashed like 5 steps away from a save room, costing me a big chunk of progress.
-I could also swear that the input handling on the weapons with charge attacks are broken somehow. That one 8-bit coin purchased greatsword utterly baffles me in terms of how I sometimes get stuck doing the full charge when I don't seem to be holding down the button at all.

I'm not universally against Kickstarters but this game has somewhat convinced me that it's not the best development environment.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Herr Schatten »

Gave it a quick try yesterday, didn‘t get to grips with the weird keyboard controls, spent ages setting up a Joy2Key configuration for my trusty USB Saturn pad, only to find out at the first door, that I need an analogue stick in order to proceed. Head —> table.

I‘ll give it another spin later with an Xbox controller, since it seems like the game is specifically designed for that.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by opt2not »

Eeeks!
Pretty nasty bug they introduced in the new patch.

https://www.siliconera.com/2019/06/19/b ... o-restart/

I guess their QA staff phoned it in on this one.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Sumez »

Wait so that wasn't even the day one patch?
Eugh this is such bullshit.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Weak Boson »

oh damn ive been playing this non stop all day wtf is wrong with me. Some spoiler free impressions after 12 hours and ~70% map completion:

Game is fun! It's very much in the vania of the DS games, for better or worse.

As with those ones it seems there's going to be a problem of balance in the abilities with some shards being coveted far above others. Still it's already clear that there are a lot of play styles and "builds" that are possible.

Overall the shard system is good. Basically just the same as Aria of Sorrow but you can upgrade shards or make new ones using materials you find. To compensate they seem to have deemphasized the weapon-crafting side of things somewhat compared to the of Sorrow games. Where the crafting system goes a bit too far imo is in the food preparation. Why am I here churning butter when there are demons everywhere ??

Now it's possible I became overleveled at points, but in general the base difficulty seems pretty low. A couple of bosses gave me the run around first few attempts but more often than not I was able to just flail through. Definitely a downgrade from Ecclesia in that regard. but considering the game has hard mode, nightmare mode, and then as dlc chaos mode it's to be expected that normal mode is more about just acquainting oneself with the castle. unfortunately you can't choose hard from the off.

I think how much meat there is in the game (outside of self-imposed challenge runs) will really depend on how those modes are handled.

The boss fights have been a bit disappointing for me. Maybe Curse of the Moon set the wrong expectations. They're not bad just not memorable as of yet. Fortunately this is made up for by the normal enemies being fun to fight for the most part.

Technical issues I've had on PC have been par for the course: the menu sometimes has a bit of a mare trying to fit itself on my old ass 5:4 monitor; and also the game crashed once early on. Annoying but soon forgotten.

The graphics are actually OK. Maybe having really low expectations helped, but there are some cool uses of the 3D in the environment designs. Obviously it's going to be inferior to 2D in some ways but it seems they tried to make the most of it and I appreciate that. The style of the game in general feels quite unique to me... it's got a kind of over-produced feeling in some places which is a bit weird but also oddly appropriate when the subject is the dreadful splendor of a baroque demon castle.

All the characters have weird pac man mouths when they speak but the voice acting is good, so the story gets a thumbs up from me for now.

The worst experience I've had with the game is the classic "where the HECK do I go now ?" feeling. And so entails a lot of backtracking and confusion. This might be partly the cost of trying to blaze through it so quickly, but I had some trouble knowing where I was supposed to get new abilities from, and where I was supposed to use them to progress. Would be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this, maybe I'm just a doofus.

Kind of weird to see backer portraits in the game but I want to thank from the bottom of my heart those patrons who chose to submit a picture of their cat instead of themselves.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by bigbadboaz »

Herr Schatten wrote:Gave it a quick try yesterday, didn‘t get to grips with the weird keyboard controls, spent ages setting up a Joy2Key configuration for my trusty USB Saturn pad, only to find out at the first door, that I need an analogue stick in order to proceed. Head —> table.
God I can't stand when devs do this with games that don't need it/fans will clearly want to play digitally. Problem has been around since arcade complilations started hitting the PS2. How hard is this to fucking figure out..!?
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Turrican »

bigbadboaz wrote:
Herr Schatten wrote:Gave it a quick try yesterday, didn‘t get to grips with the weird keyboard controls, spent ages setting up a Joy2Key configuration for my trusty USB Saturn pad, only to find out at the first door, that I need an analogue stick in order to proceed. Head —> table.
God I can't stand when devs do this with games that don't need it/fans will clearly want to play digitally. Problem has been around since arcade complilations started hitting the PS2. How hard is this to fucking figure out..!?
It's not as gimmicky as the stylus use in DOS. The second analogue is actually used for all the projectile shards, not just to open doors.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Dochartaigh »

opt2not wrote:Eeeks!
Pretty nasty bug they introduced in the new patch.

https://www.siliconera.com/2019/06/19/b ... o-restart/

I guess their QA staff phoned it in on this one.
Wait, let's revisit this since nobody else has replies...am I reading this correctly that ALL the progress on my Xbox One save will be lost/possibly corrupted when/if I update to 1.02 as also mentioned here:

https://www.gameinformer.com/2019/06/19 ... to-restart

If so, this is complete bullshit and makes me want to ask for a refund right now...

For those not following, it sounds like Xbox One games, for those who have this (probably common bug), will NOT be able to progress in the game. The ONLY option will be to start over with a brand new game (AND this update only comes out next week for XBO, so if I want to be smart about this I should just stop playing now...for a game I've literally been waiting for YEARS for by now, wait until next week, then re-play (which is boring as hell for me) the like 15+ hours I've already put into it...). Beyond pissed.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by bigbadboaz »

As awful as that sounds, don't you think if you simply wait for the next patch without updating, it will have been fixed?
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Dochartaigh »

bigbadboaz wrote:As awful as that sounds, don't you think if you simply wait for the next patch without updating, it will have been fixed?
The only way to fix the problem on XBO is to do the 1.02? update next week. If I'm reading it correctly that will NOT fix the problem on your previously-saved save games (IF they're corrupted - which there is no way to tell for sure except to play the game even longer to see if the problem creeps up...).

So even after that patch, if you want to play it safe, you have to start over from scratch no matter what.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Sumez »

EDIT: Moved to proper thread.

Game feels good. A little "heavy" and stiff around the controls compared to something like SOTN, but it owns it. First boss was awfully designed, and struggling with Zangetsu now who's a little better (playing on hard where he can kill you in two or three hits). Liking the game a lot though.

It's also one of the most buggy pieces of software I have seen in ages (PS4 version). It's incredible how many bugs I encountered before even gaining control first. The consequences range from inexplicably huge loading times, weird scene transitions, complete crashes, or short freezes (usually shortly after loading a game), while some of the more consistent ones are random words dropping out of the subtitles and being able to move around your character and hit stuff even after taking a mortal hit and being declared game over.
It's incredible how rushed this feels for a game that's been delayed more than two years.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Weak Boson »

I went through Hard mode on NG+. I was massively over leveled by virtue of some engame completion-ism, but fun to find a more optimal route through the game. Sadly wasn't able to uncover any whacky sequence breaks or alternate story paths. But I unlocked Nightmare mode which is where the real fun begins.

I was initially a bit disappointed that there didn't seem to be hard mode level caps but in Nightmare you are capped at level 1 so it all makes sense now. Decided it was time to actually play the game and started a clean save to try Nightmare mode. Whether or not I'll complete such a run will be interesting, but I had a good time clawing my way through the first area.

The genius of Order of Ecclessia for me was exemplified by the fact that a clean Hard mode level 1 cap run was a) possible and b) quite fun. But that game had a few high risk/reward items/abilities that were clearly designed to help out level 1 players. I haven't come across anything as obviously useful for such a run as that game's Death Ring, so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

The first boss was right on the line of "a devilishly hard fight that's as fun as it is ferocious" and "IGA hates me personally and I will never play his games again". The thing that tips it in favour of being fun is that the boss doesn't have so much health that it feels like bad RNG ruins it. But if the later boss fights are pure attrition that could spell doom. But hopefully with proper use of Miriam's extensive arsenal things will work out.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Vanguard »

Weak Boson wrote:I was initially a bit disappointed that there didn't seem to be hard mode level caps but in Nightmare you are capped at level 1 so it all makes sense now. Decided it was time to actually play the game and started a clean save to try Nightmare mode. Whether or not I'll complete such a run will be interesting, but I had a good time clawing my way through the first area.
Nice, I was hoping there'd be something like that. I love Ecclesia's level 1 hard mode.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by system11 »

Not sure when I'll finally get my physical copy, so I used the DL code.

The game clicked for me after the initial village sections, there's a sword drop which makes a lot of early going (I'm at about 20% map) a bit too easy though. It was proving difficult until I got that sword and boom - paper enemies. I like the graphics personally, they're "good enough" - I'd have preferred 2D but these work. I think I'd like the option to hide visibility of some accessories, for example the stone mask is excellent but I'd prefer it not to be visible since she looks like a golem in the cut scenes as a result.

The hairdresser is an awesome character/feature.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by ryu »

I'm shocked how people just brush off all the freeze bugs. "Just wait till they fix it, bro". I guess kids today and PC gamers just don't know any better.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Leader Bee »

I got the equivalent of a crissaegrim drop from low level enemies in roughly the third area, We all know how game breaking that weapon was right? Hopefully it will be outclassed soon but I have already gotten past the timed train section and it's still an effective weapon.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Klatrymadon »

That particular weapon does become less useful in the late game, but yeah, if you're exploring thoroughly and finding/crafting good stuff then you kinda have to consciously fight against becoming overpowered, if you don't want to be. I like it, though. One thing this game shows is that a of what people have pointed to (over and over for 20 years) as Symphony's mistakes in terms of balance and pacing were part of a coherent design philosophy that this game is pretty much standing by.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Weak Boson »

Oh lord. Getting past tangy zangy on nightmare took way more healing items than I'm proud of. I'm not 100% sure but it seems bosses are more aggressive/faster on nightmare. In any case I would have appreciated if his different moves had a bit more telegraphing - I feel like this might be a problem with the "human" bosses in this game in general.

Up to the next boss now with the Crissaegrim-equivalent at my side. It's probably going to be a good all-round weapon for a while but I've noticed that on Nightmare you really have to change weapons a lot to suit the situation. For example, against flying enemies you really want a greatsword for that overhead reach.

The dps of crissaegrim doesn't seem too much more than the greataxe I made with the 8-bit coin. But that is partly due to grinding out greatsword expertise shards - they're actually really easy to obtain early on. But the fact that you don't have to time your attacks mean it will always be a go-to for bats, medusa heads and those darned toads.

In general the yellow shards seem to be quite good investments. At max rank (requiring end-game upgrade materials) they become white "passive" shards. You thus get a nice boost to your abilities plus you can still equip one to double down on those effects. eg, getting a massive luck boost for grinding.

EDIT: turns out there's a pretty easy cheese for the boss.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Sumez »

Up at just over 70% on my Hard Mode playthrough. Started the game on Hard, so it's not NG+, and I haven't tried the easier difficulty, but the game is plenty challenging to me. If you have issues with the game being too easy, just start on Hard (entering "NIGHTMARE" as your save file name unlocks all three difficulties). I think it's the better way to play, but it also highlights both the strengths and (especially) the flaws of the game's immediate gameplay...

While I do like a lot about the game, I'll say I have a big issue with the "magic" balance. While it's fun to play around with a lot of the available shard magic (and easy to get stuck just reusing the same - I'm still tearing through bosses and larger enemies with an upgraded True Arrow, picked up in one of the earliest areas), I feel like it's so powerful the game pretty much asks you to rely on it constantly. While that's better than it not seeing any use at all, my melee weapons are almost useless in comparison as long as I have MP left, due to my vast array of spells that will just clear out rooms in a couple of button presses.
This removes a lot of the potential finesse driven combat gameplay, in the favor of the much simpler metagame of resource management, which just isn't as fun to me. While I could just refuse to rely too much of magic (which I do when I can get away with it), the size and aggressiveness of some of the monsters, as well as the constellations in some rooms where everything just comes at you at once, the game pretty much wants you to ravage them with your shards.
It doesn't help that I never feel like I can rely on where an enemy's hitbox is, with all the 3D going on, and an often relatively short melee range. This is an even bigger problem in boss fights, where it's almost impossible to know where to feel safe against any boss larger than a regular person. In general, a majority of the bosses I have fought have been absolutely terrible, and by far the worst aspect of the game. It's almost constantly hard to see what attacks are coming, and where it's safe to stand, and the camera feels like it's actively trying to make matters worse. Some of the worst examples are Craftwork (big hand) and the twin dragons.
Most bosses I won through the help from healing potions and/or shard spamming, and only very rarely did I manage to (or need to) delve into their patterns to learn how to dodge and counter. And even when I did, it often didn't seem to help me much. Alfred would still find ways to trap me into situations where dodging isn't an option, and Bloodless mostly just felt completely luck based.
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