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

[Sumez]

But then you have Morrigan in CvS2

[it290]

However, creating beautiful and fully animated high resolution hand-drawn line art for your 2D game is probably the most time consuming and expensive approach of all.

Do you think that's true? I feel like pixel art requires a degree of specialized knowledge and precision that isn't quite as common as fluency in 2D animation. I've known a lot of animators, both 2D and 3D, both when I was in art school and professionals outside of school, and hand-drawn techniques are still something that people are trained in at school, whereas I don't know if the same type of training really exists for pixel animation (although obviously a lot of the concepts could be transferred over). It also occurs to me that hand-drawn frames could probably be produced in a similar way to most American cartoons, where inhouse artists draw a few keyframes for every second of animation and then the rest is outsourced to Korea; that process seems less feasible to me with pixel art for some reason.

[Weak Boson]

Well, finished up the last boss of Nightmare mode, not sure I'll bother with the optional bosses. I'm still interested in the DLC playable characters and modes they're supposed to be adding, but I don't think there's much further to be gained from increasing the base difficulty over Nightmare mode.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Game of the year.

[Herr Schatten]

Taking it slow, I just finished the train stage. The game is fun, but am I really supposed to be tearing through bosses like that? I didn‘t even farm for anything, just progressed normally, but apart from Zangetsu, all the bosses went down all too quickly. I didn‘t even get the chance to develop any strategies, as haplessly mashing buttons seemed to do the trick just fine.

[Steamflogger Boss]

It's a bit on the easy side for sure.

[Sumez]

If you're playing on hard mode I guarantee you won't tear through the bosses, I had a lot of trouble with most of them.

Usually not really in the fun way, though :\

[CStarFlare]

Has there been any indication on whether bug fixes are coming? I got a few emails about them working on making the Switch version better, but the PC version still has several big issues. If they could fix whatever crashes my game on the crafting screen I'd be extremely happy - and if they also fixed Meriam's audio bug the game would be a pure joy. I'm in the grind for drops/crafting endgame and I'm more than a little frustrated that three weeks after launch they've not fixed either issue or as far as I know expressed an interest in doing so.

(Obviously Switch port is in horrible condition and needs the most attention but I imagine that's a much bigger project than a few bandages on the other versions)

[it290]

I bought the Switch version at launch and after completing 98% of the map ended up double-dipping on the PS4 version to play on my Pro. It really is a night and day difference between the two, especially in terms of responsiveness. A big reason SOTN is so fun is because Alucard just feels so great to control, and although Miriam is still not a patch on that, the PS4 version is leagues ahead of the Switch in this regard. TBH I thought the game was fun on both platforms, but unless they fix the input lag and the more severe fps drops/stutter on the Switch there's no way I'll be going back to it even for handheld play. I really hope they prioritize those over cleaning up the texture jank, because even though the game looks pretty gross in parts that has far less impact on the overall experience.

[Steamflogger Boss]

I had another big out that cost me about 20 minutes. The only real negative with this game imo.

[Leader Bee]

Really surprised that the majority of issues with this game are on consoles, Japanese Devs don't tend to have experience with pc but I'm still yet to experience a single issue

[Weak Boson]

The PC version definitely has some rough edges. Maybe some parts of the game are more at risk than others, but I've had a fair few instances of frame rate drops and inexplicably long load times. The only major recurring bug I've had has been the one where Miriam's head disappears on the menu screen and then exiting the menu causes the game to crash. (I'm not 100% sure because I never needed to, but I think you may be able to save your progress if this happens using the suspend feature)

None of this ruined the game for me, but fair to say a bit more polish would be appreciated.

[Herr Schatten]

LOL, that shield weapon you can craft from the 8 bit coin is some broken shit. I was using it against Bloodless, and it blocked every single of her attack while dishing out the damage. All I had to do was crouching in front of her and mashing the attack button.

I‘m playing on PC, but luckily, I haven‘t experienced any crashes, bug or glitches yet. Do they tend to appear only later in the game or have I just been lucky so far?

[ryu]

The few times the games crashed for me always happened when checking the bookshelves.

[Dochartaigh]

So I'm at the last (real) boss, but don't want to end the game quite yet. Think my map is 98% or something. So besides finishing the map, what else is left to do? Go and find all the shards and cooler weapons?

I also don't think I've crafted? one single meal (like for the women next to where the shop keeps asking me about) - can't figure that out...need to find a tutorial to see if I'm missing anything (kinda hate 'crafting' in games so it might not be for me anyway). Have barely crafted any items with the guy in the next room either (commonly upgrade shards there though).

[Leader Bee]

Never really understood the shop for weapons in CV games, overpriced and you'll usually find the same weapon or something better a short while later anyway.

[BrianC]

Never really understood the shop for weapons in CV games, overpriced and you'll usually find the same weapon or something better a short while later anyway.

Yeah, much better stuff is available for crafting and the initial sell price is insanely low, as well.

Spoiler

The stinginess of the shopkeeper soft of makes sense, story wise, given that she turns out to be the real villain.

[Weak Boson]

^on that note

Spoiler

I was wondering if there would be some mechanic where if you sell her shards she gets more powerful in the final fight, or something like that, but never tested it out. probably a bit too much to hope for ?

[it290]

So I'm at the last (real) boss, but don't want to end the game quite yet. Think my map is 98% or something. So besides finishing the map, what else is left to do? Go and find all the shards and cooler weapons?

Spoiler

Have you done the 8-bit nightmare stage yet? Pretty short and not too amazing, but nice tune and decently challenging. There are a few optional bosses too if you haven't completed those yet. This game does seem super boss-poor in both quantity and quality when put up against SOTN, though.

I also don't think I've crafted? one single meal (like for the women next to where the shop keeps asking me about) - can't figure that out...need to find a tutorial to see if I'm missing anything (kinda hate 'crafting' in games so it might not be for me anyway). Have barely crafted any items with the guy in the next room either (commonly upgrade shards there though).

A lot of the base items you need to create the simple meals are staples like eggs, flour, milk, etc. that you need to buy from the shopkeeper instead of finding as an enemy drop. Once you get a few of those going the more complex ones generally become easier to craft, and they're worth it for the stat boosts in particular—as someone mentioned earlier, consuming all of the drinks drastically improves your MP recharge and basically gives you double/triple or nearly infinite MP depending on which spells you use. You probably don't need any of that with where you're at in the game, but having those options is fun if you're going for a specific build.

[it290]

Never really understood the shop for weapons in CV games, overpriced and you'll usually find the same weapon or something better a short while later anyway.

It's good if you need a base item to craft something more complicated, and for completing some of the quests, but yeah, generally not that useful.

[Dochartaigh]

Have you done the 8-bit nightmare stage yet? Pretty short and not too amazing, but nice tune and decently challenging. There are a few optional bosses too if you haven't completed those yet. This game does seem super boss-poor in both quantity and quality when put up against SOTN, though.

Yup, did that and the weird slot machine guy, the carpenter (forget if that was an optional boss or not...he just sits there forever after I beat him which I thought was weird), I'll have to pull-up a list and see if I got them all.

A lot of the base items you need to create the simple meals are staples like eggs, flour, milk, etc. that you need to buy from the shopkeeper instead of finding as an enemy drop. Once you get a few of those going the more complex ones generally become easier to craft, and they're worth it for the stat boosts in particular—as someone mentioned earlier, consuming all of the drinks drastically improves your MP recharge and basically gives you double/triple or nearly infinite MP depending on which spells you use. You probably don't need any of that with where you're at in the game, but having those options is fun if you're going for a specific build.

I'll give it a try. I honestly still get my butt kicked by even regular enemies on occasion so more stats is always good. I was never buying non-potion type stuff from the shopkeeper so that's probably why I could never make anything.

[Austin]

It's worth trying to make as many exotic meals as you can since specific unique ones will give you a permanent stat buff the first time you consume them. They also tend to give you a good chunk of health back as well, so crafting meals is another way of having more ways to heal yourself.

[Sumez]

The biggest feature of meals is crafting all the drinks/shakes, as they all add to your MP generation, and once you've got most of them down, your magic will start regenerating almost as fast as you can use it. It's just one of many ways to get hilariously OP in this game.

[Weak Boson]

^This man speaks the truth. I followed this advice and it makes a huge difference, especially in Nightmare mode where your max mp doesn't increase as much.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Yep, it's pretty important.

[Steamflogger Boss]

So the game really likes crashing when you have the 8bit nightmare crafting item. Crashed like 5 times but thankfully after you get the crafting guy to load once after getting it that solves the issue.

Beat the game killing everything (yes the stupid secret train guy too) and 100% map completion. Since the game shipped in such a shit state you can't even craft everything in the game w/o updating/patching. What a fucking joke.

[Turrican]

PS4. I got the platinum trophy; the game did never hard crash again after that first pre-patch occurrence. Despite feeling like most of the true challenge and fun are still ahead of me (ng+, crazy hoarding and crafting, medal bosses), I feel I can now say that the developers strived hard and accomplished what they aimed at. No small feat coming from the insidious Kickstarter background... However this game is already:

- a modern take on SotN wich draws the better elements from the half a dozen vanias which came in the timeframe 2001-2007 and thus improves on the formula in several way. Compared to '97 we have: higher default challenge. Better bosses patterns. More post-ending content and play modes. All stuff that we had gotten alredy in igavanias 2001-2007, but not in the original '97 title.

- a rather unique case of new franchise that doesn't ape the inpiration source but actually feels like the creators rightfully were repossessing from it what they had imbued in it to begin with. You can almost visualize Iga getting closer to SotN and shouting "buraddo schiiruuu!!" and sucking out all the crazy ideas he had injected as scenario writer. Familiar singing songs, chairs to sit in, librarian to molest from below, enochian bestiary, Japanese overtones, and the list goes on.
The interesting side effect of this is that Bloodstained actually puts a retrospective wedge (or rather, augments it) between the "classic" Castlevania 1986-1993, which it really never feels like an homage or a sequel or even remotely related, and the post 1997 Igavanias, which now inevitably feel like the nurturing of stuff bloomed here today.

- most of all, if you take notice of this list that many years ago I helped to compile, and compare it to RotN's credits: you can easily see that although Iga produced a variety of games for the Castlevania brand, actually just a core group of 4 shares the core trio of Iga (Producer, Scenario) - Shutaro (Chief Program) - Curry (Player Program). These 4 are Aria, Dawn, Portrait and Ecclesia. This trio of creators did 4 portable titles, each arguably tweaking and improving over the previous, and ten years later they were given a very rare opportunity to make a 5th one, with a significant budget and for a modern tv home system. By doing this, by achieving their results in RotN they retrospectively charged their previous efforts with a special kind of cultural significance... Because if you think it a bit, it's absolutely not the norm that you can get the same people working on their core ideas a decade later and not failing spectacularly. Star Trek and Star Wars aren't the same a decade after their inception, nor they are handled by much of the original core staff. Which hasn't gone to do something else by carrying the torch, by the way.

What I'm trying to say is perhaps something along these lines. Having Iga-Shutaro-Curry on Bloodstained in 2019 is a bit as if you were given Yu Suzuki not doing Sword of Vermilion or Shenmue, but another significant OutRun. Having these three doing their stuff is better than "parmesan on top of macaroni" as we in Italy would say: it's actually better than having the (excellent!) Christian Whitehead taking the reins of Sonic with CD/Mania; it's actually better than having the (sublime!) Omar Cornut making the definitive take on Dragon's Trap. Having Iga-Shutaro-Curry doing Bloodstained is like if you could reassemble the totality of Sonic Team, nahh it's even better actually. It's something like if you could have evoked Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda and Kazuo Miyagawa to do another of their movies in early 2000s.

Of course, the 5.5 millions and the fact that Iga-Shutaro-Curry brought along Michiru Yamane, Ayami Kojima, and down to the tiniest cameos, Robbie Belgrade... That's just a supreme way of icing the cake.

That's what I feel I have to say about the game for now.

[Steamflogger Boss]

PS4. I got the platinum trophy; the game did never hard crash again after that first pre-patch occurrence. Despite feeling like most of the true challenge and fun are still ahead of me (ng+, crazy hoarding and crafting, medal bosses), I feel I can now say that the developers strived hard and accomplished what they aimed at. No small feat coming from the insidious Kickstarter background... However this game is already:

- a modern take on SotN wich draws the better elements from the half a dozen vanias which came in the timeframe 2001-2007 and thus improves on the formula in several way. Compared to '97 we have: higher default challenge. Better bosses patterns. More post-ending content and play modes. All stuff that we had gotten alredy in igavanias 2001-2007, but not in the original '97 title.

- a rather unique case of new franchise that doesn't ape the inpiration source but actually feels like the creators rightfully were repossessing from it what they had imbued in it to begin with. You can almost visualize Iga getting closer to SotN and shouting "buraddo schiiruuu!!" and sucking out all the crazy ideas he had injected as scenario writer. Familiar singing songs, chairs to sit in, librarian to molest from below, enochian bestiary, Japanese overtones, and the list goes on.
The interesting side effect of this is that Bloodstained actually puts a retrospective wedge (or rather, augments it) between the "classic" Castlevania 1986-1993, which it really never feels like an homage or a sequel or even remotely related, and the post 1997 Igavanias, which now inevitably feel like the nurturing of stuff bloomed here today.

- most of all, if you take notice of this list that many years ago I helped to compile, and compare it to RotN's credits: you can easily see that although Iga produced a variety of games for the Castlevania brand, actually just a core group of 4 shares the core trio of Iga (Producer, Scenario) - Shutaro (Chief Program) - Curry (Player Program). These 4 are Aria, Dawn, Portrait and Ecclesia. This trio of creators did 4 portable titles, each arguably tweaking and improving over the previous, and ten years later they were given a very rare opportunity to make a 5th one, with a significant budget and for a modern tv home system. By doing this, by achieving their results in RotN they retrospectively charged their previous efforts with a special kind of cultural significance... Because if you think it a bit, it's absolutely not the norm that you can get the same people working on their core ideas a decade later and not failing spectacularly. Star Trek and Star Wars aren't the same a decade after their inception, nor they are handled by much of the original core staff. Which hasn't gone to do something else by carrying the torch, by the way.

What I'm trying to say is perhaps something along these lines. Having Iga-Shutaro-Curry on Bloodstained in 2019 is a bit as if you were given Yu Suzuki not doing Sword of Vermilion or Shenmue, but another significant OutRun. Having these three doing their stuff is better than "parmesan on top of macaroni" as we in Italy would say: it's actually better than having the (excellent!) Christian Whitehead taking the reins of Sonic with CD/Mania; it's actually better than having the (sublime!) Omar Cornut making the definitive take on Dragon's Trap. Having Iga-Shutaro-Curry doing Bloodstained is like if you could reassemble the totality of Sonic Team, nahh it's even better actually. It's something like if you could have evoked Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda and Kazuo Miyagawa to do another of their movies in early 2000s.

Of course, the 5.5 millions and the fact that Iga-Shutaro-Curry brought along Michiru Yamane, Ayami Kojima, and down to the tiniest cameos, Robbie Belgrade... That's just a supreme way of icing the cake.

That's what I feel I have to say about the game for now.

Bravo.

This game reminded me of how much I love this genre when it's well done.

[Leandro]

PS4. I got the platinum trophy; the game did never hard crash again after that first pre-patch occurrence. Despite feeling like most of the true challenge and fun are still ahead of me (ng+, crazy hoarding and crafting, medal bosses), I feel I can now say that the developers strived hard and accomplished what they aimed at. No small feat coming from the insidious Kickstarter background... However this game is already:

- a modern take on SotN wich draws the better elements from the half a dozen vanias which came in the timeframe 2001-2007 and thus improves on the formula in several way. Compared to '97 we have: higher default challenge. Better bosses patterns. More post-ending content and play modes. All stuff that we had gotten alredy in igavanias 2001-2007, but not in the original '97 title.

- a rather unique case of new franchise that doesn't ape the inpiration source but actually feels like the creators rightfully were repossessing from it what they had imbued in it to begin with. You can almost visualize Iga getting closer to SotN and shouting "buraddo schiiruuu!!" and sucking out all the crazy ideas he had injected as scenario writer. Familiar singing songs, chairs to sit in, librarian to molest from below, enochian bestiary, Japanese overtones, and the list goes on.
The interesting side effect of this is that Bloodstained actually puts a retrospective wedge (or rather, augments it) between the "classic" Castlevania 1986-1993, which it really never feels like an homage or a sequel or even remotely related, and the post 1997 Igavanias, which now inevitably feel like the nurturing of stuff bloomed here today.

- most of all, if you take notice of this list that many years ago I helped to compile, and compare it to RotN's credits: you can easily see that although Iga produced a variety of games for the Castlevania brand, actually just a core group of 4 shares the core trio of Iga (Producer, Scenario) - Shutaro (Chief Program) - Curry (Player Program). These 4 are Aria, Dawn, Portrait and Ecclesia. This trio of creators did 4 portable titles, each arguably tweaking and improving over the previous, and ten years later they were given a very rare opportunity to make a 5th one, with a significant budget and for a modern tv home system. By doing this, by achieving their results in RotN they retrospectively charged their previous efforts with a special kind of cultural significance... Because if you think it a bit, it's absolutely not the norm that you can get the same people working on their core ideas a decade later and not failing spectacularly. Star Trek and Star Wars aren't the same a decade after their inception, nor they are handled by much of the original core staff. Which hasn't gone to do something else by carrying the torch, by the way.

What I'm trying to say is perhaps something along these lines. Having Iga-Shutaro-Curry on Bloodstained in 2019 is a bit as if you were given Yu Suzuki not doing Sword of Vermilion or Shenmue, but another significant OutRun. Having these three doing their stuff is better than "parmesan on top of macaroni" as we in Italy would say: it's actually better than having the (excellent!) Christian Whitehead taking the reins of Sonic with CD/Mania; it's actually better than having the (sublime!) Omar Cornut making the definitive take on Dragon's Trap. Having Iga-Shutaro-Curry doing Bloodstained is like if you could reassemble the totality of Sonic Team, nahh it's even better actually. It's something like if you could have evoked Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda and Kazuo Miyagawa to do another of their movies in early 2000s.

Of course, the 5.5 millions and the fact that Iga-Shutaro-Curry brought along Michiru Yamane, Ayami Kojima, and down to the tiniest cameos, Robbie Belgrade... That's just a supreme way of icing the cake.

That's what I feel I have to say about the game for now.

Well said. I also thought this game was an amazing accomplishment,

[Sumez]

I really liked Bloodstained, but I truly wish I could have been as excited for it as Turrican is.

I feel like if said trio got to work on a smaller production with a simpler game engine, and fewer people involved in the actual game creation, we could have gotten a tighter product that was closer to their original titles, and hopefully with a much less clumsy overall feel.