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.
