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

[ryu]

Okay now I understand.

People are praising this game so much because they're afraid openly criticizing it could cause Iga's reputation to drop to the point where there won't be a sequel.

[Weak Boson]

^damn right. if Bloodstained gets panned IGA will be trapped in the spirit dimension and we wont get another game until the next solar eclipse !

[Sumez]

Isn't the next eclipse in like 2020? No way they'll have anything out that fast.

[Steamflogger Boss]

Of course I want a sequel. The game is legit good aside from the bugs. Not many games I have loved this gen but I loved this one.

[Turrican]

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.

I doubt we can realistically ask for something even closer. I guess my positive attitude stems from a concern that was similar to yours; that is, that the choice of Unreal Engine truly carried the risk to totally ruin the outcome. instead, what we got is something that works as the previous titles despite Unreal.

Sure, a tighter project, a smaller team, a more focused approach: all this sounds good, but also sounds like the indie scene. Iga might have come up with a Fez or a Cave Story, or an Iconoclasts under those premises... That's certainly a possibility. However, we shouldn't let the nostalgia goggles cloud our view, and remember that despite being largely sprite-based, Symphony of the Night wasn't the result of an indie session of garage coding. There was corporate Konami behind, meaning money, sufficient for a series of remarkable features like: inclusion of FMVs; Rika Muranaka's managing the use of a singer abroad for the shocking ending vocal theme; animators and coders getting time to try polygons and any special effect they could think of; hiring famous seiyuu from the anime world for full voice dubbing; money for English dub and localization; contracting illustrator Ayami Kojima not just for cover purpose but for the intruductory manga as well; and so on.

Sure, thirty years later you can boot up SotN on the Psone and be fooled it's a nice little indie gem, "it looks just like Axiom Verge or so"; but hear the sound carefully, and pay attention to the visuals and you'll see nothing could be farther from the truth.

Besides, I'm not sure it's a budget issue: with a smaller budget Inti nailed an homage to Dracula's Curse like we had never experienced before (and it's completely legitimate to prefer CotM on purely gameplay terms to RotN, exactly like going back to Dracula's Curse and Symphony and discovering the the first has a dose of challenge still unmatched by the latter). Thing is: CotM required that level of presentation (sufficient enough to focus on pure action, let's say), while RotN requires an aural and visual oomph to truly feel like a successor the costly game it descends from.

I also have a fair share of criticism in regards to RotN... Mostly on the backgrounds rendering and lighting. I suppose a more mature use of textures and art direction could bring some crucial improvements in this field. But for now I'm just too happy to enjoy the fact that the game basics haven't been crippled by Unreal.

[Sumez]

Wait, at what point did I as much as hint at SOTN being reminiscent of a tightly budgeted indie title? :\ Even comparing it to Axiom Verge sounds insulting to me.

The game is a feast of splendor. It's something Bloodstained maybe could have been if the Kickstarter money were used differently and the game had been able to focus on a more clear direction - but instead they went towards janky 3D towers, dubious boss fights, and longer loading times.
What I'm talking about is a different thing entirely, and yeah it might be closer to Curse of the Moon, but at this point I think that's just where we need to look if we want sustainable, tight game design.

[Steamflogger Boss]

I thought this was better than SOTN. Haven't played that in awhile though.

[Squire Grooktook]

while RotN requires an aural and visual oomph to truly feel like a successor the costly game it descends from.

And that's where it kinda fails for me =/

[Leader Bee]

I thought this was better than SOTN. Haven't played that in awhile though.

Agree entirely

[neorichieb1971]

Has anyone from the kickstarter got their other goodies yet?

I paid for the $100 tier and I have only received the game thus far.

[CIT]

I haven’t received anything yet!

[Turrican]

They said loot and swag was shipping in August... Some tiers might get processed before others. With some luck, they're organizing tube shipments for the rolled, not folded Amano and Kojima posters. Crossing fingers for that.

[neorichieb1971]

Thanks, thought I was left out.

[Marc]

Better than SOTN? OK, now I'm interested.

[Austin]

I'd definitely argue it's better than some of the handheld Vanias, but SotN? Nah. Not to me personally anyway.

[it290]

The challenge level/power curve is at least better than SOTN, and some of the added systems from the later games add more variety. It's nowhere near SOTN in atmosphere, boss design, or the sublime feel of the controls, though.

[Herr Schatten]

I took my sweet time, but I finally finished it. Overall, I liked it quite a bit, even though I feel that Curse of the Moon was a tighter package. I didn‘t grind or farm for anything, just played with what I picked up along the way.

Bosses were a bit of a letdown, and I also found the recurring ones better in CotM, even though those tended to boil down to rigid pattern memorization there. I think in RotN, I only fought about half of the bosses the way I was supposed to, the rest I just cheesed with the 8/16/32-Bit Shield Weapon, including the final pair. I enjoyed the optional bosses (Master Carpenter, Millionaire‘s Bane, Revenant, 8-Bit Overlord), but I didn‘t bother with the post game one.

I had to look up how to get to the Aegis Plate. It would have been nice if the chest had appeared on the map on the first visit to the tower, before you got the shard to reach it. Also I‘d have liked some more hints on what to do in the fight against Gebel, not just a vague remark in the Tsangetsuto‘s item description. I found it weird that at one point a regular shard from a common enemy was needed to proceed. I wonder if maybe the strange turtle man, the one CotM boss not returning in RotN, was originally planned as the boss for that area, but got cut for whatever reason.

Spoiler

It took me a couple of tries to find out that in the fight against Bael, the heads constantly regenerate, and you‘re supposed to concentrate on the one currently ridden by Dominique. Once I stopped wasting my resources on the other heads, Bael went down in no time.

[Steamflogger Boss]

I played through SOTN again recently and my comment stands.

I will be revisiting Bloodstained again soon with some self imposed challenges.

[opt2not]

I put Bloodstained on hold till the Switch version is more playable. But in the meantime I went back and finished Aria of Sorrow, and thinking about, I kinda like it better than SOTN, tbh...

[BIL]

Aria does some good stuff! The most violent man of gaming weighs in

[Steamflogger Boss]

Aria is a masterpiece.

[Leader Bee]

I found it weird that at one point a regular shard from a common enemy was needed to proceed.

I bet that must have really pissed off those that werent shard farming as they went. You're talking about the underwater section right and the shard that you use to push yourself along?

I'm trying to stay away from too many hints but i'm glad I looked into this one.

[Sumez]

I found that one pretty obvious. A surprise, sure, but I wish the game had relied more on that kind of stuff. Like, actually using its central mechanic as a relevant one.

If it was a rare drop it would be dumb of course, but they drop like every second kill?

[Leader Bee]

If it was a rare drop it would be dumb of course, but they drop like every second kill?

Took me maybe 10 minutes of entering the room repeatedly with a luck of 25

[sky-13]

If it was a rare drop it would be dumb of course, but they drop like every second kill?

Took me maybe 10 minutes of entering the room repeatedly with a luck of 25

I’m pretty sure that the Aqua Jet shard was originally going to be dropped from a cut boss.

All the bosses from Curse of the Moon appear in RotN except the stage 2 boss, who happens to shoot an aqua jet as his attack.

[Leader Bee]

Seems weird they'd get all the special bosses hidden behalf be locked doors open ntovthe game but not a normal story progressession one.

[Weak Boson]

I got that water shard while backtracking in a hurry "yeah shoot water whatever" I thought. Followed by several hours of "where do I go ????"

I’m pretty sure that the Aqua Jet shard was originally going to be dropped from a cut boss.

All the bosses from Curse of the Moon appear in RotN except the stage 2 boss, who happens to shoot an aqua jet as his attack.

This makes a lot of sense.

[Herr Schatten]

I got that water shard while backtracking in a hurry "yeah shoot water whatever" I thought. Followed by several hours of "where do I go ????"

The exact same thing happened to me. I had already picked up the shard, but I had only quickly tried it outside of the water and had dismissed it as one of the many not particularly useful ones.

[Turrican]

I’m pretty sure that the Aqua Jet shard was originally going to be dropped from a cut boss.

Interesting theory, however it must be said that Aria did use the same trick if I remember correctly (in game progression advanced by regular souls instead of unmissable plot checkpoints or "bosses").

I think it's definitely something that adds to the formula, and not a "flaw" in game design. It was great to see the rection online in the first month of gameplay, where people were genuinely puzzled and stuck at some points. Some uf us didn't think to hunt the acquatic soul, others had not connected the bromide with the librarian, and others had finally got to invert the castle but didn't know where to search every nook & cranny for the spikebreaking suit.

I watched all this realtime, on the social networks, and was amazed that in 2019 a thirty-hours-or-so software pieces was able to generate enough excitement to see players around trying to figure out something in the game by themselves... Just as if we were still living in an offline world...

In order to generate this positive effect (because a no-brainer progression would have meant a very, very short-lived experience) I think every possible contraption used by developers was fair game.

That's incidentally something that Iga brought again in 2002 with HoD compared to CotM. The overall difficulty was pathetic, but the backtracking, and the puzzling mesh of the two intertwined castles made the progression much better, in the sense that players usually got stuck at some points. That was the difference between Circle: an great action game just aping the SotN layout, and Harmony, a flawed game that had inherited in its bone marrow the two things that truly made SotN: atmosphere and non-linearity.

[__SKYe]

Just wanted to share that beloved channel Archipel just released a very nice interview with IGA, mostly about Bloodstained.