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 »

I mean.. didn't IGA learn anything watching Inafune crash and burn? The longer this goes, the more it looks like the exact same scenario - and that unfortunately includes quality of the game.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by JBC »

This game was looking pretty awful before it was delayed recently. I hope they scrap those awful melting character portraits and pointless neverending dialogue.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Ghegs »

Udderdude wrote:Yeah, it's the usual .. too many backer rewards, bit off more than they can chew, gotta scale it back. On the other hand, nobody is that big on Mac or Linux gaming anyway.
Apple is also deprecating OpenGL from their OS so many developers have stopped working on Mac ports completely.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by CStarFlare »

Udderdude wrote:On the other hand, nobody is that big on Mac or Linux gaming anyway.
Eh, my Air goes with me everywhere and as long as a game isn't too resource intensive it's the most convenient way to game. I hadn't really considered playing this on my Mac, but that's mostly because I was planning to use a control (which doesn't travel with me). Annoying for platforms to be dropped but not out of character for Kickstarter projects which are clearly struggling to make it to the finish line.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

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Image

oh no..
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Blinge »

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

Post by Weak Boson »

What's wrong with crafting ? Don't most of the other Igavanias let you create/upgrade weapons with enemy drops?

Anyway happy that the release window is summer. I know it's been slated for 2019 for a while but I took that to mean December :lol:
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Necronopticous »

Goddamn this game is ugly. I'm fully reserving judgement on the experience until I've actually had a chance to play it (the spin off was way better than I would have ever guessed) but fuck the art & animation is atrocious. Why does everything look so slow and stiff? Jesus!
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Herr Schatten »

Necronopticous wrote:Goddamn this game is ugly. I'm fully reserving judgement on the experience until I've actually had a chance to play it (the spin off was way better than I would have ever guessed) but fuck the art & animation is atrocious. Why does everything look so slow and stiff? Jesus!
I only ever expected it to look as good as the horrible PSP remake of Rondo, so I'm actually pleasantly surprised that it looks marginally better. I feel like I already got my Kickstarter contribution's worth with Curse of the Moon, so by now I don't really care how RotN will turn out. I won't complain if it's actually fun to play, though.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Sumez »

I know I've continuously been at the forefront of criticizing this game's visual look, but to be honest as long as it's zoomed well out for the gameplay, it look perfectly serviceable to me. When they zoom in for "action scenes" or whatever it looks like absolute garbage, though. I hope that's mostly just something they are doing for the trailers.

And I'm in the same boat, I already feel like I got my money's worth from COTM, so I'm not too hung up on ROTN.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by evil_ash_xero »

Didn't WayForward get involved with this, semi-recently? They should have been tapped early on. The game's kind of iffy looking, but has gotten better. It still looks a bit too funky, though.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Sumez »

Really split on WayForward... Their track record is actually a lot worse than Inti Creates. They have a lot of completely inoffensive, but also massively uninteresting games. The only genuinely good WayForward game I can think of is Contra 4, and that's probably mostly due to Sean Velasco (Yacht Club).
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by BrianC »

To be fair, a few of Wayforward's misses were probably due to them being contract licensed games with a limited schedule. You don't consider the Shantae games genuinely good (I found Pirate's Curse especially good)? I liked a couple of their GBC games, as well as Mighty Switch Force and Mighty Flip Champs. I couldn't get in to Mighty Milky Way due to often frustrating controls.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Obscura »

The only Shantae game I've played is Risky's Revenge, and my god, that was total crap. The thought of someone holding that thing up as evidence that WayForward are good is really somewhat stunning.

Meanwhile, I've played two IntiCreates games, and have enjoyed both to at least some degree.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by evil_ash_xero »

Sumez wrote:Really split on WayForward... Their track record is actually a lot worse than Inti Creates. They have a lot of completely inoffensive, but also massively uninteresting games. The only genuinely good WayForward game I can think of is Contra 4, and that's probably mostly due to Sean Velasco (Yacht Club).
I'm primarily talking about their influence on the graphics.
I still think their best games are Contra 4 and Pirate's Curse.

But their involvement seems to have helped the graphics out. Bloodstained looked a good bit worse, just a while back.
Obscura wrote:The only Shantae game I've played is Risky's Revenge, and my god, that was total crap. The thought of someone holding that thing up as evidence that WayForward are good is really somewhat stunning.

Meanwhile, I've played two IntiCreates games, and have enjoyed both to at least some degree.
Pirate's Curse is a good bit better, although it looks really similar. Now that being said, ex-WayForward made Shovel Knight. Most people liked it.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Sumez »

Shovel Knight is super good. Way above anything WayForward ever made (except maybe Contra 4, which is why I brought up Velasco)
BrianC wrote:To be fair, a few of Wayforward's misses were probably due to them being contract licensed games with a limited schedule. You don't consider the Shantae games genuinely good (I found Pirate's Curse especially good)? I liked a couple of their GBC games, as well as Mighty Switch Force and Mighty Flip Champs. I couldn't get in to Mighty Milky Way due to often frustrating controls.
The Shantae games are just generally not very interesting. They look good, and the controls feel spot on (so I hope that is the area they are "helping out") but aside from that, the games I have played (Pirate's Curse and Half Genie Hero) are just incredibly unambitious and feel overall uninspired.
Pirate's Curse at least had some enjoyable Zelda-like dungeons but Half-Genie Hero feels completely pointless. It seems like such a deceit to raise a Kickstarter for a game that feels like none of the people involved really cared about making.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Steamflogger Boss »

I'm sure they cared about the money. :wink:

But yeah my experience in trying them is that I didn't get very far because I just wasn't having fun. As for why it wasn't really quantifiable, I just wasn't.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Mero »

Got PS4 Half Genie Hero sat on my shelf right now, we'll see if I like it or not when I get round to it. It was cheap either way.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by evil_ash_xero »

Any of you guys ever played A Boy and His Blob (by WayForward)?

Certainly different, but I thought it was an interesting little game. On a system I hated (Wii).
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Marc »

Mero wrote:Got PS4 Half Genie Hero sat on my shelf right now, we'll see if I like it or not when I get round to it. It was cheap either way.
Yea same, I picked up that and Risky's Revenge on sale, I'd always had it in the back of my mind that they were supposed to be quite decent, surprised to see them getting slated here.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by BulletMagnet »

evil_ash_xero wrote:Any of you guys ever played A Boy and His Blob (by WayForward)?
Played through that one several years back, and honestly thought much the same of it as their output in general; cute and charming enough to be worth a look if you like that kind of thing in your games (which I do), but in purely objective gameplay terms it was just okay. To be fair I never played the NES original so I couldn't compare the two; also, IIRC this one was ported to PC at some point.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by CStarFlare »

Marc wrote:Yea same, I picked up that and Risky's Revenge on sale, I'd always had it in the back of my mind that they were supposed to be quite decent, surprised to see them getting slated here.
I enjoyed Risky's Revenge, but I think "quite decent" is a good way to describe it - the presentation is great but the gameplay has less sparkle. Glad I played it, but don't think it will ever be installed again. I was excited to see Pirate's Curse on sale and snatched it up - but didn't really ever play it. I'm sure it'd be a fun way to spend an afternoon if I ever wanted a cozy game that scratched a retro-y itch without making my heart race.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by drauch »

Yeah, I like 'em all myself. They're just comfy, fun games with good humor and charm.
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by M.Knight »

I liked both Risky's Revenge and Pirate's Curse (stupid TLB conditions notwithstanding), though PC clearly feels more enjoyable on a mechanical level. The way the various powerups work in that game and can complement each other to boost your movement options is a lot more fun to experiment with than the series' trademark transformations. And not only the transformations can't be used together, but the dances also break the pace. It's not a good game mechanic but I can't see WayForward ditching it from the series as it's one of Shantae's core concepts.

Half-Genie Hero was a lot more disappointing though. It has the same kind of humor and wit as the other games, but the vector art-style isn't as good as the pixel-art, the level design was very stop-and-go in nature, and the game forced you to repeat the few levels it has over and over despite most of them being pretty much linear.

Some alternate modes such as the Risky and ninja one are rather alright, and definitely better than the main campaign.

When I was playing it, I wrote some more detailed impressions on the modes and which ones I liked or not, but never got around to finishing the whole game. Might as well throw what I have here if it's relevant :
Spoiler
I've been playing Shantae Half-Genie Hero (Ultimate Edition) for the last few weeks, and I have to say it is one of the weakest entries in the series and really feels like a major step back after Pirate's Curse. The vector art style is nice even though I slightly prefer the previous game's pixel-art and Pirate's Curse's sexier character artwork. The dialogue is funny, goofy as always and often had me laughing. The music is pretty fun to listen to. But the game itself, man, it's not up to the same standards.

There are various reasons why HGH is not as good as PC and I think the way the levels play is one of the easiest to notice. Instead of a large interconnected map as in the previous games (or sets of maps in PC's case) with dungeons, HGH only has linear platformer-style levels where the objective is to go from point A to point B to beat a boss and clear the stage. This in itself is not that much of a problem. What's an issue is that the game's story is padded with fetch quests where you have to get an item to trade it for another item to trade it for yet another item in chains that generally don't make much logical sense but somehow allow you to get the plot device you needed. And in order to get those items, you have to replay the stages you already cleared, most of the time with the help of a new transformation that is unceremoniously given to you after beating a boss. One of the early quests even seems like it comes straight out of a MMORPG and wants you to farm 30 pirates in a specific area, which in hindsight was probably an early indicator of how much padding was waiting for me in the game.

While some levels (such as Mermaid Falls) have plenty of secrets that makes revisiting the levels an interesting task, most of them do not feel pleasant to play over and over again despite the game expecting you to do so. An annoying quirk of the level design that can be felt in almost every level is its stop&go nature. Up until you get a flying transformation that makes most of the obstacles pointless, you can't really swiftly move through the stages to find the items you need. There are several ways the game kills its own flow :

-Lasers, sandstorms, flying enemies and other obstacles that force you to stop and wait.
-Obstacles that require a transformation to pass, which forces you to stop and dance, pass the obstacle and then cancel the transformation because it's useless outside of those obstacles.
-Regular enemies with billions of HPs that get in your way and that force you to stop and whip them until they die.

While that first design choice is pretty annoying, especially in a game that supposedly encourages you to speedrun it, the later two issues are even more baffling because they aren't even new problems.

I know the transformation dances are part of Shantae's character and it came with the original story concept. But quite frankly, it's garbage as a game mechanic. Every time you have to use a transformation, you must stop moving, press a dedicated dance menu, possibly wait until the dance menu cycles long enough to get to the dance you want, and then input the correct direction.

Not only there are a bunch of superflous steps for actions that can be as extremely basic as jumping higher or smashing a boulder, but the whole process was removed in Pirate's Curse and replaced with the Pirate Gear powers that worked sooo much better. You didn't have to stop the action to use them, each had their own button/way of triggering them, and as they are not compartimentalized the same way transformations are, you could combine their uses and the game expected you to do exactly that to get to some places. The way the Pirate Gear allowed you, for example, to turbo dash, triple jump and float-land to cross a very long pit was very fun, and there's nothing in the transformation powers that felt as enjoyable as this. Here the harpy transformation can do the same job and cross that pit but it feels like bypassing the level entirely instead of pushing it to its limits with your tools. It's clearly a step back when you compare it to how Pirate's Curse worked.

The amount of transformations also went out of control, with many of them feeling pretty pointless as a result, even discounting the bonus/joke transformations. I didn't come across the bat transformation until way later into the game than intended and that's only because some puzzles were arbitrarily specific to this transformation. Because there's already another way to fly, this form becomes useless aside from those specific sections who feel very artificial as a result. The same can be said for the water-based forms, and the spider form which I used maybe...twice? in the entire game. The only transformations you'll use a lot are the monkey one due to its speed and jumping abilities, and the harpy later on to more easily navigate the levels.

What worsens the uselessness of many transformations is the fact that most of them can't even attack unless you get a specific power-up. And even when you do get this power-up, the damage output is terrible and pales in comparison even with Shantae's default hair-whip attack. If there are areas where a transformation is required but with enemies nearby, you are definitely not going to use the transformation form to attack them.

The only saving grace of the transformation system in HGH is that Shantae can utter variations of "Transform!" when you perform it, and one of them sounds extremely bored and jaded, as if she was as fed up about having to transform as me. It's very funny.

The enemies are also not that well designed in regards with flow. Many of them simply have way too many HPs, so whenever you encounter one you have to stop and whip it a bunch of times even if looks like a popcorn. This one is a flaw that existed in previous Shantae games and I was kinda savvy enough to quickly buy upgrades to the hair whip speed to improve the DPS early-on, but I can't imagine how much of a pain it can be for an unsuspecting player.

What can also be frustrating with these enemies is that despite taking several hits to die, they won't always stagger when whipped. So when such an enemy moves towards you, you have to whip it, move backwards to avoid getting run into, and whip again until it dies. In hindsight, I imagine this was made to give a purpose to the otherwise useless backdash move, but during the entirety of the main Shantae campaign, I never even thought about using it.

Some other enemies, especially in the desert level, have ranged attacks that they fire on a regular basis even if you can't reach them with your whip attack yet. Those enemies can be placed near the other side of a jump, so you have to wait for an opening in the attack, jump and then beat the enemy. The whole process takes too long to keep my interest level high.

For some of the bigger enemies, it's not even worth wasting time to beat them and you are better off bypassing them. They have even more HPs than the regular ennemies and they can even block your attacks. It seems that the inspiration is Zelda 2's shielding enemies, but the problem here is two-fold : you sometimes have to jump to attack the enemy instead of being able to hit both stances while grounded (like in Zelda 2) which slows down the fight, and whether the enemy guards high or low isn't properly displayed, which makes the whole thing feel completely random.

I really wonder how come nobody at WayForward thought the enemies were too euroshmuppy. It's not even like HGH is the first game in the series.

Speaking of euroshmups and resilient enemies, the bosses are also way too beefy and take forever to die. The amount of patterns they have is clearly not enough to last for all the health they have, to a point where it feels like their health is additionnal padding on top of all the forced backtracking you have to do in the levels. Apparently, the "hardcore" mode boosts their health even further. Well, that's one mode I am never going to play.

On the other hand, the rotating spike ball item that consumes magic seems pretty broken in comparison, as it's the actual best way to inflict some more decent DPS on the bosses and it can make the fights be a lot shorter. However, you have to get tons of gems to buy the item, its upgrades, as well as the upgrade that slow down magic consumption. And the relatively low rate at which the game spawns magic refill items conditions you to not use it to get rid of regular enemies so I didn't even think of using the spike balls. Just like mana systems in JRPGs that make you not want to use magic abilities and just spam attack, here I feel the same compulsion to save every bit of magic, even if in the end I am not going to use it at all. Maybe a magic jauge that recharged when using the hair whip on enemies would have given a more interesting dynamic to this system.

Back to the topic of bosses, their patterns and attacks themselves aren't always very well implemented too. The carpet race mid-boss for example has rather small windows where you can actually get close enough to the mid-boss to whip it, as the carpets keep moving away from them, and one of the two ships even fires in a straight line, which means you get even less time to strike it. The Hypno Baron boss, when on its own, floats and moves in the air all over the place at a speed which doesn't match Shantae's basic moveset at all. It's like he was made to be fought with a different character from another more fast-paced video game entirely. Or with the rotating spike balls.

Some other bosses are just plain uninteresting. The desert boss for example has you hit a rock, press a button, and wait until the rock is slowly fired by a cannon on the boss's head. And you have to repeat this process several times, more than the magical three IIRC.

The version of the game I have features additional modes, which mostly force you to replay slightly different remixes of the same levels but with different characters.


The Risky Boots campaign is, without surprises, much more pleasant to play than the main one, though all bosses save the final one are still the same and enemies can still take too long to die. The Pirate's Curse abilities return and their combinatory power is once again a lot more enjoyable than Shantae's transformations.

Amusingly enough, the two power-ups that are new in this game (the grapple beam and the underwater ball) feel the worst-integrated to the synergy provided by the already existing abilities, as if the designers of HGH and PC weren't the same and the HGH tried to add things to what the PC designers implemented even though it was already pretty great. The former is made redundant by the cannon ball and the floating hat in almost every situation save for a specific platforming puzzle in the last stage, and the latter just makes you walk underwater, which is more of a passive trait than an ability that would add options to your moveset.


The Bolo/Sky/Rottytops campaign also has you replay the same levels but this time, you have a set of three characters à la Lost Vikings, each having their own abilities and switchable on-the-fly. The concept is interesting in theory, but in practice it just slows down the game by splitting a character's moveset into three and forcing you to switch every time you have to use another part of the moveset.

The character that seems to have the most fleshed out moveset and abilities is Bolo, and it's pretty fun to play as him. His weapon is a spike ball on a whip that he swings forward in a way that's a little bit reminscient of Castlevania games. It doesn't arc behind him but the range seems almost identical. On top of that, he has the ability to throw a grappling hook and swing to specific rings and air objects. While this is no Umihara Kawase, it creates some enjoyable platforming sections. Out of the three, he is the one I like to use the most because his abilities don't seem too gimmicky or overly-specific, as the grappling hook can also be used to damage airborne enemies without jumping and the spike ball's range and damage output are comparatively decent, especially if you position yourself in a way that makes the spike ball hurt the enemy again on the way back to Bolo.

Rottytops's playstyle is more similar to Shantae, as her attack is a powerful close range leg swing (well, she litteraly discolates her leg to use it as club). However, her special ability is a pseudo-teleport of sorts that makes her throw her head in a spot and reappear where it lands. It is often going to be used to go through lasers, cross some large pits or reach some upper platforms, but it has zero offensive usefulness. At best you can use it to lob and bypass some annoying HP sponge enemy. The process itself takes a bit of time too, as you have to aim the head throw, throw the head, and then wait for the landing and the teleportation animation to complete.

When you aim, time is thankfully stopped, but the lines that predict the head movement are not always 100% accurate, as sometimes the head will bounce off a wall the line didn't take into account, or it will bounce on the floor despite the line not showing you anything about it. This can get annoying when you realize than throwing the head in the void or on spikes will damage you, even though throwing it so it lands on top of the black lasers that this ability is made to bypass will safely reset the head toss It feels kinda inconsistent.

And then we have Sky, which is supposedly the jumping character. She has an equivalent to Risky's floating hat that lets her extend her jumps a bit, and can also throw an egg and make it hatch mid-air to create temporary bird platforms. As long as you are on the platform, it stays active, but otherwise it disappears after a second or two.

Well, that egg throw technique is a big pace-killer, especially coming after Risky Boots's swift Cannon ball jumps. When Sky throws the egg, you have to wait until it stops rising and starts falling again before pressing the ability button again to make it hatch. If you try to make it hatch before it falls down again, you'll find out that the bird platform will spawn higher than what your jump can actually reach, making it completely useless. It is possible to mash the ability button like crazy to try to make it insta-hatch and have a chance of making it quickly spawn at a reachable height but it doesn't feel right at all. On top of that, if you actually hatch the platform and aren't happy with your timing, you have to wait until the platform disppears before being able to throw another egg. I imagine the reason for that is to prevent creating infinite staircases, but a simple fix would have to insta-remove the current platform if you toss another egg, and prevent the egg toss and throw a warning sound effect while trying an egg toss on a bird platform.

Sky's attack is also pretty pathetic. She sends boomerang birds forward but they are ridiculously weak and the hitboxes are so small you sometimes have to stop walking and duck to have them hit small-sized enemies, so her offensive abilities seem pretty limited in general. There are some specific places where the birds's properties come in handy (during the Ammo Baron fight for example), but otherwise there's no real reason to use her aside from the specific platforming challenges that absolutely require her abilities.

And that's the main issue with the level design here. It's a bit like Shantae's transformations, but with character abilities instead. It's not always as bad as the transformations but I still get the feeling that it would have been better to have all the abilities into a single character. Or even ditch and replace some of the abilities. The head toss for example isn't very rewarding to use. There are barriers, chasms and lasers that you toss your head through to pass, and that's it. No real interaction as it can be the case with the grappling hook, here you just have to aim the line properly. The egg throw could easily be replaced by a double/triple jump, but I imagine the designers didn't want too much overlap with Risky's arsenal.

While most of the previous modes are very easy due to an abundance of healing items and massive lifebars, this mode is a different beast altogether. You only have the three default hearts and never go beyond that, and there aren't any consumable items so you have to be pretty careful. Rottytops has an ability that recharges your health but it consumes half of your magic and magic is sparse so it's still harder than the other modes.

One annoying quirk of the magic and health though, is that it isn't recharged when you go from a stage to another so it is not rare to have to use the stage select mode to go back to a previous area and grind for health and magic until you warp back to the boss or the stage portion that gave you trouble.

The other quirk is that the three characters have "levels" which increase when picking up gems and decrease when hit. The levels affect the damage output and it punishes you twice for a mistake : by removing health but also power. This system is more or less the one that was in Cave Story, and each character has its own specific level. While it is far from game breaking, I am not sure there is any advantage in implementing this system here. It's just annoying.

On the upside, the writing is hilarous and Bolo's character in particular is very funny. The dynamic the three have when they cooperate but at the same time are pretty reluctant to do so and would rather do their own thing works well.


Ninja mode features Shantae again, but with a different set of abilities, no transformations, and a ninja outfit that doesn't look stylish nor cute. (It's even pretty ugly to be honest) This time you move a bit faster, have a close-range blade, can send shurikens and have a teleport-dash move (that amusingly can be used to glitch yourself out of bounds as I recorded it here even if it has no purpose). With such tools, the game plays more like a Shinobi game than the slow paced stop&go main campaign.

Movement feels good and the pace seems faster thanks to it. The blade is fun to use, except for the fact that this mode also has the dynamic power system that the Bolo/Sky/Rotty campaign had and the blade's attack speed is tied to it. In other words, if you take damage the time between two slashes is higher, and that is absolutely not fun at all. This main weapon feels right when at its max speed and the rhythm is a lot more arcade-y but get hit once and you'll have to stop and recover gems before being allowed to enjoy yourself again. Urgh.

Still, it's better than the main game.
evil_ash_xero wrote:Any of you guys ever played A Boy and His Blob (by WayForward)?
Yeah, I did. It's not very difficult, aside from some bonus levels and the boss battles, but it's a charming adventure with a beautiful art-style. In any case, it's a lot tighter than the NES and Game Boy versions who felt kinda janky and aimless in comparison.
RegalSin wrote: I think I have downloaded so much I am bored with downloading. No really I bored with downloading stuff I might consider moving to Canada or the pacific.
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BrianC
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by BrianC »

To be honest, I haven't played much of HGH. I liked what I played of it, but I don't expect it to be as good as Pirate's Curse. The Kickstarter for HGH was ill timed too. Before Pirate's Curse was released. Guess which turned out to be the better game? Also, while I agree Shovel Knight is better than Shantae, I'm not so sure Sean Velasco is the reason. He's not listed under a specific position in Shovel Knight and he directed that 2D Bloodrayne game.

While I like many of David Crane's earlier games, his later games feel a bit stiff and janky. A Boy and his Blob is certainly an interesting concept, though the original NES game feels like Pitfall with no jump and experimental trial and error gameplay.
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Sumez
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Sumez »

I was just trying to find a common ground between Shovel Knight and Contra 4. :\
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Herr Schatten
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Herr Schatten »

CStarFlare wrote:Risky's Revenge, but I think "quite decent" is a good way to describe it - the presentation is great but the gameplay has less sparkle.
This.

I tried the first Shantae game on GBC, but found it clunky and annoying. When Risky's Revenge was on sale at GOG, I decided to give the series another chance. The lovely Henk Nieborg graphics were enough to keep me motivated. Despite a couple of flaws the game itself is enjoyable, albeit a little forgettable. I don't seem to be able to recall a single boss fight offhand despite the game having multiple, so I guess you can safely say that those aren't particularly memorable.
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Turrican
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by Turrican »

I think you "had to be there" with the first Shantae. Getting it at release, and enjoy the techical wizardry behind it. Sure, it's a dragontrapvania perfectly executed but it's also more than simply that, because they had the balls to realize it on GBC. To squeeze that hardware, struggling to add a single color more to a background or sprite... That was the awe.

However, everyone had jumped over to GBA already, so I appreciate that there may be very few sharing my "had to be there" feelings towards the game.

The troubles came right with the second episode, after the GBA cancellation, we got a downloadable DSware entry that 1) didn't have anymore any technical prowess to show: whatever it did, while handsome (Henk Nieborg) wasn't uncommon to see elsewhere and often better (Iga's DS vanias...); 2) and crucially, it felt truncated, several volumes smaller than the first episode in terms of actual game rooms, transformations and such. It wasn't like passing from Dragon's Trap to Wonderboy III Monster Land, but it was egregious nonetheless, especially since the inferior sequel began reaping all sorts of possible game critics' awards (from the same press that of course had largely ignored the GBC entry).

The Dsware felt a bit like if in 1999 we had got a "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night 2" comprised of just the alchemy laboratory and marble corridors reshuffled a bit.

So yeah... the "series" died there for me.
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BrianC
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Re: Bloodstained RotN : Kouji IGA's new "Castlevania" game.

Post by BrianC »

Pirate's Curse is much longer than Risky's Revenge. I'm under the impression that the Wayforward was stuck with the size limit on DSiWare since the latter is actually one of the larger DSiWare games.
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