Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (2019)

While some parts of the game are very enjoyable, others I have found quite annoying. Annoying in a truly Castlevanian way, mind you. But still annoying.
There are some visual glitches. Miriam and familiars would pass through some walls. Flying enemies would distort while dying, sometimes. Speaking of flying enemies, some of them would be able to shoot you from inside the walls, while staying invulnerable to your attacks. Elementals are especially guilty of this.

Then there are of course areas with endless "medusa heads" (called Dullahammer Head here). Very much Castlevania. Also very much annoying.

Getting the True Ending is almost impossible to figure out without a guide. Starting with the fact that you need a skill that is a random drop from a very particular jellyfish enemy, and not a boss, like in many other Metroidvanias. Yep, you got that right. You'll have to farm in order to get the true ending.

Crafting is mildly annoying as well. You need to remember the ingredients, and also where to farm them. Or just stick to Wiki all the time.

Some weapons with special effects don't mention that in the descriptions at all. One example is Rhava Bural sword, that has much faster attack rate.

Difficulty curve is very uneven. Some later bosses died on the first attempt, while Zangetsu took me an evening to beat. The only factor that makes the encounters slightly easier is the huge amount of healing items you can carry, if you're willing to farm. I've beaten the True Boss by standing still, without even trying to avoid its attacks, and just constantly healing.

The game is literally Castlevania reskinned with bad writing and no charm. Similar style of combat, exploration, creepy castle, multiple endings, similar bosses. I don't fault it for the similarities, since it has the same creator, but I can't say I didn't find myself wishing for more originality. The cast of characters was boring, the story was there I guess, and the world-building was lukewarm. What I did like was the wide variety of weapons, interesting powers, and a decent amount of enemy types. Overall, the game is just a very average middle-of-the-road Castlevania clone, not much more to it, unfortunately.

A surprisingly unpolished and underwhelming metroidvania from the mind behind the Vania-part of the genre. Having played every Castlevania-title made by Koji Igarashi, I had high hopes going into this title. While it does deliver a true Igavania-experience in spirit, I am not too impressed by the execution itself.

You play as Miriam, a human with magic capabilities due to a series of experiments conducted on her. After having awakened from a long slumber, you are tasked with stoping your test subject companion Gebel from opening a demon portal. In order to succeed, you have to explore an enormous castle, gaining new abilities that allows you to progress by backtracking to places you previously could not reach. This is the first metroidvania in the classical style established with Symphony of the night in 1997 (often called Igavania after the creator Koji Igarashi), with some influences from the Sorrow-games of the franchise in the form of being able to absorb enemy abilities. Apart from a new alchemy system, the game is by and large a pure nostalgia trip to the old days of the late 90's and early 00's era of Igavanias.

The first thing that becomes apparent is what a graphical mess this game is. The developers must either have been relatively unfamiliar with Unity or not able to showcase their talent due to a stressful development schedule, I have no other good explanation sufficient to motivate such a sloppy mess of code. Lighting of textures are completely off, animation is stiff and ugly, everything feels like a demo. This becomes extra painful when comparing Bloodstained with its spiritual predecessor. Symphony of the night had this really cool mixture of sprite-based animation and 3D-models that was very innovative in 1997, and it still looks great today.

These technical shortcomings translates to the feeling of movement in Bloodstained. Miriams animations feel so stale and lifeless, which stands in stark contrast to the sheer joy of controlling other Castlevania-protagonists. Just compare Mirams walking and backstep animation with Alucard from Symphony of the night. Alucard has this ghostly duplicate shadows following his movements, and slides back smoother than Michael Jackson. Miriam has a generic running animation and simply jumps back. Moreover, she also feels incredibly slow in her movement. It does not help that the controls feel clunky, with unforgiving frames for platform edges and unclear hitboxes adding insult to injury.

It is so awkward having played other modern metroidvanias such as Axiom Verge when going into Bloodstained, since the former title excellently showcases how to take inspiration from an established franchise but increasing flow and fluidity in controls and movement. In Axiom Verge, movement is always enjoyable, while Bloodstained only gets really interesting towards the last 25% of the game when gaining the ability to invert gravity and the speed booster power up. Many power ups feel gimmicky rather than made to traverse the map in interesting ways, with the reflector ray being the worst offender.

Despite its flaws, the overall gameplay is still fun to some extent. Exploring a large gothic castle by unlocking new abilities can only be screwed up that much, and many of the boss fights in the game surprised me with interesting patterns and concepts, especially the second Zangetsu fight, which is probably the high point in the whole game. However, I think that some progression points are a tad too obscure to figure out (Why would I assume that I need a passport made by a librarian? Why is one central ability needed to progress the game underwater found by farming a normal enemy instead of a boss ability?). The added alchemy system is a huge miss too, since it felt far too grindy and complex to invest time in when I already found equipment better than what I was available to produce by mixing existing gear.

I am also provoked by the fan service aimed towards kickstarter backers, especially in the form of silly enemy paintings depicting major contributors to the crowdfunding. I want a game, not memey gags.

While I had some good moments beating the true ending of Bloodstained: Ritual of the night, I am mostly baffled by how such a shortfall of a product could have survived the floods of reviewers and hardcore metroidvania-fans unscathed. I could have understood the forgiving reception more if Symphony of the night was a one-time event, but that formula was expanded to produce six handheld successors with all the Igavania trademarks during 2001-2008. Many of these titles also added their own unique twist to the core concept, with the most notable examples being the tactical soul system in Aria of Sorrow and the Castlevania II-like structure in Order of Ecclesia.

Since 2008, the metroidvania resurgence have evolved and refined the style to the extent that just trying to remix an old tune from 1997 is not as impressive anymore. Compared with the new behemoths of the subgenre and the already seven existing Castlevania metroidvanias, Bloodstained have no means to stand out. On the contrary, it does not even match the base level of graphical quality, swiftness in controls and design structure games such as Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Axiom Verge, AM2R or Yoku's Island Express achieves.

The most interesting thing about this game to me, is how well-received this old fashioned and dated game became compared to the fierce backlash the Pokemon and Paper Mario-series has faced the last years. But that is a discussion for another time...

I loved Symphony of the night so I was anticipating this game for a while. In retrospect, I probably set the bar too high. I was expecting the beautiful 2d visuals of SOTN and what I got were decent visuals crippled by confusingly poor performance. This game isn't doing anything crazy - no big effects or multiple enemies on the screen at the same time yet the slowdown is frequent and load times are longer than giant triple A games.

The nail in the coffin was the grindy gameplay...I just wasn't feeling it.

I guess I would like to lay a little bit of background. I have enjoyed the Castlevania series ever since I played the DS series. So I am more familiar with this kind of game, as opposed to the originals (which I'm slowly getting to now, they are great to if just really hard).

Another issue that is taking away from my enjoyment a little bit, but is not necessarily the fault of the game itself, is my regret at having Kickstarted this game and also having selected the Nintendo Switch version. That version is pretty bad. I've read some reviews saying it's playable and they did patch it somewhat, but when I play the Switch version I just get a bit bleh after awhile. I'ts like my eyes are trying to focus on something that they aren't able to. I would find myself squinting at details in the background trying to make out what they were. A good example of this is when I went to my first savepoint in the PC version. "Holy crap those were flowers under the statue?" There are these purple flowers under every save point statue, but in the Switch version it just looks like a big purple blob. I went back to the Switch version to compare and now knowing what they are I could make out that they were flowers but yeah.

So I ended up playing this game on the Xbox gamepass. This isn't ideal for me as I would rather own a game like this because I might want to re-visit it or re-play it in the future as I have done with many of the previous Castlevania games. But I don't have that motivation here because I know I won't keep my game pass subscription going on a permanent bases and Xbox gamepass doesn't even have cloud saves which surprised me. (I played this game on game pass a couple months ago but ended up getting distracted, I was surprised to see my save files all missing, I'm so used to cloud saves.)

OK onto the game itself, just wanted to get that rant out of the way. I found the music to be fantastic. A lot of tunes really matched the atmosphere. I would have liked to see maybe some more metal or I dunno techno sounding tracks but maybe that wouldn't have been right. I always enjoyed the gregorian chanting and that kind of thing. Had a very quality vania kind of sound.

Graphics and art design were fantastic. I loved seeing the new monsters and exploring the castle was always interesting, though some of the "environmental" themed areas became a bit just one color.

Gameplay was where things took a bit of a dive unfortunately. Combat is a mixed experience. Often it was great, dodging monsters attacks and taking them down felt really good. There were a couple monsters towards the end I felt un-dodgeable (at least I couldn't figure it out) and thus a bit unfair but that was only a few of them.

The biggest downside to the game is in its difficulty curve. Previously Castlevania (post SoTN) games felt very punishing whenever you went into a new area, you had to learn the new monsters attack patterns and get pretty good to progress through the new areas. Often I would finally find a save point with just a bit of health, a great feeling. But when you back-tracked you would of course feel powerful. Bosses were equally tough in the older games, I would often have to try multiple times.

In Bloodstained monsters generally pose no challenge except for a few areas that suddenly hit you with their difficulty. It's almost like the developers understood the fun of going to a new area and finding way tougher monsters but instead of that being almost every new area, they did it just a few times. Worse there is a shard you can get very early in the game THAT ENTIRELY BREAKS THE COMBAT. I made the mistake of using this when I first tried to play the game and it makes it mind-numbingly boring and easy. That's probably why I bounced off the game the first time I tried it.

The bosses in Bloodstained are a bit more challenging, they were always fun to fight and a few posed a good challenge. The end fight was reasonably satisfying.

Oh another complaint, you can only start the game in normal difficulty. You have to play through normal to unlock hard, play through hard to unlock nightmare. If these were unlocked to start with that might have cut out 50% of this review and made it a lot less of a rant. I was also interested to see that you could do a New Game + but it starts you on Normal/Hard with your same level most of your equipment etc so the game then offers NO challenge, you are GOD on New Game+. Is that how NG+ is supposed to work? I figured it would at least reset me to level 1...

This game was made to be a spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night, and it achieves this. Big-time. Right down to the similar game title, cheesy (but competent) voice acting, and a vampire librarian who looks like he was pulled directly from Dracula's Castle.

The 2.5D graphics are pretty. The music is catchy (the boss music kicks all kinds of ass). The gameplay is snappy and fun. There are a ton of different weapons, and a CRAP-TON of enemy abilities to use. There are countless side-activities you can get distracted by, with gathering ingredients to cook stat-boosting meals being the most useful of these diversions.

The game was Kickstarted, and you'll notice occasional little touches that donators got included in the game. You'll encounter things like haunted paintings of funders, along with a fair number of enemies that I'm pretty sure are just people's dogs & cats. And once you finish the game, you get access to a sound player that includes all of the music, voice lines, and even things like personalized voicemail messages that backers apparently got David Hayter to record (because who doesn't want Solid Snake in their voicemail?)

In addition to some very direct videogame references (I noticed nods to Shovel Knight, SMB3, SOTN, and others), the game has a fair amount of cheese. While I find it hilarious, others might get cranky about enemies rocking on electric guitars, or yappy disembodied poodle heads.

The difficulty isn't terribly high (aside from a couple stages in the final-third of the game). There's unfortunately a very important progression-gating item that's really cheaply hidden (let's just say, when you can't figure out how to get past spikes with the map around 60-70% complete, don't waste too much time before you Google the solution).

If you like Symphony of the Night, you should like Ritual of the Night, because it sure is more of that.

The game is not bad, but to me it felt quite mediocre. The story was entirely forgettable, I didn’t care for any of the characters. The atmosphere was lacking and absolutely nothing like Castlevania. The gameplay loop was fine, I enjoyed the battle system even though it felt clunky and many of the abilities Miriam can learn are too weak/obsolete.

I also experienced frame rate issues quite often and 2 crashes. I think this game is OK but it needed more polish. In the end, I don't think I would have missed out on anything if I hadn't played it.

[A]ccording to 505 Games' Angel-Corlux, who also co-runs the game's official subreddit: "Embargo is going to be launch day because we have a sizable launch patch that has various bug fixes, optimization and balance improvements, and the first free DLC. I know sometimes games that are hot trash embargo reviews until after launch so they can pull a fast one on folks, but I promise that's not what we're doing, we just want to put our best foot forward. :) ​

(emphasis mine, source Destructoid)

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for a media embargo, but they often don't bode well. We will see how this shakes out.

As it stands right now:

So far, Bloodstained feels like a slightly janky but very loving homage to Castlevania

and

505 Games (or whomever is responsible) did a disservice to the game by not allowing advanced review copies by way of a Steam build, like so many crowdfunded games before it. There is almost no hype or buildup for this release outside of already-dedicated communities like the official subreddit and Discord channel, and a heap of positive impressions would have helped their case.

(source also Destructoid)

I got my demo key last night and holy crap am I excited! If I were to judge it solely on the 5-10 minute demo I'd say it falls somewhere between Order of Ecclisia and Symphony of the Night in terms of quality, which is to say it's fantastic. It uses 3D models for everything, but they're stylized and look great...

I'm so glad I backed this one!