Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (PS4) - New Setlist, Same Symphony.

One of my initial downfalls of getting suckered into Kickstarters was when Castlevania luminary Koji Igarashi made a particularly bonkers teaser basically calling out Konami for giving up on what brought them to the dance, and just giving up on their most popular video game franchises. After being told "people don't want that kind of game anymore", he took the crowd sourcing platform to prove that wasn't true. 65,000 thousand people and 5.5 million dollars later I think he's successfully made his point.

But then development happened. Almost 5 years of it. The problem is, when you promise the moon and people pay you exorbitant amounts of money for these promises, you are going to be expected to deliver on them. So to say that this new game had a rough development cycle would be a massive understatement, but I'm getting ahead of myself. First? Let's at least see if they delivered on the game portion of it.

BLOODSTAINED: RITUAL OF THE NIGHT(PS4)

Bloodstained begins in 18th century England. The industrial revolution barreling forward and the Alchemy guild is worried about losing their influence of the nation's wealthy patrons. To maintain control, they intend to sacrifice people infused with demon shards to summon demons to the world, basically to scare people into believing in the guild's necessity. From the experiments, two shardbinders were successfully prepared to be sacrificed: Gebel, who barely survived the procedure, and Miriam, who fell into unnatural sleep just before they were to sacrificed. 

Miriam awakens a decade later to learn that Gebel has survived, and has now aligned with the demons. He has apparently summoned demons to the world and has taken refuge in a demonic castle to take vengeance on the guild. As a shardbinder, Miriam has the ability to fight back, and so she travels with some of her remaining guild compatriots to try to stop the demons, help the people, and hopefully save Gebel.

So ok, admittedly that's not a whole a lot of framing, but its enough for what we came here for. We want to wander a big castle, fight monsters, get more abilities, and cover a massive map. So let's get the major comparison out of the way because it is going to come up a lot: is Bloodstained a Castlevania game? Yes, in everything but its title. If anything, you can you see it as the culmination of all of Iga's previous Castlevania experiences and best ideas. It's going to be difficult to discuss everything becuase this game has a LOT of mechanics.

The obvious comparison is going to be Symphony of the Night which will draw the strongest comparison because it is more or les s the quintessential definition of the term "Metroidvania" as a genre because of the franchises departure from level based gameplay. Like SotN, Bloodstained starts us off with a brief tutorial area to teach us the basic controls of the game before letting us loose in an incredibly large and sprawling castle. We are free to explore until we find dead ends until we come across the necessary item or boss that allows to change how we travel or open new paths.

My initial complaint was slow movement speed, but ultimately it was never too much bother.
You do eventually get speed boosting items. 

It's combat system can be broken down to multiple parts spanning from pretty much every Castlevania from 1997 on. Miriam can equip what feels like hundreds of weapons that can drastically change how you approach your fights. Do you want a slow but heavily damaging axe to wail on baddies with singular precision strikes? Or do you want to put on some boots for weaker but quick damaging kicks to deal lots of damage very quickly.  You have a TON of options.

Sub items and abilities make their return from classic Castlevania and Aria of Sorrow soul stealing in the form of shard collecting (hence Miriam being a shardbinder). As you fight through throngs of baddies they will occasionally drop shards which allow Miriam to use in different ways as you have a number of them you can equip at once. For example, one is mapped to a single button to use like an old Castelvania game like a dagger or axe. One is tied to the right shoulder, typically one that has an ongoing effect (such as the dash). You can turn the right analog to aim Miriam's arm, and used the trigger for a targeted shot, and you can also have a passive and familiar equipped as well. By end game, Miriam will be loaded for bear.

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Thanks to the myriad of collectibles and book cases scattered throughout the castle you will find a number of books that give the weapons techniques too. So on top of their normal abilities you have more technical moves you can pull off as well. For example with some weapons you can do your standard "hadouken" quarter circle forward on the controller with an attack, and it will cause you to fire a projectile, or use a jump move, or heavy slash. They change with the weapons so there is a lot of freedom to play around.

From Order of Ecclesia NPC side questing returns. While you explore the castle you will often make trips to back to your home base location to buy new gear, upgrade your shards, fuse new equipment and so on. At your base there are a handful of NPCs there who give minor quests. One old lady wants food, one very angry lady wants you find monsters and KILL THOSE MURDERERS DEAD. You have a farmer who will plant seeds for you, and a woman who wants to bury nickknacks and old equipment.

Dis is Chompy and Snaps. They need to calm down.

Most of these provide varied rewards, and some of them are trickier to complete than you might think. Hunting the monsters is easy enough, but finding the correct drops for you to cook the right food dishes or craft the right gear for you to bury is going to take some patience and elbow grease to do. I am on a New Game+ run decked out with an high luck stat set of gear to try to increase the drop rate and even then it feels like the regularity of what drops is sparse at best. Typically the rewards for doing so outweigh the cost to create the item, but you will probably find yourself hitting a wall on the equipment one. "Oh I need leather shoes, oh I need a beret, oh I need Excalibur." Whoa, whoa, whoa lady. A bit of a jump there.

Bloodstained took a bit of a beating in the early kickstater because of its look. I got hooked by the concept art but when the E3 beta came out for backers, its 3d modeling was rough at best. They since polished it up to a nicer looking cel-shaded style of models, but there were a lot of little mistakes with eyes, eyelashes, mouth animations. They quickly patched some of these design problems out, but for a game that had a 5 year development it sure felt awfully unpolished. Ultimately, the gameplay animation and character design is good looking and satisfying, but I do wonder if 3d render was the way to go.

This mechanic annoyed me, because it only appears like 2 or 3 times in the game.

So you have plenty of time forget it existed before you will need it again.

The game has a pretty exceptional score, although probably pretty similar Castlevania fanfare if I am being completely objective. But it does have some, pretty notable tracks to it that will dig into your ear and set up shop. Some truly great tracks are Exorschism, Voyage of Promise, and Gears of Fortune. I really liked this soundtrack a lot and feel Michiru Yamane did an excellent job.

The voice acting however, I am a bit less charitable to. I wouldn't go out of the way to say that it's bad because the lines are delivered competently enough, but because of how the dialog is written it never feels smooth or natural. From what I understand, the English delivery of the dialog feels flat and uninspired in comparison to the Japanese language. Some of the conversation feels like it excruciatingly repeats things we have already learned. This is really unfortunate because a look at the voice actors in this one? They really assembled a pretty great cast who have done lots of voices from games I loved.

Play on, sister.

As I kind of eluded to, I felt the story was fine. There were some twists in the game that were almost painfully predictable, and there is one really big one that kind of buries the lead to ending sequence of the game, but ultimately I don't feel it really impeded my enjoyment on that front. Most people don't play metroidvania style games because they are super invested in the rich plotline. And if I am being totally honest here, having some what hokey story with some cheese to voice acting really kinda falls in step with what a lot of us loved about Symphony of the Night. Maybe that was the intention? If it was, that's brilliant.

There's also a shit ton of easter eggs in the game and hidden bosses to find. A lot of nods to Iga's previous work. Breakable walls which I know is a big thing for some Castlevania fans. there a bunch of items that change Miriam's appearance, and there is a room where you change her hair and appearance as well, which is was an unnecessary but fun little distraction that I enjoyed.

Sometimes you just need to summon a chair and take a break.

I am not sure how I want to approach my usual "What I didn't like" section of this review, because a number of the problems that I have/had don't necessarily come from the game itself. Some of  these problems stem from being a kickstarter backer of this project. For example, had I not kickstarter backed this game, would I have right to complain about the development time? Nobody likes when a game is delayed, and this one got delayed a lot. But when you back you get this feeling of entitlement I guess. So when you slate it for two years, and it takes you five? You better expect some backlash.

Granted, due to the ridiculous amount of money they got, they made a whole lot of promises. So many that arguably, the game isn't even fucking completed yet. They are going to release all the content over time to the tune of THIRTEEN DLC updates. Holy eff'n hell. Now I don't know shit about shit when it comes to game development, but it sure seems like something is wrong when a game like Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice which graphically is stunning, was able to pump out their in just under 3 years. While this game which would have fit at home on the ps2 took almost 5.

Some abilities are specifically just for movement, or function as keys that have no actual attack potential.

Then you have the colossal fuck ups of 505 Games involvement. First you decide to make the backer exclusive content "premium DLC" which basically means its not flippin' exclusive to backers at all, now is it? Then you don't even get it out a month after the game actually releases (I still don't have my codes for it). But then we have the fucking mindnumbing charging backers 60 dollars for an exclusive physical edition, THEN put the physical edition out in the store for 40. Big ole fuck you, right there.

But that isn't even the worst part, the Best Buy edition of the game comes with an exclusive steelbook variant of the games cover, which looks incredibly nice. But for the 60 dollar backers like me? I got a shitty cardboard slipcase. Many of which got damaged in shipping because they didn't have the courtesy of a padded envelope. But if that wasn't enough of a kick in the dick, they only made 500 extra of the steelbook and had the nerve to charge backers and additional 25 dollars for them. Making it now 85 to get what people at Best buy could get for 40.

Gotta find the weapon that works for you.

Now, they tried to spin it that the backers got access to content that balances things out, and I will admit that I thought the low res 8-bit Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon was excellent. But to say that getting this 10 dollar bonus, a cardboard case, beta access, and cheap DLC somehow balances things out is decidedly wrong, and even with weeks of damage control people are still furious. Rightly so, from where I stand.

And like I said above, for a game that had some a long development time, the lack of polish on this one is almost insulting. I couldn't believe how many graphical glitches I came across in my initial play though of the game. Thankfully they got on top of those quickly. But the game was full of technically glitches as well. These kind of bugs will be worked out, I know. But when the game breaks it really can go out of the way to mar my opinion of a game. If you look at my reviews for Death's Gambit and the Secret of Mana remake, game crashing is becoming a cardinal sin for me.

Some techs are easier to pull off than others, and depending on level and gear it can make or break a fight for you.

While I just said two paragraphs ago that I really liked Curse of the Moon its almost to Ritual of the Night's detriment. If there is any one gameplay thing that I could complain about its these two things: The difficulty curve and the boss fights. First off, After a pretty stable start it throws you up against a wall with a fight against another character. But if you get past it, its basically a gentle downhill slope to the final areas before the difficulty starts to ramp back up again. I did not find this to be a very challenging game after that fight and honestly that can be a problem of metroidvania's as a whole. Seriously, between Bunnymorphosis and the Portrait Shield shards? Anything that didn't cause curse was fucking laughable.

But with the boss fights specifically? There didn't feel like there was any real variance to how I needed to take care of them. Curse of the Moon's level based system made it a battle of attrition to reach the boss, and then needed to learn the enemy attack patterns and tricks to take them down quickly and safely. Ritual of the Night I basically could save before a boss, wait for them to make an attack and then unload with a fast attacking weapon until they dropped. I dealt with almost every boss this way. It just fed into the lack of challenge and feels like a disappointing step back.

This is one of the last hidden bosses you find. You might find his attack patterns strikingly..... Familiar...

On top of that, since I played Curse of the Moon first, at some point I started realize that I was going to be fighting all the same bosses from that game as well. There were no new ones, no extra ones. Some of them even used the same attacks. This actually diminished some of the surprise I had going into some of the fights because I already knew what to expect. If anything, I've already fought more challenging versions of it.

Let me just spoil something for everyone right now: There will be a part of the game where you need to swim. You need a shard from a specific enemy to do it. In the opening part of this game you fight these human teeth tentacle things. Once you open up an area with an underground lake, there is one more of those things in a different color palette in one specific area. You need the shard THAT ONE drops to get the water jet that lets you go under water. There, I just saved you like 4 hours of pointless wandering for an item that doesn't exist.

Literally almost everyone I know got stuck here. Finding that one specific enemy that gives water jet is key to progress.

I'm sure I can keep ranting on this one, but honestly that feels like I'm arguing two different things. So the ultimate question is, was Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night good? Honestly it feels like that's 100% dependent on if you were a backer or not. If like me, you backed the game, you probably feel short changed by a number of things, perhaps let down by what you didn't get, or what you don't have yet. I know some of the lack of polish bothered me.

But if you were to just judge the game by its own merits as if you just bought it digitally, leaving all the kickstarter stuff out of the equation? I would say that Bloodstained is an incredibly rock solid experience. For fans of Symphony of the Night it's going to feel like slipping into a comfortable pair of shoes. Every complaint I possibly had is basically diminished by the fact that I picked the game up and basically didn't stop until I finished it. I think I wrangled up like 20 something hours inside of 2 or 3 sittings. And, because of the way the DLC is scaled, that means like Shantae and Shovel Knight I am going to keep coming back to it to play the new content. That's good for replayability.

So to the everyman? I would Bloodstained is a good game, if not great. If you are looking for something to scratch that Castlevania itch, Iga is going to satisfy that it in all the right ways with this one, and for only 40 bucks that is incredibly reasonable for a game with this much playability. For the backers? Maybe they will come up with some extra bonus concessions for those who felt short changed. But ultimately? I am just happy that the game finally came out and it ended up being pretty good. Solid recommendation for this one.

"Arise myself and my shadow!"

Is forever burned into my brain.